tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31780046646131787892024-03-13T00:22:20.055-04:00Annals Of The HiveComments on the World Wide
Copyright Billy Glad 2005 - 2024Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.comBlogger87125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-40184845501577090112023-04-10T12:38:00.003-04:002023-12-16T09:41:02.876-05:00Fundamental Notions Of The HiveThe quality of our lives matters.<br />
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We don't have the political clout to change economic policy in our favor. We have to adapt to economic conditions that will favor the rich for a long time. If we can't become wealthy ourselves, we have to learn to think like the wealthy think, to anticipate their moves.<br />
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Debt is not a good thing to have.<br />
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Find a cheap, warm place to live. Stay close to clean water.</span><br />
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Think of yourself as a producer. A maker of things.<br />
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Cooperate. Contribute. Serve. Hold fast. Don't fall through the cracks.<br />
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At it's limit freedom is the ability to reimagine and reprogram yourself in any way you choose.<div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;">The most important </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;">problem facing the world economy is how to divide work between people and machines. I'm not sure we're headed in the right direction.</span></div><div>
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<br /></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-4745720870791516132023-04-10T12:37:00.005-04:002023-12-16T09:27:39.384-05:00The Studio System Redux<div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">I’m thinking about defending the studio system against promiscuous</span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;"> auteurism</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">. I suspect the studio system may be our best chance to maintain some semblance of quality in film by acting as a gatekeeper, a bestower of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, an imprimatur that narrows our viewing options to an almost manageable way too many now that streaming has kicked into high gear. That’s a role critics have played in the past and the </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">auteur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;"> theory was the perfect instrument for separating the wheat from the chaff, the quality art from the kitsch. But in a streaming world of tens of thousands of directors, concentrating on the work of a handful of </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">auteurs</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;"> seems, well, limited. And the number of true </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">auteurs </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">may be even smaller than some critics believe. Many of the </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">auteurs </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">only made the list because we stretched the definition of authorship. I still believe there have been, are and will be </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">auteurs, </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">but my take now is that only makers like Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Cassavetes and others who write their own screenplays as well as realize them should be considered authors of films. That reduces the candidates for the exalted status of </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">auteur </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">considerably. “Pantheon” directors like John Ford who primarily realized scripts written by other makers, would be immediately demoted, directors like Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Terence Malik, young Greta Gerwig, Francis Ford and Sofia Coppola, Kubrick, and Oliver Stone would be promoted and directors like Scorsese, Cameron, Bigelow and Scott would become questionable </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">auteurs</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">. Certainly someone like Antoine Fuqua would never make the cut. But wait.</span></span></div><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">About eighteen years ago I missed </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur (2004) </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">when it was first released. There are probably a number of reasons I wasn’t interested in seeing it, primarily, I think, because I had no great interest in Fuqua the director. I had seen </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">Training Day (2001)</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> but wasn’t particularly impressed, and I probably counted Fuqua’s music videos against him. But why I dismissed Fuqua’s film doesn’t matter really, because if I had seen </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> in 2004 I would have seen an entirely different film from the one I saw one evening when I was bored, clicked through the movies on Cinemax, and decided to give </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> a look. Back in 2004, I hadn’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">The Buried Giant</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> and tried to imagine ways Ishiguro’s foggy Arthurian England could be rendered on film. And although it was first published in 1956, I hadn’t read Winston Churchill’s</span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;"> A History of the English-Speaking Peoples</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> yet either. When I read the first volume I realized the history of the Saxon conquest of England was as vague as the memories of Ishiguro’s characters in </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">The Buried Giant</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">. The Fifth Century generally is a murky, empty space, lost in time and waiting to be filled.</span></span></div><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">This was on my mind when I had my first look at Fuqua’s </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur. </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">I’ve watched it four times now and I still can’t explain why I am so intrigued and, yes, moved by the film. I understand some of it. I was struck by how much </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> resembles a John Ford Western set in the darkness, grime and poverty of Fuqua’s 5th Century England, not just because of the similarities between King Arthur’s knights and Ford’s cavalry officers and cowboys, but also because Fuqua uses portrait shots of his characters to freeze them in time and in our memories the way Ford did, and even goes John Ford one better by using portrait-like close-ups of King Arthur’s knights to transform them from Romans to Sarmatians and to restore them to the Middle East at the end of his film. And </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> is a striking example of the way the confluence, the synthesis, of film and literature creates a rich experience for viewers who can bring something of their own to a film. Fuqua’s portrayal of the Romans, Britons and Saxons fits my picture of the Britons, Arthur, his knights and the Saxons in </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">The Buried Giant</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> and in Churchill’s history better than the Medieval rendition of those characters in typical Arthurian films. Fuqua’s </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">mise-en-scène</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> is, for me, powerful and poignant. Like all great myths, the legend of Arthur never fails to entertain. And Fuqua’s </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> is a dark and fascinating retelling of that myth. But was it Fuqua the director who did all that, and if it was, how did he get to that place?</span></span></div><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> is a Jerry Bruckheimer production, based on a screenplay by David Franzoni. Without interviewing them it’s impossible to know if the </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> project originated with Bruckheimer or Franzoni, but almost certainly it did not originate with Fuqua. And that’s the point. In the case of </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">King Arthur</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">, the track records of the producer and the screenwriter are better guides to the quality of the film than the </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">oeuvre</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> of the director. And that’s very neat, because it is going to be easier to keep track of and predict the quality of the work of production studios than it is to get a handle on the talent of individual makers of streaming film and video. If we get lucky, the studios will step up to the job of making sure that the quality goes in before their names go on. The best bets right now? HBO and Netflix.</span></span></div><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">For the would-be makers of screenplays and films, information about how the studio system works, how projects are conceived and realized in the real world, will become an increasingly essential part of their education. Surprisingly, just when an explosion of bandwidth makes it easier than ever to make and distribute independent films, studios may become more important to filmmakers and audiences than they were in the heyday of Hollywood.</span></span></div><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">Everything old is new again. (Hat tip to Peter Allen.)</span></span></div><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><br /></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-13389998316958538992023-04-07T09:15:00.002-04:002023-04-07T09:36:27.667-04:00I Remember<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;">I like accidents, ephemeral events, things you catch out of the corner of your eye. Melancholy moods, dark streets, the rain. Redemption. Seeing the old order brought down and chaos reign. Reluctant heroes. Magic and the supernatural. Women who work retail.</span></p><p class="mb-4" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">Everything is memory, even those recent memories we think of as the present. If you can’t buy that, nothing I say will make sense. My recollections of my own life are exactly like my memories of films. And of my dreams.</span></span></p><p class="mb-4" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">A long time ago, I had a recurring dream that lasted for months, the kind of dream you can wake up from, go back to sleep and pick up where you left off. I was a prince in exile on another planet. There was not a trace of the modern world. Everything was medieval, 10th Century maybe. We fought with swords, spears and bows and arrows. With axes. Mostly in the dark. I had a wife and a couple of kids and a band of loyal followers. Sometimes I feel like I just fell to earth.</span></span></p><p class="mb-4" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">I was a kid who could read words he couldn't pronounce. And I misunderstood and mixed up half of the things I heard. I thought Pound said "hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but one </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">bordello</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">" and Dylan Thomas said "in my craft </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">of</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">celluloid</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">."</span></span></p><p class="mb-4" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">I was born in a Texas Gulf Coast town during the Depression, right before the war. My grandmother was Italian and my grandfather was an Irish cop. My father was a tall bohunk from Pittsburg who was in the Army when he met my mother. He got out of the Army, cut grass and delivered ice until my grandfather got him a job on the police force. He went back into the Army after Pearl Harbor and ended up occupying Japan. My mother had a half-brother, my uncle Bill, who was in the Army Air Corps when the war started. He was the toughest man I ever knew.</span></span></p><p class="mb-4" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">My mother and I lived with my grandparents in their house down by the docks. During the Depression, my mother said, my grandfather used to bring home groceries and meat he got from the grocers and butchers on his beat. We'd share the food with my grandmother's sisters and brothers and their families sometimes. My mother emptied bed pans at the hospital down the street until she got a job with the Corps of Engineers.</span></span></p><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">I don't remember any of that. I remember card games in the dining room, listening to people talking and laughing while I fell asleep, a paper jack-o-lantern that caught fire, and falling off the back porch. Later, I remember the lights were off at night along the beach because of the German submarines in the Gulf. When my dad came home from Japan, he brought me a sword.</span></span></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-22222516973043430192023-04-07T09:14:00.001-04:002023-04-07T09:36:55.330-04:00<div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">My first motion picture theater was the State Theater on 21st Street in downtown Galveston. The ticket window was on the street and there was a lobby with a concessions stand. The “colored section” was a small balcony upstairs. Admission was 20 cents and I got a feature, a cartoon, the news and a Western serial for my money. I’m sure I started out on Disney films, Tom and Jerry cartoons and the Cisco Kid but when I was old enough to take the bus downtown by myself I moved on to films like </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">Storm Warning (1951)</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">. I was eleven years old. The movie frightened me, of course, but I sat through it twice. There were other theaters down the street that showed steamy adult movies like </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">The Story of Bob and Sally (1948)</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;"> and I heard people talking about those movies, but I was too young to get in to see them, so Ginger Rogers getting dressed, Ginger Rogers in a slip, Ginger Rogers’ white shoulders, her stockinged legs, muscular arms and a glimpse of her breasts were probably my first exposure to sex in the cinema. Doris Day, Ronald Reagan, murder, rape, a whipping, burning crosses and white hoods were part of the </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">Storm Warning</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;"> </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-style: italic;">mise-en-scène, </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e;">too, although that term wouldn’t have meant anything to me then even if it had been invented.</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Martini Theater down the street from The State was a more toney venue. I went to grade school with the manager’s daughter. They had a color television, the first I had seen. The first television of any kind that I saw, a black-and-white RCA, was owned by the Salinas family down the block. The neighbors gathered over there to watch boxing matches on TV. That was in the late Forties and early Fifties. In Galveston, Texas. Peter Pan (1953) was the last Disney film I saw before high school. The stage version with Mary Martin, televised by NBC a couple of years later, was more impressive.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">I handled 16mm film at an early age, threading Barney Google and Snuffy Smith cartoons and short Westerns into a little, grey Keystone projector I had gotten as a present. I don’t remember how old I was, the occasion, or who gave it to me. Thinking back, it seems strange to me now that I should have had a projector like that. I projected the films on the wall in my long, narrow bedroom. I staged plays with prop characters I cut out of comic books and pasted on cardboard. I built a platform in the backyard and talked my friends into improvising scenes on stage. I drew comic strips, mostly about flyers and air battles, because the airplanes were easy to draw. Saturdays, I listened to</span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;"> Let’s Pretend </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">on the radio in the living room and football games in the kitchen. I read Andrew Lang’s </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">The Blue Fairy Book </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">more than once. My favorite character was the Yellow Dwarf in </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">East of the Sun and West of the Moon</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">. Looking back, and how much clearer things seem looking back, I see all of that as work that was more important than church, school or family.</span></span></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-85934493794960095862023-04-07T09:12:00.005-04:002023-12-02T17:07:05.962-05:00<div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;">When I had measles as a child, my grandmother and her sisters took turns reading to me. I don’t remember the title of a single book. Outside of the books we read aloud in class and comic books of all kinds, I only remember reading Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane detective stories, a few Reader’s Digest books and </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-family: times; font-style: italic;">Peyton Place</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;"> before I graduated from high school. I vividly remember the</span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-family: times; font-style: italic;"> Peyton Place</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;"> scene of a man giving his pregnant wife head. Somehow, though, young </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-family: times; font-style: italic;">Phaethon</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;">, plummeting to earth from the Sun God’s chariot, slipped in and nudged the Yellow Dwarf and his Spanish Cat off of the beaten path.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">The summer before I went away to college for the first time I set out to get ready for college by reading “everything” but I don’t think I got very far. I enrolled in an American Literature seminar and was laughed at when I named James Michener as an important American writer. I was mortified. But in another seminar I heard Chaucer read in Middle English and snapped to what college and college professors were about. I cut classes to read Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Teilhard de Chardin, Mailer, Algren, Jones, Shaw and Ginsberg. I saw films by Vadim, Truffaut, Godard and Bergman. I moved into a boarding house full of vets going to school on the GI Bill. I made drunken road trips to Mexican border towns. </span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">I witnessed the advent of color, wide screens, surround sound and Dolby, 3D, theater complexes with tiny theaters, naked women and almost naked men on the big screen in living color and in black-and-white. By the time I had graduated from high school, dropped out of college a couple of times, been drafted into the Army, lived in Germany where I wrote for an American tabloid, and got back to the states, I had been watching movies for over 20 years, but I don’t remember commenting on a single one of them to anyone until, watching </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">Scorpio Rising (1963) </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">sometime late in the summer of 1967, I turned to a friend and whispered: “Did he just say that Jesus was a queer?” And my friend, turning his leering, acid-distorted face my way, replied: “I don’t know. But I like the way he said it.”</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">That was my first brush with metonymy, a concept that, like </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">mise-en-scène, </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">I experienced long before I had a name for it. Years later, over dinner one night, I tried to sell the importance of metonymy in film to the Greek wife of a museum director. She cut me off. “Man lives by metaphor,” she said.</span></span></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-31627711186360283812023-04-07T09:07:00.008-04:002023-12-02T17:09:40.961-05:00<div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;">In was in 1967 that I discovered Antonioni and Fellini. I saw Blow-Up (1966), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Persona (1966), The Loved One (1965), and Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1965). I watched Godzilla (1954) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) on late night TV. I read a Wonder Wart-Hog comic book. I saw a drunk sleeping on the stoop of Carnegie Hall.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span>It was the summer an Army buddy and I took over the second floor of an old duplex in Galveston and put in some time arguing politics versus culture. He was a Swiss Marcusian and argued that politics shapes culture. I argued the opposite.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span>It was the summer of the Six-Day War and our favorite cartoon showed the aftermath of a collision between an Arab and an Israeli tank, the Arabs holding their hands in the air, the Jews holding their necks.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">I read the </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">Koran</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> that summer and I was impressed by the idea of </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">houris</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span>I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span>Sitting by the pool at The Galvez, a grand, beach hotel one afternoon, I suddenly understood what a function was and lost my fear of mathematics forever.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span>My friend loafed on the beach while I programmed computers at an insurance company downtown. After work every day, I'd drop a deck of punch cards off at the computer room and the operators would run my latest Keynesian model on the company’s IBM 7080 mainframe. The models always blew up. I never got the accelerator and the multiplier right.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span>My friend totaled my red '65 Barracuda Fastback on the Boulevard one afternoon. He had just come back from the Monterey Jazz festival. The richest man in town sent him out there with somebody's wife, probably as a joke. He ended up inheriting a department store in Basel and slowly disappearing, like that big cat.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span>Somebody’s wife ended up finding Jesus under the sink in the bathroom of a cheap motel in Laredo one night. She was crouched in the corner, desperate for help, and it was Jesus or the big cockroach that had just crawled out from under the sink.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #454c5e;">I still think it's about culture. About education in all its forms. If I don't know what a credit default swap is, never saw a play or an opera, never read a serious book or saw a serious film, don't know what a function is, never read any history, how can I believe I know anything worth knowing at all? What does “serious” mean? I think it’s about the intention to do more than pass time.</span> </span></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-14697769665391085862023-04-07T09:06:00.001-04:002023-04-07T09:40:36.885-04:00<div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;">Politicians, like everyone else, swim in the sea of mass culture. Political movements emerge and ride the wave of mass culture for a while, then sink back into the sea. It is impossible to imagine the New Deal outside a culture that valued people and the idea of society, just as it is impossible to imagine the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests that followed outside the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. The problem with the American political system now is that not only the leaders, but all of the possible pretenders to positions of leadership, to political office, you see, have been vetted by an establishment process that has eliminated the possibility that any anti-establishment, read anti-Wall Street and anti-Corporate, idea will work its way into the political process. The culture of dissent just isn't there to sustain it.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">It’s not my intention to create a culture of dissent. I wouldn’t know where to start. My intention is less ambitious and less serious than some. Norman Mailer felt “imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." I just want to raise sensibilities a notch. I freely admit that my intention is highbrow, though I fear I am too lowbrow myself to produce anything of real highbrow value. I will settle for building a little raft by lashing together, in homage to a brilliant scene in the HBO series </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">Rome (2005 - 2007)</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">, the bloated bodies of a few old thoughts.</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">I read John Simon and Pauline Kael before I went to film school. In film school I read Andrew Sarris, Robert Warshow, Claude Levi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt. After film school I read Bazin, Wollen and Tarkovsky. I believe it was Simon who said the difference between critics and reviewers is that critics assume you’ve seen the film.</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">I could find out if it was John Simon who said that, but I’m determined to resist the urge to “google it." I’ve had too many dinners and friendships ruined by people reaching for their cell phones to resolve a doubt, nail and ambiguity, or dispute a fact. No one vaguely recalls, imagines or speculates in the face of a cell phone and Google. No one makes up a more pleasing reality at dinner anymore.</span></span></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-74404553538712909772023-04-07T09:01:00.003-04:002023-12-02T17:11:25.422-05:00<div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #454c5e; font-family: times;">When I got out of film school in the late sixties I was able to make the films I wanted to make for a while. If they are inaccessible and too allegorical it’s because I was inaccessible and too allegorical myself. I was never interested in the world as it was. Things of this world were only manifestations of a ghost world or of a long-gone past I tried to evoke without much success. That kind of filmmaking requires a patron. If I ever had a chance to acquire one, and in retrospect I think I might have had a chance, I didn’t snap to that at the time. I guess the lesson there is to keep your eye on the main chance. There was only one film I wanted to make that I couldn’t. I saw Jerry Jeff Walker perform at Liberty Hall in Houston and left the hall thinking that anyone who had ever had a friend or hoped to have one would want to know Jerry Jeff Walker. But the timing was bad. Before I could put the film together, Walker’s career was in a tailspin. If I had been Albert Maysles, Walker would have been a perfect subject, but I was still thinking like D. A. Pennebaker and trying to get in on the beginning of something good, not to document its end. What I remember best about my career as an independent filmmaker is the generosity of friends who gave me jobs, loaned me equipment and helped me make my films.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">In the introduction to</span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;"> I Lost It At The Movies</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">, her 1960 collection of film reviews, Pauline Kael asks: ‘Isn’t it precisely the artist’s task to give form to his experience and the critic’s task to verbalize on how this has been accomplished?” Yes. But to what end? Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight." What mathematics does, Whitehead explained, is create a public world that's the same for everybody. Mathematics imagines a world "as one connected set of things which underlies all the perceptions of all people. There is not one world of things for my sensations and another for yours, but one world in which we both exist."</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover one world that underlies all of the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not? Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering, air and space travel possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter? Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg, Red Mountain and Green Mountain, </span><span class="italic" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">le monde,</span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"> the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the fifties and sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't seeing the same things at all.</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #454c5e; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; word-break: break-word;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235); border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: times;">What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, or filmmaker that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelets. All I can make accessible to anyone is what I see, hear and think when I watch a film. But again, to what end? To stay afloat as the wave of pap rises to fill the bandwidth streamers are creating.</span></span></div>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-9309045619343270012023-04-07T09:00:00.003-04:002023-12-02T17:21:44.364-05:00<div style="text-align: left;">For the maker of films there are thoughts,
jottings, comments and notes here about how to make film from the world.
Quentin Tarantino is right. A good review can be studied like a class
assignment. And for the viewer of films there are thoughts about how to make
film from film. These essays may be more useful to the student than to the
accomplished filmmaker or to the viewer who wants only to be informed, entertained
or emotionally moved. But there may be something useful here for viewers who
can entertain the notion that the film we experience as memory is the real
film.</div><p class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">If I have any single reader in mind it is the
independent filmmaker on the brink of becoming the next big thing. The good
news for that filmmaker is that there is a lot of bandwidth to fill. The bad
news is there will be a lot of crap competing to fill it. When bandwidth was
scarce, the value of information was that it added something novel to our
picture of things. Now bandwidth is unlimited and we have to create a new
standard of value. The problem for the filmmaker now is how to stand out and
the problem for the viewer is how to make good use of his or her time.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It’s a truism that literature, film and photography, are synthesized experiences. They don’t exist until a
maker creates them. But the experiences of the world, of emotions and of memories
the maker uses as the building blocks of their creations is important. The maker’s
own experience and direct knowledge has special standing. Write what you know.
Film what you know. That’s good advice. Or maybe we should say write and film
what you remember. Of what you remember, choose those things that are
first-hand, intimate and full of emotion for you. Bring those emotions to every
situation. Write and film what you know with abandon. Write and film what you
feel. Imbue every situation, past and present, historical or speculative, with
your own experience and authentic emotions. The story is just an occasion for
synthesis and the quality of the film depends on the quality of the emotionally
moving experience the maker is able to create.<o:p></o:p></p>
<br />Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-89573743415392893542023-04-07T08:59:00.001-04:002023-04-08T12:12:34.912-04:00<p>I am a product of the sixties. Mine is a sixties
sensibility, reflecting on the media of the millennium from a low to middlebrow
point of view. It’s the viewpoint of an artist more than that of a critic, of
someone who, like Pollock trying to recreate the body language that produced a
Mondrian, needs to feel in his bones where the maker is coming from.</p><p class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It is the filmmaker’s task to make emotionally
moving films, the streamer’s task to provide emotionally moving streams of
films, the viewer’s task to seek out films that linger in memory and enrich their
life. It’s not enough to watch reality TV and sports, to listen to rap, country
or pop, to follow celebrities on Twitter and Instagram, to watch Tik Toks, and
to be up on the latest episodes of series like <i>Game of Thrones (2011 - 2019)</i>,
that spectacular triumph of <i>mise-en-scène </i>over narrative. If you want to
get high and immerse yourself in the rich <a name="_Hlk104378901"><i>mise-en-scène</i>
</a>of <i>Game of Thrones, </i>just do it. But absorb the <i>mise-en-scène</i>
and the second unit-directed action. Don’t subject the narrative to a strip
search for significance or meaning. For me, <i>Game of Thrones</i> ended with
Daenerys Stormborn, The Unburnt, victorious. For one moment, thanks to CGI, she
is not like a dragon. She is a dragon. I don’t really remember or care to
remember what happened after that.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">We have to paddle hard to reach the top of the oncoming
swell, before the wave breaks, swamping our little craft.<o:p></o:p></p>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-22675949324417720332023-04-07T07:00:00.001-04:002023-04-08T12:14:53.326-04:00<p class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">We're all <i>McLuhanistas</i> now. We take it for
granted that the contents of each new medium, the World Wide Web, for example,
is other media. In the case of the World Wide Web, it is television, film,
photography, music, radio, books and magazines of all kinds that make up most
of its contents.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The Web started out where the media that preceded
it ended up: as a mass distribution network. The content of the Web, a
photograph or a film, for instance, may be transformed by being published in
the context of the Web, where it collides, lickety-split, at random, with other
data, but the photo or film is not altered on purpose to make it
"Webic" in the way books and plays are altered to make them
"filmic," by breaking them down and putting them together again as
screenplays and films, Frank Nugent’s adaptation of Alan Le May’s novel <i>The
Searchers</i> for John Ford’s Western film <i>The Searchers (1956)</i> is as
fine an example as any, or for that matter the way film created for television
is made "episodic."<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">There is no art form yet the object of which is
the creation of exciting Web collisions, juxtapositions or chains of
hyperlinks. Nor, for that matter, is it possible to imagine what the medium
that may someday subsume the Web will look like much less what the
"art" of that medium might be, unless the medium is an all-seeing
artificial intelligence that imagines the ephemeral events of the Web and real
life as, essentially, one and the same, and becomes, at the same time, solitary
creator and only viewer, muttering to itself.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Generally, art is degraded as it makes its way
through the media food chain. Novel to film to streamed television to YouTube
snippet, inserted into an article about an article on the Web, is a downhill
trip. But only the last stage of that journey, the Web, was designed from the
get-go to abstract, distill, decontextualize and repackage without adding value,
to transmit, or, when not simply transmitting, to transform, by reducing
content to pap. When it is not just moving content from one point to another,
the World Wide Web has managed, on purpose, to dumb down its content—print,
film, television and the other media—to an extent previously unimagined. Even
more than television, the Web is, with a few notable exceptions, a vast
graveyard where ideas and creative energy go to die. And now it has an
unlimited bandwidth to fill.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The history of television is instructive. Film has
been kinder to books than television, the medium the Web resembles most, has
been to films. In some ways, television has advanced the art of film.
Certainly, the extended length of series like <i>Rome</i>, <i>The Sopranos
(1999 - 2007)</i>, <i>Lonesome Dove (1989) </i>and <i>Angels in America (2003)</i>
has given audiences more time with the characters and <i>mises-en-scène </i>of
those films than movie-going audiences ordinarily get. And <i>mise-en-scène</i>,
a stage term applied to film by the French critic André Bazin that refers to
everything about a film except its script, takes time to appreciate. It's <i>mise-en-scène</i>
that makes it necessary to actually see a film before we can talk about it as
film. But, at the same time that television gives audiences an extended look at
the<i> mises-en-scène </i>of some films, it alters the film experience by
degrading a film's<i> mise-en-scène</i>, making it smaller, flatter and more
frontal, an effect that favors montage over extended scenes that are blocked
and photographed in a way that develops the illusion of depth on the screen and
recreates the real world. Sometimes the art of that is subtle, sometimes, as in
Otto Preminger’s <i>In Harm’s Way (1965)</i>, it is obvious and in and of
itself a pleasure to watch and to study.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Television was not conceived as a distribution
medium for films any more than film was conceived as a distribution medium for
books. Films may end up, along with made for TV movies, feeding the practically
insatiable maw of cable television and streamers, just as novels may end up as
films, but television itself was envisioned, like radio before it, as a live
medium. That aspect of television is in decline, too.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The fact that television news and opinion has
degenerated until even raw video of breaking events is edited, explained and
commented on in search of memorable and persuasive phrases designed to lead
viewers to preconceived points of view, is not the result of television's
intention, so much as it is the result of the corruption of television's
original intention to reveal, inform and transport.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The Web, on the other hand, has adhered to its
original intention. It remains as it began, a network of people, separated in
space, each identified by a unique address on the web, coalescing into
temporary communities around points of common interest where data is exchanged.
Some of that data is still information. It actually adds to the representation
of something. Most of it now is redundant, simply repeating something already
known, and a lot of it is noise, data that adds to the representation of
nothing. <span style="background: white;">The World Wide Web creates the illusion
of connection while it affirms our separation in space.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Apart from the content they pass back and forth,
the World Wide Web and the sites on it, are not very interesting. Most sites
lack the kind of structure that narrative gives to novels, plays, films and
television. Even so-called reality television is structured by formulaic plots
that include some element of suspense. Nor does the structure that embeds the <i>mise-en-scène</i>
have to be narrative in the sense of a traditional plot with a familiar
commercial structure. Films like Warhol’s <i>Sleep (1963) </i>and <i>Blow Job
(1963)</i> are structured by the nature of the event. The Netflix series <i>The
Keepers (2017) </i>is structured by vivid verbal narration reminiscent of <i>Persona</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><o:p></o:p></p><p>The Web has not found a way to adapt content, to
transform a subject, without copying it on the one hand, or destroying it on
the other. Even when sites manage a sort of transient narrative, usually around
some great and scandalous event, a favorite ploy of muckraking sites and
tabloids, their <i>mises-en-scène</i> are, frankly, a mess and they quickly
turn into echo chambers, some of the most boring sites on the Web. But, I might
add, some of the most popular and profitable, too. </p>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-74335592057800154132018-12-24T06:45:00.003-05:002022-08-28T18:01:34.212-04:00Time Travel In The SixtiesCompared to the action-packed super-realism of time travel films like the Terminator series, <em>12 Monkeys </em>and <i>Planet of the Apes</i>, the black-and-white video technology of <em>The Star Wagon</em>, a 1966 television play, written by Maxwell Anderson and directed by Karl Genus, is archaic. But Genus’ direction and the relaxed and intimate acting of a cast that includes Orson Bean, Joan Lorring, Eileen Brennan and Dustin Hoffman make <em>The Star Wagon</em> one of the most entertaining attempts to use the idea of time travel to dramatize the tension between free will and destiny I’ve seen.<br />
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<em>The Star Wagon</em>, produced for WNET and NET Playhouse at the time that National Educational Television was evolving into the Public Broadcasting System, is one of the television plays available from distributors like Broadway Theatre Archive who specialize in early television productions. It’s also available as a rental from Netflix.<br />
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Taped mainly on location, <em>The Star Wagon </em>follows Bean, a dreamy inventor, and his earthy sidekick, Hoffman, as they try to reverse their fortunes by turning back time. If the outcome of their journey through time seems sappy and predictable nowadays, that may say more about the cynicism of the 21st Century than it does about the naiveté of television audiences in the Sixties, who were comfortable with Hollywood endings, the triumph of good over evil and the idea that innocence, lost in time, can be restored. And some of Anderson’s themes — that there are no great men, that nothing matters more than freedom, and that the business of business is the fleecing of the unwary – seem, in this age of Ponzi schemes and bailouts, downright timeless.<br />
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Television is an intimate medium, suited for low-key performances, and Genus’ cast, led by Bean and Lorring in the role of Bean’s long-suffering wife, deliver the kind of casual intimacy seldom seen in film. Genus uses his performers and the low resolution images of early black-and-white video to create a unique mix of impressionism and naturalism. The high contrast images of Genus’ actors, overexposed to the extent that the actors’ bodies seem to glow, are painterly and impressionistic, but the performances Genus and his actors create are natural and realistic.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsngEJ7QPUI/AAAAAAAAAT8/MsVw5JgTa1M/s1600-h/Bean+and+Lorring.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389084791114054978" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsngEJ7QPUI/AAAAAAAAAT8/MsVw5JgTa1M/s320/Bean+and+Lorring.jpg" style="height: 242px; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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Genus’ cast has a remarkable ability to be with one another, to be with Maxwell Anderson’s script, and to demonstrate that good acting is, in fact, reacting. The result is a kind of naturalness that even directors like John Cassavetes, who were completely committed to naturalism and improvisation, never achieved. Cassavetes was able to use improvisation to structure his films by creating realistic situations, but the dialogue his actors improvised seldom matched Anderson’s ear for small talk, flip comments, and the kind of gentle razzing we see in <em>The Star Wagon</em>. <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsnffsH87FI/AAAAAAAAATs/bCZhJpcPTe8/s1600-h/TSQUARE.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389084164638960722" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsnffsH87FI/AAAAAAAAATs/bCZhJpcPTe8/s320/TSQUARE.JPG" style="height: 320px; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
Anderson and Genus deliver poetry, as well. Standing on the star wagon, Hoffman looks like an angel with one good wing. There is a dreamlike, druggy quality to Bean and Hoffman’s laughter as they launch themselves back through time. Bean moves effortlessly from innocence, as he rehearses a hymn, The Holy City, with Lorring, to funny sexuality as Eileen Brennan digs in his front pocket for candy at a picnic; and Bean’s dark and violent rebirth leaves the impression of opera, of voices singing together to reveal the dark underside of Anderson’s comedy before Hoffman yanks Bean from the river to begin life over, half-drowned and miserable, lying in the mud with his head in Brennan’s wet lap.<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsnffBx3EDI/AAAAAAAAATk/Qe1XtwIPUYE/s1600-h/The+River.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389084153272012850" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsnffBx3EDI/AAAAAAAAATk/Qe1XtwIPUYE/s320/The+River.jpg" style="height: 242px; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/Ssnfe8_k_uI/AAAAAAAAATc/2VDY1sVCCAU/s1600-h/Rebirth.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389084151987371746" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/Ssnfe8_k_uI/AAAAAAAAATc/2VDY1sVCCAU/s320/Rebirth.jpg" style="height: 242px; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
Technically, these scenes of Bean’s death and rebirth by the river are as advanced as any experimental cinema of the Sixties. Bean’s passage begins with the sound of Hoffman pushing Brennan out to the way and jumping into the river, but we aren’t allowed to see Hoffman pull Bean out of the water until we enter the drowning Bean’s thoughts and contemplate nothing less than the meaning of life.<br />
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It is possible to think of life as a long series of paths not taken, doors opened or not opened, decisions made one way instead of another. It is a convention of most time travel films that the journey back through time will either change nothing, or it will change everything. The art of those films is to show why this should be so, to explain in a satisfying way why history had to happen exactly as it did happen. In <em>The Star Wagon</em>, Anderson breaks with that convention. He raises the possibility of changing history by going back in time, and then rejects that possibility as an act of will. Orson Bean’s Stephen returns to the present tense of his life as we found him, not because he has to, but because he wants to. But he is better for having made the journey, even if the world is not, and, watching the film, I felt the sweetness of life in a way I had not felt it since those summer evenings long ago, when I was a boy and I waited nervously at shortstop for our pitcher to deliver his first pitch.<br />
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At the end of the play, Stephen tells us his time machine is just a way of remembering the past. Karl Genus’ <em>The Star Wagon</em> is as good a way as any of remembering some of broadcast television’s best years. And that’s something, in my view, upon which it is worth spending some time.</div>
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Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-27759271924325943022018-12-23T09:54:00.000-05:002022-12-31T09:00:21.584-05:00Escape To RealityWhen the world gets to be too much for me, I pull out one of my video collections and escape for a couple of days. I have <em>Angels In America</em>, all of <em>The Sopranos</em>, <i>Rome</i>, <em>Lonesome Dove, </em>and a ton of Bergman. Most of the time they'll do, but, when things get really rough, I turn to my John Cassavetes Criterion Collection.<br />
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More than any other director, John Cassavetes portrays people at their limits, bound up, boxed in by their marriages, their friends, their sex, their race, their age, the limits of their talent, and any other cage or corner Cassavetes can cram them into. And they usually don’t get out. They find their salvations, if they find them, inside their cages. Even if a Cassavetes character appears to escape, we can’t be sure. When Cassavetes and Peter Falk leave Ben Gazzara in London at the end of <em>Husbands (1970)</em>, it doesn’t feel like Gazzara has slipped out of his cage. It feels like his friends have left him on the battlefield to die.<br />
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Although it doesn’t include <em>Husbands</em>, the Criterion Collection’s boxed set of five Cassavetes films provides an easy, though expensive, way to acquire a taste for Cassavetes. The set has <em>Shadows (1959),</em> <em>Faces (1968),</em> <em>A Woman Under the Influence (1974)</em>, <em>The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976),</em> <em>Opening Night (1977)</em> and the 2000 documentary, <em>A Constant Forge: The Life and Art of John Cassavetes</em>. Or you can watch most of Cassavetes’ films and the documentary individually on Netflix or Amazon Prime.<br />
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Cassavetes was, arguably, the father of American independent film. His first film, <em>Shadows</em>, was made at about the time French directors were creating the New Wave. It's a beat film. Cassavetes, like the French, subordinated plot to the <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">mise-en-scène</span></i></span>. His films weren’t about the narrative. The story was often beside the point; just something to hang the film on. To Cassavetes and the French <i>auteurs</i>, film was synthesized experience, and the story was just an occasion for that synthesis. The French bought the rights to dime store novels for their plots. Cassavetes invented situations. His films have beginnings and ends, but they are, like direct cinema and cinema verite documentaries, essentially situational and episodic. The end of each episode and the way it’s resolved are determined, not by the requirements of a plot, but by the inner workings of the episode itself. Affairs end. Men go home to their wives. Women who have nervous breakdowns come home to their families when they get out of the hospital. They put their kids to bed, clean up the dishes and go to bed with their husbands. Strip joint owners who get mixed up with the mob get killed. And the play must go on.<br />
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To the <em>cinema verité </em>style and structure, Cassavetes added improvisation. He worked out scenes in collaboration with his actors instead of forcing his view of the scenes on them. Cassavetes’ approach to directing let his actors bring their own life experiences to situations and allowed him to add their sense of what is authentic and what is not to his own. The tension between rigid direction and improvisation, between conformity and self-expression, is a recurring subtext in Cassavetes’ films, from <em>Shadows</em> to his Pirandellian masterpiece, <em>Opening Night</em>.<br />
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Cassavetes' first film, <em>Shadows, </em>features Lelia, a young, black artist, cornered by race, gender and family. She’s the kid sister of Hugh, a singer who can’t sing, and Ben, a horn player who never plays for us. Hugh and his agent, the only person who can stand the way Hugh sings, tour second-rate clubs in the Midwest. Ben listens to jazz from the corners of rooms; cruises New York City bars and cafes with his friends, trying to get laid. Lelia hangs out with Ben and his crew, and with artists and intellectuals, older guys who know things Ben and his friends don’t know. She falls for a good-looking white boy, who dumps her when he meets brother Hugh, because, unlike Lelia and Ben, Hugh is obviously black. Lelia ends up on a dance floor in the arms of a middle-class black man she meets at a party, the kind of man Lelia and her brothers think of as a square but others might call solid. Cassavetes leaves her there, moves on to watch Hugh go off on another road trip, and to watch Ben and his pals get beaten into unconsciousness in the men’s room of a bar when they try to pick up the wrong women. Cassavetes crammed that action and the feeling of the beat Fifties into one black-and-white box in 1959. It was ten years later before he was able to make his next independent film, <em>Faces</em>, a portrait of a marriage on the rocks.<br />
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<em>Faces</em> was Cassavetes’ film for the Sixties, and the first Cassavetes and Rowlands collaboration. It was the beginning of a body of work that eventually exhausted the themes Cassavetes took up in <em>Shadows</em>: women on the edge, the way families and friends tie us up but make us strong, the life and death struggle to be authentic and spontaneous instead of phony. <em>Faces</em> is Cassavetes' least successful film, although it's his most accessible and appreciated effort. It's his least filmic and most photographic film. In <em>Faces</em>, an L.A. executive leaves his wife for a prostitute, played by Rowlands. His wife, Lynn Carlin, tries to commit suicide after a one-night stand with Seymour Cassel, a hipster she picks up in a club. The executive goes home to his wife and, in a scene that breaks the static, monotonous repetition of faces that dominates the film, chases the hipster out of the house. In addition to Rowlands, Carlin and Cassel, the cast of <em>Faces</em> included Fred Draper, Val Avery and Elizabeth Deering, actors Cassavetes worked with for the next ten years. <em>Faces</em> was Rowland’s first shot at portraying a woman on the verge of a breakdown. Her second shot came six years later in <em>A Woman Under the Influence</em>.<br />
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There is something almost unbearably edgy about the young Rowlands in <em>A Woman Under the Influence.</em> It’s as if somebody has jammed a 220v wire into her brain. It takes her about two minutes to convince me she’s the most troubled woman I’ll ever see. Her relationship with Peter Falk is tense. There is an acceptance of violence against women in the film I find deeply disturbing. And yet, <em>A Woman Under the Influence</em> is about the kind of people I know well. Working class people. Never enough living space. Not much education and culture. Sometimes not enough money. They fight at the dinner table. But there is redemption in the physicality of these Cassavetes’ characters, in their muscle. It’s a punch, a roundhouse right, that brings Rowlands down to earth and restores her to her family. To her kids. To the dirty dishes that, when all is said and done, have to be taken from the table to the sink. In <em>A Woman Under the Influence</em>, Cassavetes shows us a family coming together, closing the doors on the outside world and making what they can of their lives. <em>A Woman Under the Influence</em> added Lady Rowlands and Katherine Cassavetes to Cassavetes’ troop of actors.<br />
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<em>The Killing of a Chinese Bookie</em>, the fourth film in the Criterion set, is Cassavetes’ <i>film noir</i> classic. It’s the darkest of Cassavetes’ films, not just visually – most of it was filmed at night with available light — but emotionally as well. It’s Cassavetes’ most bitter film. When the mob decides to kill him for his club, escape is never an option for Cosmo Vitelli. He has no real family or friends. The most important thing in his life is a third-rate floor show he created for his tawdry strip joint. Vitelli, played by Ben Gazzara, gets shot in the gut while he’s trying to murder a Chinese bookie to pay off a debt to the mob. He manages to kill most of the mob, but he ends up bleeding to death, slowly, while he paces the sidewalk outside his club.<br />
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<em>Opening Night </em>is<em> </em>Cassavetes' last film. Gena Rowlands stars as an aging actress, struggling with her age, her relationship with her co-star, played by Cassavetes, the demands of her director, the limits of the script, and the death of a young fan who gets hit by a car while she’s watching Rowlands leave the theater. Rowlands is haunted by the girl’s ghost. On the verge of breaking down, Rowlands murders the girl’s ghost and her own youth. Playing a scene with Cassavetes, she saves the show and her career with an improvised performance on opening night. The film is a triumph for Cassavetes. As the writer and director of <em>Opening Night</em>, he can do what he was never able to do in the real world. He can direct the play’s audience and their reaction to him and his wife.<br />
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The audience loves them, of course .<br />
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I guess I do, too. The easy explanation for that is to say I like melancholy moods, dark streets, and the rain. I like redemption. I like to see the old order brought down and to see chaos reign. I like reluctant heroes and the kind of women who work retail. And there’s plenty of that in Cassavetes. But it’s more than that.<br />
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Cassavetes knew that it’s not what you see, but what you remember that counts. It’s the way films live in our memories that matters. And he gave us a lot to remember. He gave us close-ups, and he gave us enough time with his characters to get to know them well.<br />
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I remember Ben Carruthers in <em>Shadows</em>, walking down the street in a coat that’s too light for New York City in the wintertime; Seymour Cassel fleeing down the hill in <em>Faces</em>; Gena Rowlands dancing, Peter Falk climbing a hill with his crew, Katherine Cassavetes guarding the stairs to keep Rowlands away from the kids in <em>A Woman Under the Influence</em>; Ben Gazzara in the dark, getting his orders from the mob, and Gazzara in the light, standing in the spotlight with Mr. Sophistication and his strippers in <em>The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. </em>I remember Rowlands, beating her youth to death in a hotel room, crawling toward her dressing room, putting her dukes up when she’s improvising with Cassavetes in <em>Opening Night</em>. And I remember John Cassavetes, laughing and bounding around the stage in <em>Opening Night</em>, while the audience laughs out loud and applauds.<br />
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When I watch Cassavetes’ films I feel I’m in the presence of myths.<br />
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Can I name the myths? Can I say who Cassavetes’ characters remind me of, who the major and minor deities are in Cassavetes’ pantheon? Who is that with the wound that will not heal? Who is that, chasing the suitor from his house? Who is that, leading his men out to work? Who is that, leading the women out to dance? Can I name them? Not a chance. It was Cassavetes’ achievement to create a pantheon of characters who suggest mythic figures without names. I could no more name them than the Greeks, gathered around the hearth to listen to the poet spin his yarns, could say who Achilles and Odysseus reminded them of.Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-15704026063868531362018-07-11T06:30:00.003-04:002022-08-28T17:58:14.400-04:00Grey Gardens RevisitedThere is an element of the hunt in documentary films, a delicious kind of trophy hunting at its lightest, but, at its heaviest, a predatory savaging of people and events that exposes the dark side of subjects and the exploitative nature of documentary film. <br />
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The Maysles brothers' <em>Grey Gardens (1975</em>) is a film portrait of Big Edie and Little Edie Beale. It’s a film about eccentrics and eccentricity, about marginal people whose living conditions reflect the condition of their lives.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNygmBMYTI/AAAAAAAAASU/oUnBMLArJz4/s1600-h/The+Beales.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387275483552178482" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNygmBMYTI/AAAAAAAAASU/oUnBMLArJz4/s400/The+Beales.jpg" style="height: 352px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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Film lends itself exceptionally well to the substitution of one thing for another when two things regularly appear together. Over the course of the Maysles brothers' film, the Grey Gardens estate comes to stand for the lives of the Beales in the same way the American flag has come to stand for America and the White House for the President. If there were nothing more to <em>Grey Gardens (1975)</em> than that – and there is – it would still be an important work of art, because it’s a wonderful example of film as sympathetic magic. It gives us the illusion of power over the world by reducing complicated people and situations to a manageable size.</div>
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The genre the Maysles brothers chose to work in had rules, and they were accused from time to time of breaking them, of manipulating events, of straying outside the boundaries of direct cinema and <em>cinéma vérité</em>, particularly in the case of <em>Gimme Shelte</em>r (1970), a sensational film that features the murder of a black Rolling Stones fan at Altamont. <br />
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Direct cinema captures real events as they happen, without interfering with them in any way. There is no direction in direct cinema, no “do this” or “do that again.” No questions. No staged scenes. Nature documentaries are perhaps the purest example of the form. The filmmakers witness horrific events, but never interfere. <em>Cinéma vérité</em>, another style of modern documentary, has some latitude. It’s more about truth than about reality, and, as long as the film conveys the truth, it may wander away from real events.<br />
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In the case of films like <em>Grey Gardens (2009)</em>, a historical drama that HBO has run off and on since its triumph at the Emmies, neither the rules of direct cinema nor <em>cinéma vérité </em>apply. The intention of the producers is simply entertainment, and they're free to pick over the bones of the Maysles' kill any way they can. HBO doesn't broadcast <em>Grey Gardens</em> as part of it's regular schedule anymore, but, in a move that harkens back to the days when movies were all glitz and glitter to brighten the lives of the little people, they put it up on HBO On Demand over the Christmas holidays. "They were steeped in affluence and privilege," the HBO promo proclaims. "Yet their lives in East Hampton became a riches-to-rags story that made national headlines." There is a metaphor lurking around there somewhere.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNyf2Ct6hI/AAAAAAAAASM/QjeqMbn6GuM/s1600-h/Barrymore+and+Lange.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387275470673668626" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNyf2Ct6hI/AAAAAAAAASM/QjeqMbn6GuM/s400/Barrymore+and+Lange.jpg" style="height: 300px; width: 300px;" /></a><br />
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A cottage industry has sprung up around Grey Gardens and the Beales since the Maysles first documented the squalor and decay of the Beales’ lives. Since <em>Grey Gardens (1975)</em> the documentary, we’ve had <em>Grey Gardens</em> the musical, <em>Grey Gardens</em> the book, <em>Grey Gardens</em> the web site and, finally, HBO's version of the Beales' story. But I doubt HBO will have the last word.<br />
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Over the years, the Beales have attracted a cult following: people who know what it’s like to live on the fringe. But the audience for works based on the lives of the Edies is more general than a cult. It includes any of us who have ever slowed down to look at the scene of an accident. <br />
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The story of the Edies coincides with the long, downhill slide of American society, the decay of the American dream, and the slow stratification of America into two cultures, one affluent and above ground, the other underground, it’s people trapped in poverty. If it could happen to the Edies, it could happen to anyone.<br />
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American capitalism has always had two spurs to keep us moving up the steep hill of success. One boot prods us with the promise of fortune and fame, the other with the specter of disaster, with the threat of losing all we have suddenly or, like the Beales, gradually, as we get older. The Beales’ story is frightening and fascinating. It’s hard to look at it, but it’s harder to look away. <br />
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The Maysles brothers had an eye for the wounded straggler, for the animal ready to die. Perhaps it’s because their subjects knew they were damaged that the Maysles brothers were able to stay above the people and events they filmed, to appear to be superior to their subjects, to have the upper hand. Their contemporary, D. A. Pennebaker, seemed more respectful, more deferential to his subjects – even, as in the case of the <em>War Room</em> (1993) when Pennebaker’s camera grovels at the feet of James Carville and Mary Matalin, obsequious.<br />
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Pennebaker had a knack for getting in on the beginning of things: Timothy Leary and the counterculture; Bob Dylan; Joplin and Hendricks at the Monterrey Pop Festival; and, finally, the Clintons. The Maysles brothers, Al and David, had a knack for being there at the end of things, the final acts, the death throes of the traveling salesman and the Counterculture, the unraveling of Camelot. </div>
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By the time he filmed <em>Grey Gardens (1975)</em>, Al Maysles was one of the best cinematographers in the world, and the Maysles brothers had mastered the art of manipulating subjects and situations. They had developed a gift for narrative unmatched in documentary film. No one tells a story the way the Maysles brothers do.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNyfZcuSsI/AAAAAAAAASE/4WTugdrzZDs/s1600-h/The+Badger"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387275462998117058" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNyfZcuSsI/AAAAAAAAASE/4WTugdrzZDs/s400/The+Badger" style="height: 400px; width: 315px;" /></a><br />
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“Once you’ve lost that push, you’ve had it,” Paul Brennan, the "Badger," tells the camera in <em>Salesman (1968)</em>. Brennan suffers from too much awareness. He knows he’s a dead-ender in a dying profession. Negativity is the unpardonable sin of Brennan’s world, and Al Maysles patiently and carefully documents Brennan’s descent into negativity during Brennan’s last days as a bible salesman.<br />
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“We can get it together,” Mick Jagger tells the crowd at Altamont, just before a shot of what appears to be the Hell’s Angels killing a black fan who pulled a gun on them. Earlier in the concert, when Grace Slick, watching the Hell’s Angels beat her fans with pool cues, said: “People get weird, and you need people like the Angels to keep people in line,” she was, at that spaced-out, sappy moment, more in touch with the direction of American society than the slightly confused Jagger who believed Altamont was going to set an example for America about how to behave at large gatherings.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNyfHkyOSI/AAAAAAAAAR8/jQ3AsJkrj08/s1600-h/Gimme+Shelter.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387275458200090914" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/SsNyfHkyOSI/AAAAAAAAAR8/jQ3AsJkrj08/s400/Gimme+Shelter.jpg" style="height: 314px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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The Maysles brothers persuaded Jagger and the Stones to let Al film them watching a rough cut of <em>Gimme Shelter</em> on a Steenbeck editing table, ostensibly to provide a gimmick to structure the film. The brothers’ real reason was to make the apparent knifing of a fan by the Angels the central point of the film. Without the knifing and the opportunity to make Jagger eat his words, the Maysles brothers would have had a mediocre, though beautifully photographed concert film, whose high points were scenes of Jagger expressing his androgynous sexuality and young Tina Turner fellating her microphone. The violence and the obvious naiveté of the Stones and Grace Slick gave the brothers a chance for something much bigger, a chance to take down the Stones, Slick and the Counterculture at the same time. Eerily, Jagger’s helicopter exit from the Altamont speedway foreshadowed America’s final exit from Saigon, and, by the end of <em>Gimme Shelter</em>, Jagger’s stare was as vacant as the barren landscape in the last shot of the film.<br />
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For big-game hunters like the Maysles brothers, who already had bagged the "Badger", the Stones, Grace Slick and the beginning of the end of the Counterculture, two eccentric ladies in a run-down mansion were sitting ducks. </div>
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Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-32124526105305571772017-10-28T09:12:00.000-04:002022-12-31T09:00:32.086-05:00Lady Macbeth In Iraq<em>Bring forth men-children only, for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males. -- Macbeth</em><br />
<br />
Why do women tear other women down? I ran across a hatchet job on Kathryn Bigelow by film critic Martha Nochimson at Salon this morning. Nochimson's attack is personal, and, in a nutshell, boils down to the charge that Bigelow ditched her femininity to succeed in a man's world. A lesser included offense is the rather strange charge that Bigelow's Sgt. James in <em>The Hurt Locker</em> is less manly than -- of all people -- John Wayne, who consistently glorified war, but whom Nochimson characterizes as a "meaningful mentor" to young men.<br />
<br />
There has always been tension between creative people like Bigelow and the critics who crash their parties, but this "criticism" -- which reminds me of the gender issues raised around exceptional female atheletes -- is less an example of second-rate criticism than an example of the way women tear each other down. While Bigelow is trying to crash through Hollywood's glass ceiling, Nochimson is hanging onto her legs. When will women stop acting like crabs in a basket, crawling over one another to get out?<br />
<br />
Make no mistake about it, Nochimson's article is not about <em>The Hurt Locker</em>. It's about Bigelow and the kind of woman she is. <br />
<br />
Bigelow deserves and will get the Best Director Oscar for her work on <em>The Hurt Locker. </em>Her film conveys both the incredible pressure American troops in Iraq have been under to make instant life-and-death decisions and the limits of high-tech to take the pressure off of them. As she develops the film's premise, that something about war is addictive, we realize it's not just Sgt. James who's addicted. All of us are. In Sgt. James' case, it's the unmediated experience of danger that's addictive. He disarms bombs with his own hands. For the rest of us, it's war as the central reality of our time.<br />
<br />
That Sgt. James is unable to find his way home, that by the end of the film all he wants is another moonwalk down a deserted Baghdad street in search of another bomb, says something important, though disturbing, about what it means to be a human being -- or a nation -- at war. <br />
<br />
Ms. Nochimson should watch <em>The Hurt Locker</em> standing up next time. Clearly, most of it went over her head. And she should give up criticizing films until she learns what irony and metaphor are for.<br />
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Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-73450825654344409752017-09-20T09:18:00.000-04:002023-10-31T08:30:55.664-04:00Hollywood's Real Glass CeilingKathyrn Bigelow is about to become the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director.<br />
<br />
Whether she deserves the Best Director prize -- and I happen to think she does -- is beside the point. Ms. Bigelow will come away with the Oscar for Best Director as a consolation prize, because the Academy can't afford to admit that <em>The Hurt Locker </em>was the best picture of the year.<br />
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<em>The Hurt Locker</em> is up against Hollywood's real glass ceiling: the industry's profit margin.<br />
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Can Hollywood acknowledge that a low-budget movie that has grossed less than $20 million is a better film than the box office event <em>Avatar</em> that has grossed over $1 billion and is on its way to becoming one of the most profitable films of all time? Can the industry tell moviegoers: Thanks for the bucks, but the 3D spectacle you blew your money on last Christmas wasn't a great movie after all?<br />
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The face-off between <em>The Hurt Locker</em> and <em>Avatar </em>has been billed as woman against man, ex-wife against ex-husband, blockbuster against art house breakout. But, in the most basic sense, the confrontation looming at the Academy Awards is about whether movies can come to grips with the human condition instead of trying to escape from it.<br />
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Can we afford to make movies that synthesize real experience, to support producers and directors who engage the world as artists, or can we only support escapist spectaculars that distract us from the real world?<br />
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Rejecting <em>The Hurt Locker</em> will be a clear statement that Hollywood doesn't have the heart to take on the real world. In the head-to-head match-up between <em>The Hurt Locker</em> and <em>Avatar</em>, there is no question that <em>The Hurt Locker</em> is the better film.<br />
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<em>Avatar</em> is a significant motion picture event, designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release has been accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. It’s probably the first of many 3D blockbusters Hollywood will crank out over the next couple of years, and, in that sense at least, it represents the future of the industry. <br />
<br />
Unfortunately, <em>Avatar</em> is a very bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills. Worst of all, the film consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them. In a medium that lends itself to metaphor, <em>Avatar</em> is remarkably without characters, scenes or images that point to anything beyond themselves. Cameron's images, like his film, are, essentially, meaningless.<br />
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There is more real meaning in any single scene of <em>The Hurt Locker</em> than there is in all of <em>Avatar</em>.<br />
<br />
Ms. Bigelow's film conveys both the incredible pressure American troops in Iraq have been under to make instant life-and-death decisions and the limits of high-tech to take the pressure off of them. As she develops the film's premise that war is addictive, it doesn't take us long to discover it's not just Sgt. James who's addicted to war, it's America itself that's addicted as well. In James' case, it's an addiction that craves the unmediated experience of danger. He disarms bombs with his own hands. But it's an addiction that's tempered by James' and his team's regard for human life.<br />
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Ms. Bigelow's GIs are reluctant killers who risk their own lives to save the lives of others. Somehow, as we watch James' teammate, Specialist Eldridge, struggle to engage the enemy, Ms. Bigelow leads us to the realization that we are all Specialists now.<br />
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Critics of the Iraq occupation will find no cheap shots at America or the American military in <em>The Hurt Locker</em>. Ms. Bigelow invites us to see the war from the point of view of our best kind of soldier -- one whose job is to save lives, not take them.<br />
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That one of them is unable to find his way home, that by the end of the film all he wants is another moonwalk down a deserted Baghdad street in search of another bomb, says something important, though disturbing, about what it means to be a human being -- or a nation -- at war.<br />
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Nevertheless, Hollywood will split the Oscars between Ms. Bigelow and Mr. Cameron. Ms. Bigelow will win the Best Director Oscar, but the Best Picture award will go to <em>Avatar</em>. That's the bottom line.Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-30782609819023764042017-08-04T15:31:00.001-04:002022-12-31T09:00:41.839-05:00Avatar: Cameron's Epic FailureBe sure you see the 3D version of James Cameron's <em>Avatar</em> (2009). The 3D visuals are the only thing <em>Avatar </em>has going for it. Without them, it's a second-rate effort with a hackneyed plot and dialogue from a director who seems to have entered his long fingernails phase. Cameron spent so much time making <em>Avatar</em> that the world moved on, leaving him to obsess over yesterday's themes alone. <br />
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While <em>Avatar, </em>like American banks, is probably too big to fail, it will be interesting to see if America embraces <em>Avatar</em> the way it did Cameron's most important film,<em> Terminator 2: Judgment Day</em> (1991), or Michael Bay's excellent summer blockbuster, <em>Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen</em> (2009). It was Cameron's genius to create a myth in <em>T2 </em>that resolved the conflict between human beings and machines by uniting the best of humans and the best of machines in Schwarzenegger's cyborg.<br />
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In the Transformers films, Bay went beyond the man <em>vs.</em> machine myth to pursue a vision of machines transcendent. Bay's machines embody the best and the worst of human nature, while in <em>Avatar, </em>Cameron rejects humanity to pursue a comic book vision of nature in revolt against man and his efforts to subdue it. Bay celebrates the kickass technology of the U.S. military and its projection of power anywhere at any time, Cameron comes down on the side of the men and women who oppose the cynical exploitation of people and nature by corporations -- a theme he developed far more successfully years ago in <em>Aliens</em> (1986)<em> </em>and in <em>The Abyss</em> (1989) -- although Cameron's efforts along those lines never approached Roland Joffe's moving and historically accurate film, <em>The Mission</em> (1986) <em>. </em>They still don't.<br />
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<em>Avatar</em> has too many film-historical references to be considered original art. The warmed-over plot and characters will appeal to viewers who think of the Battle Of The Little Big Horn as the high point of the westward expansion or of <em>Dances With Wolves </em>as a good film. The rest of us will have to wait for a new director with fresh ideas to exploit the 3D technology Cameron has pursued so faithfully and so completely frittered away. Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-48702350566284579402017-07-02T15:31:00.002-04:002023-05-04T12:33:12.817-04:00The 3D BubbleAfter single-handedly creating a 3D bubble with <em>Avatar</em>, James Cameron is trying to fill it. Since<em> Avatar</em> was released last year, the universe of available 3D screens has doubled internationally. That's a lot of seats to fill. So Cameron's <em>Avatar,</em> already the highest grossing movie of all time, is being re-released today.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/THp-81vnK7I/AAAAAAAAAbc/pvJH8rXwpps/s1600/avatar+poster.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5510856677725252530" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/THp-81vnK7I/AAAAAAAAAbc/pvJH8rXwpps/s400/avatar+poster.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 400px; width: 400px;" /></a> <br />
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The marketing angle for the re-release, aimed at filling some of those seats in the over-built world of 3D theaters, is nine -- yes, <em>nine</em> -- previously unseen minutes of film, picked up from the cutting room floor. <br />
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<em>Avatar</em> fans will see their beloved Na'vis mourn the death of a fallen warrior in a "big, emotional scene" that Cameron claims is the best CG he's done. (Like Jesus, Cameron has saved his best wine for last.) We're also promised a "rousing action-adventure, pulse-pounding" hunting sequence.<br />
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Following the re-release today, an extended <em>Avatar</em> DVD will be released in November that includes the new footage, plus an "alternate reality version" of the film that is 16 minutes longer than the original.<br />
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Cameron says it will be a long time before there is an <em>Avatar</em> sequel -- if we're lucky, it will be a very long time -- but, apparently, Cameron will be able to find plenty of scraps to keep<em> Avatar</em> fans on the hook during the long wait.<br />
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The success of <em>Avatar</em> is a sign of the times. It tells us more about ourselves and the world we live in now than about whether<em> Avatar</em> is a particularly good film, or even a particularly entertaining one.<br />
Escapist movies do well in hard times. And the times these days are hard enough to require exceptionally escapist movies. <em>Avatar</em> fills the bill. More than anything else, it's a movie about escaping from the reality of the human condition.<br />
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Sadly, it's not a good movie to boot. In fact, Avatar is a very bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills. <br />
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Worst of all,<em> Avatar</em> consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them. In a medium that lends itself to metaphor, <em>Avatar</em> is remarkably without characters, scenes or images that point to anything beyond themselves. Cameron's images, like his film, are, essentially, meaningless. Maybe the times are too hard for films that synthesize real experience. Maybe Hollywood can't afford to support producers and directors who engage the world as artists. Maybe the market will only support escapist spectaculars that distract us from the real world.<br />
<br />
<em>Avatar</em> is a significant motion picture event. It was designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release was accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. The industry is betting it will be the first of many 3D blockbusters that will be cranked out over the next couple of years. The theaters and seats are waiting. And Cameron has set the bar low enough that Avatar might represent the future of the industry. That's a pity, because Cameron has done much better in the past. In <em>Avatar</em>, the 3D technology Cameron pursued so faithfully and so completely was just frittered away.<br />
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In his best film, <em>T2, </em>Cameron resolved the age-old conflict between human beings and machines by uniting the best of humans and the best of machines in Schwarzenegger's cyborg. In <em>T2</em>'s Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the cauldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron uses a series of close-ups to create a beautiful and unforgettable portrait of the cyborg. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/THqCKIFpGsI/AAAAAAAAAbk/eIzpX8TDdUA/s1600/terminator2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5510860204522674882" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/THqCKIFpGsI/AAAAAAAAAbk/eIzpX8TDdUA/s400/terminator2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 400px; width: 303px;" /></a><br />
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But in <em>Avatar </em>Cameron rejects humanity to pursue a comic book vision of nature in revolt against man and his efforts to subdue it. <br />
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To his credit, Cameron has always sided with men and women who oppose the cynical exploitation of people and nature by corporations. But that's a theme he developed far more successfully years ago in <em>Aliens</em> (1986)<em> </em>and in <em>The Abyss</em> (1989), although Cameron's efforts along those lines never approached the movie <em>Avatar </em>reduces most blatantly, Roland Joffe's moving and historically accurate film, <em>The Mission</em> (1986)<em>. </em>Cameron's reprise of <em>The Mission </em>is pure escapism that offers his audience the temporary and vicarious thrill of watching alien natives defeat well-armed corporate mercenaries.<br />
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Ultimately, films exist as memories. I saw <em>Avatar</em> twice when it was first released, once in digital 3D and once in IMAX 3D. I don't vividly remember a single image from the film. Maybe that's the key to a successful re-release. If you don't remember a film at all, it makes sense to see it again. In the inside out, upside down world of pop culture, the most forgettable films will have the longest lives. Viewers will watch them again and again, as though they're seeing them for the very first time.Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-76560408722643274252017-06-20T10:27:00.001-04:002023-01-03T09:25:52.385-05:00Avatar 2: The SequelI don't want to wait 10 years to review the sequel to <em>Avatar (2009)</em>, so I thought I'd pick up on some of James Cameron's main ideas and make my own sequel to review.<br />
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My <em>Avatar 2: The Sequel </em>begins with crowds jeering and spitting on the defeated corporate warriors as they return to earth. The President declares that this defeat shall not stand. Determined to lick that Pandora thing, corporate America returns to Pandora in force. They use germ warfare this time, the kind of germs that have always worked on natives. Measles bring the Na'vi to the brink of extinction.<br />
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After a few scenes that establish the brutality of the corporate invaders -- things like soldiers handcuffing Na'vi kids and shooting them -- the Na'vi and the anti-colonial human scientists who stayed behind on Pandora use the Avatar machines to create human avatars for the Na'vi and take the battle to earth.<br />
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Jake and Neytiri lead a band of avatars who hijack a couple of spaceships and crash them into New York City and Washington, D.C., killing millions and wiping out the government, while the Na'vi snooze comfortably in their pods. Unfortunately, wiping out millions of bad guys doesn't stop the measles, and the Na'vi, including Neytiri and Jake, whose parents were vaccine deniers, die off anyway.<br />
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I believe that recycles enough themes and situations to be a hit while maintaining at least a semblance of historical reality, so let's review it.<br />
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Cameron has done it again! And he has finally figured out how to use the subjective POV to exploit 3D. Megan Fox rocks as Neytiri's human avatar. You know the rest.Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-23478766702275356142017-06-15T08:44:00.002-04:002023-10-31T08:39:28.639-04:00The Hurt Locker May Have A Chance After All<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/TCyruywCjWI/AAAAAAAAAaU/1lolceX9ZdM/s1600/palestinian+navi.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5488950866243390818" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/TCyruywCjWI/AAAAAAAAAaU/1lolceX9ZdM/s400/palestinian+navi.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 266px; width: 399px;" /></a><br />
(AP Photo/Bernat Armangue) <br />
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<a href="https://www.annalsofthehive.com/2011/02/hollywoods-real-glass-ceiling.html">Just when I thought Kathryn Bigelow's <em>The Hurt Locker</em> didn't have a chance to win the Academy Award for Best Picture</a>, the AP reports that some pesky Palestinians have decided to get into the act. Palestinian protesters at Bil'in have painted themselves blue and posed as characters from <em>Avatar</em>. Apparently, the demonstrators equate their fight at Bil'in to the Na'vi's fight against intergalactic corporatism in Cameron's film.<br />
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With the Best Director Oscar already in the bag for Bigelow, Cameron now finds his Best Picture Oscar in jeopardy. Hollywood needs 3D, but do they need it enough to associate themselves with a film that's been picked up on by those controversial Palestinians?<br />
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Could be a sweep for Bigelow.<br />
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The struggle of humans against machines, as it has played out in our best films, has two main variations. In the first variation, machines are evil. In the second variation, machines are just dangerous and it's the "mad scientists" who create or use them who are evil or insane. Machines have a potential for evil, but they usually include a built-in safety mechanism to protect people -- the first law of Robotics is not to harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm -- but, of course, the safety mechanism doesn't always work. <em>Forbidden Planet</em> (1956) is an especially bleak rendering of the mad scientist myth. After thousands of years of rationality, with the assistance of a machine to end all machines, the Krell are destroyed by monsters from the id. Morbius, in his pursuit of the knowledge and power of the Krell, is transformed into a monster who, subconsiously, seeks to destroy anyone who opposes him. In masterful renditions of the myth like Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, <em>Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb</em>, both the evil machine and the mad scientist versions of the struggle between human and machine resonate at once. Dangerous men are caught up in dangerous machines. We can see the Strategic Air Command as a machine out of control, we can see it as a machine in the hands of a mad general, or we can see SAC as a cog in the menacing machine we used to call the Cold War, a concept that comes close to what the Hindus mean by karma. A clockwork.<br />
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Until the Eighties, most Science Fiction films, and in particular the ones in which the machine is a robot, cyborg, or some combination of human and machine, favored the evil machine story and reflected the ambivalence and caution toward machines that had informed the Science Fiction film since Fritz Lang created the evil robot, Maria (the original material girl) in <em>Metropolis</em> (1926). These films include<em> 2001: A Space Odyssey </em>(1968), <em>Colossus: The Forbin Project</em> (1969), <em>Westworld </em>(1973), <em>The Demon Seed </em>(1977), <em>Alien</em> (1979), and, finally, James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's <i>T</i><em>he Terminator</em> (1984), the genre's last solid rendition of a truly evil machine. The machine in <em>T1</em>, like Skynet, the Artificial Intelligence that created it, is bad to its alloy bone.<br />
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The separation of humans from machines in popular culture began to close in the 1980’s. In Ridley Scott's <em>Blade Runner</em> (1982), more physical damage is sustained by replicants than by people, the replicants have pitifully short life spans, and, in fact, all of the women in the film are replicants. Scott's film stands Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, <em>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</em>, on its head. Dicks’ novel is about a bounty hunter who is so human he is capable of empathizing with the ruthless machines he hunts down and destroys. That capacity almost destroys him. Fourteen years later, in <em>Blade Runner</em>, the machines are more human and compassionate than the humans. It's the machines who recite poetry and philosophy and who have "seen things you people wouldn't believe," and it's pain that keeps Roy Baty alive long enough to redeem the bounty hunter, Rick Deckard. In <em>Robocop </em>(1987) the human, torn down and reconstructed with machine parts replacing limbs and organs, sustains massive injuries in his first encounter with a killer robot. And, in Cameron and Hurd's <em>Aliens </em>(1986), their sequel to Ridley Scott's <em>Alien </em>(1979), the robot or "artificial person" is ripped in half by WATCH OUT! A XENOMORPH! Cameron and Hurd's word for a non-human life form. The humans and the machines are on the same side, and, at the film's climax, it is the badly damaged "artificial person" -- his legless torso resembling a broken, plastic doll -- who saves the human child from being sucked into space.<br />
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By the time Cameron and Hurd released the sequel to their first Terminator film, <em>Terminator 2: Judgment Day </em>(1991)<em>, </em>the chasm separating people and machines was gone. <i>T2</i>, like <i>The Terminator, </i>is set within the context of an apocalyptic war between humans and machines that follows a 1997 nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The nuclear war begins when Skynet, the U.S.A.'s computer-based defense system, achieves self-awareness and attacks the Russians, hoping the human race will be destroyed in the nuclear holocaust that follows. In this, both films are consistent with each other, and with <em>Dr. Strangelove</em>, <em>Colossus: The Forbin Project</em> and other films of the Cold War era. And <em>Terminator 2: Judgment Day </em>and <i>T</i><em>he Terminator</em> have the same basic plot. Skynet sends a Terminator from the future to kill Sarah Connor or her son John before John can be born, grow up, and lead the humans in their war against the machines. In both films, the humans send a warrior back through time to protect John and his mother. It is at this point that <em>T1</em> and <em>T2</em> diverge. In <em>The Terminator</em>, the protector is a human being, and the Terminator is a machine. In <em>T2</em>, the protector is a machine, and the Terminator is neither human nor machine. He is something else.<br />
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<i>T2</i> is a brilliant rendition of the mad scientist myth. Three heroes, John Connor, his mom, and John's cyborg protector, hustle to stop the mad scientist before he can invent the basic technology that leads to Skynet. To stay alive, they have to stay out of the clutches of a new kind of Terminator who, though Cameron and Hurd call him a machine, is depicted, especially in his grotesque death throes, as essentially organic or worse. Unlike the Terminator in <em>T1</em>, who is a machine disguised as a man, the Terminator in <em>T2</em> is an organic whole, not an assemblage of parts, and, although it's possible to read "machine" into his strength, agility and relentless focus, when he's consigned to a caldron of molten steel at the climax of the film, he shape shifts, writhes and bellows in agony like a monstrous animal or demon.<br />
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<em>T2</em> is remarkably misanthropic and predictably iconoclastic in its assault on the usual people and institutions, including Ma Bell, bank machines, cops, bikers, foster parents and the city of Los Angeles, which is flattened by a hydrogen bomb. But <em>T2</em>’s rendition of the cyborg who is sent back through time to protect John Connor is heroic. And, just in case we can't follow the sub-text, <em>T2</em> spells it out for us in a voice-over by Sarah Connor. Watching the cyborg and her kid, Sarah says: "Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this <em>machine</em>, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."<br />
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In the film's Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the cauldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron and Hurd use a series of close-ups to create a beautiful portrait of <em>The Cyborg</em>. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/THqCKIFpGsI/AAAAAAAAAbk/eIzpX8TDdUA/s1600/terminator2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5510860204522674882" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-pyy02E1yE/THqCKIFpGsI/AAAAAAAAAbk/eIzpX8TDdUA/s400/terminator2.jpg" style="height: 400px; width: 303px;" /></a><br />
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But there is more. In <em>Terminator 2: Judgment Day</em>, James Cameron and Gayle Anne Hurd gave us our first glimpse of a new, still unformed technology that might replace the machine as the not-us adversary upon which we project our worst fears. Having united human and machine through the myth of the cyborg, having accepted the machine model of human intelligence and anatomy to the extent that we understood ourselves better as machines than as animals, having realized that we are evolving, not into angels but into machines, we have joined with <em>The Cyborg</em> to face the uncertain, and, because our paranoia stays one step ahead of us, always dangerous natural and supernatural worlds. The myth of the evil machine is dead. We are ready to confront, in myth and in art, the potential of bioengineering and of our own over-heated subconscious minds.<br />
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<br />Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-17177269069847032872016-05-22T20:59:00.000-04:002022-12-31T09:01:11.016-05:00BergmanTurner Classic Movies has Bergman on all night, beginning at 9:00 PM Eastern with <em>The Seventh Seal</em>, followed by <em>Wild Strawberries</em> and <em>Persona</em>.<br />
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The Criterion Collection is releasing <em>The Seventh Seal</em> on DVD in a couple of weeks.<br />
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<em>The Seventh Seal</em> is the first Bergman film I saw. I saw it at a foreign film theater just off-campus when I was a college freshman in Lubbock. They ran <em>And God Created Woman</em> a week later, and I was hooked on foreign films until the '80s when, for reasons I can't explain, except for the films of Tarkovsky and a couple of other directors, I lost interest in them. Maybe it was because my directors had died off or petered out.<br />
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I think of <em>Persona</em> and <em>Cries and Whispers </em>as Bergman's masterpieces, but <em>The Seventh Seal</em> was my first encounter with the collision of idealism and naturalism in film. To my romantic 18-year-old mind, the knight, Antonius Block, and Death were fascinating allegorical figures. They were in the natural world, but not of it. As I grew older, I was drawn more and more to the rich natural world of Bergman's films, but, in the beginning, like Block, I imagined a life of the intellect was superior to a life of the flesh.Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-19033947441231394942016-05-07T09:40:00.000-04:002022-12-28T13:31:26.612-05:00Waste Land (2010) Everybody Has To Serve SomebodyLucy Walker took some risks when she made <em>Waste Land. </em>There were physical risks <em>--</em> dengue fever and kidnapping -- and there were artistic risks, too, hazards in the landscape that could have tripped up an emerging talent, seriously damaging her reputation as a filmmaker. She had to make her way carefully, avoiding sentimentality on the one hand, cynicism and exploitation on the other. She played with scale, filming the landscape from a great distance, so that the <em>catadores</em>, working the garbage at Rio's Jardim Gramacho landfill, looked like ants, until, gradually, as she approached them, coming closer and closer, they were revealed as beautiful people. (But that could have gone the other way. Had she slipped, she might have filmed interesting patterns, moving across a colorful landscape, that, on close inspection, turned out to be grostesque. Walker had to trust her cinematographers -- Dudu Miranda, Heloisa Passos and Aaron Phillips -- and they delivered.) <br />
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Walker tried, unsuccessfully I think, to contrast the poverty of the catadores with the conspicuous wealth of Rio's south zone. Ironically, in a film that makes a point of the enormous gap, separating rich Brazilians from the poor <em>catadores</em> who dig through their waste for recyclables, the only rich people in the film are the artists and the collectors they serve. <em>Waste Land </em>starts out promisingly enough, with shots of <em>Carnaval</em> and a short montage that follows the costumes and other garbage from <em>Carnaval</em> as it's loaded into garbage trucks and hauled off to the landfill. But after that, to contrast rich and poor, Walker uses the artists, auctioneers and art collectors who move Vik Muniz's images of the <em>catadores</em> through <em>le monde</em>. That narrows the field considerably. (But don't you worry, Reader. Charles Ferguson's <em>Inside Job (2010)</em>, another Oscar contender, has enough rich people to go around.)<br />
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In a blog she wrote while she was making the film, Walker distances herself from <em>le monde</em>. She says Muniz describes Rio as St. Tropez, surrounded by Mogadishu. The "garbage-clad open sewer" <em>favela</em> her <em>catadores</em> live in is the worst in town. The landfill is the place where "posh rubbish from the south zone mixes with the cheap trash from the <i>favelas</i>."<br />
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"Evenings we return to the south zone, she writes. I sulk as I head to a delicious dinner in a bulletproof car, I'd rather be with the catadores than these billionaires moaning about the price of contemporary art. These are the people who are going to buy the art work that Vik is making in the garbage at our charity auction at Phillips. And these are the people whose garbage will be part of the piece. We're going to trace all these comings-and-goings of things."</blockquote>
Does she? Well, not quite, but if you've been around <em>le monde </em>a little, you can fill in the blanks. I remember wandering around the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston one afternoon and coming across a cocktail party in the sculpture garden. I asked the guard, a tall woman in a dark, blue suit: "What are they celebrating?" "Being so rich, I guess," she said.<br />
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All right. There always has been tension between artists and the patrons they serve. Why go to the dinner parties? Better yet, why not go and take a camera along? Even a little Flip would do. Or, best of all, why not broaden the scope of the film and give us a look at the life-style of the fat cats who live in the south zone? All of them, not just the collectors of art.<br />
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Walker does step in a hole now and then.<br />
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Nevertheless, when all is said and done, she comes through the Jardim Gramacho landfill and the making of <em>Waste Land</em> with her artistic limbs, her integrity, and her reputation intact. Lucy Walker is an increasingly important talent, and <em>Waste Land</em> is a timely and engrossing film. <br />
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Early in <em>Waste L</em>and, while Walker's crew is filming the <em>catadores</em> who separate recyclables from the garbage at Jardim Gramacho, a <em>catador, </em>noticing the cameras, calls out: "They're filming Animal Planet!" Walker includes the remark in the film to confront the issue of exploitation head on, but the <em>catador</em> could not have been more wrong. Nature films are pure direct cinema. Lions maul a baby elephant. The film makers don't interfere. They record the kill and move on. Walker is up to something else.<br />
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In a statement about <em>Waste Land</em>, Walker tells us documentary filmmakers can't help interfering with their subjects. "Your presence is changing everything," she says, "there's no mistaking it. And you have a responsibility." Walker tells us <em>Waste Land</em>, like all of her work, is about getting to know people who you do not normally meet in your life. She aims, she says, to create an opportunity for the audience to emotionally connect with the people on the screen. That's actually a pretty limited goal. In fact, she has done much more.<br />
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Walker and her collaborator, photographer Vik Muniz, have made a genuinely anti-Fascist film.<br />
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It is the intention of Fascist art, architecture and film to reduce individual human beings to insignificance, to make them feel small. (Visit the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., or watch Leni Riefenstahl's Fascist documentary <em>Triumph Of The Will</em> and you'll see what I mean.) Walker and Muniz have the opposite in mind. The footage of Vik Muniz flying into Rio to make portraits of the <em>catadores</em> out of the recyclables they collect at Jardim Gramacho is strikingly similar to Riefenstahl's footage of Adolf Hitler flying into Nuremberg for the 1934 Nazi Party Congress. (The similarity could be a coincidence, but Walker is a student of film as well as a maker of films, and my guess is that she -- on some level -- made that connection.) The intention of the Riefenstahl film is the glorification of Hitler and the Fascist Third Reich, while the intention of <em>Waste Land</em> is homage to the little "guy," to the working poor. If anything is glorified in <em>Waste La</em>nd, it is humanity.<br />
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Vik Muniz wanted to find out if he could change the lives of a group of people, using the same materials they dealt with every day. Muniz showed the <em>catadores</em> at Jardim Gramacho how to get big bucks for their recyclables by repackaging them as art. He put together a social experiment, and <em>Waste Land</em> documents that experiment. Unfortunately, the Pictures of Garbage (2008) series doesn't come through in the film. The process Muniz uses to create the work is complex and abstract. He photographs <em>catadores</em>, posing as figures in well-known works of art, <em>La Mort de Marat</em>, for example, then projects a giant image of the photographs on the floor. The <em>catadores </em>use recyclables to realize paintings -- collages really -- from the projected images, and Muniz photographs the <em>catadores</em>' "paintings" to make the final work of art. There are seven of them in the Pictures of Garbage series.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tdgn6uiIq2Y" title="YouTube video player" width="480"></iframe><em>Tiao as Marat Muniz Studios</em><br />
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(Oddly enough, "Pictures of Garbage" -- as a title -- is most interesting in English, where it picks up some real complexity from the play on the word "garbage." The pictures are of people, not garbage. And the materials used to paint them aren't garbage either. They're recyclables. The recyclables are used to outline and shade -- you might say they are where the people are not -- so the people seem to emerge from the materials, from what Muniz calls: the "garbage." All of that nuance appears to be lost in Portugese. I checked around, and I hear Brazilians never use the word <em>lixo</em> to refer to people. Muniz is lucky to be working in the U.S.A., a mean country that has the idioms it needs to adequately express it's meanness.)<br />
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It doesn't matter. The Pictures of Garbage series isn't about art anyway. It's about action.<br />
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And, if Muniz's images don't come through, Walker's do. And, for me, they deliver what Walker promised, an opportunity to emotionally connect with the people on the screen. Walker makes that connection in an exceptionally filmic way. I want to show you a segment of the film. It's a little long, but for anyone who wants to understand what direct cinema can be in the hands of a gifted filmmaker, it's worth seeing.<br />
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The situation is this. When Walker started filming <em>Waste Land</em>, she met a <em>catador</em>, Valter dos Santos, riding his bicycle, and, Walker says, right then she knew she had a film. She describes Valter as the landfill's elder statesman, recycling guru and resident bard. He's been working at Jardim Gramacho for 26 years. "It's not bad to be poor," Valter teaches. "It's bad to be rich at the height of fame with your morals a dirty shame."<br />
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Vik Muniz doesn't make a portrait of Valter, and, while Vik and young Tiao dos Santos, the charismatic president of the pickers co-op, are out on the art circuit, Valter is back at the landfill. Take a look. <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/puAme91v1JQ" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><em>Waste Land by Lucy Walker Almega Projects and O2 Films</em><br />
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That's how documentary filmmakers synthesize experience and make emotionally moving films. It's how a filmmaker like Lucy Walker can "just tell it like it is" and still take sides. (Walker dedicated <em>Waste Land</em> to Valter dos Santos.)<br />
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Look. We need more artists like Lucy Walker and Vik Muniz, artists who have the power to remind us of who we were, back when we had a sense of community.<br />
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And -- at the risk of sounding too nationalistic -- we need American filmmakers to give us a James Agee, Walker Evans look at America -- and, yes, a Lucy Walker look at America -- and at the sore -- to borrow an image from Agee -- the hard, flat, incurable sore of poverty that is spreading across America.<br />
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We need American filmmakers to point the steady, unafraid lenses of their cameras at the real face of America, and we need to have faith that something magnificent can come from the simple act of seeing one another as we really are.<br />
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After watching <em>Waste Land</em>, I realize that I have chosen not to see, too often I have chosen not to even look. I have chosen not to look, because, if I looked, I might have seen, and, seeing, I might have had to do something. I have chosen not to look, just as you, Reader, and you, Mr. President, and you Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen have chosen not to look. But my eyes are wide open now. Are yours?<br />
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Next week, <em>Inside Job (2010). </em><br />
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This has been a good year for documentary film. The five documentaries the Academy's mysterious nominating system picked are so good that I honestly can't say which one I'd vote for. Fortunately, I don't have to vote. The Academy, in its infinite wisdom, has not given me a vote, just as the universe has not given the ostrich the power of flight.Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-24601666853472619062015-12-08T11:40:00.000-05:002022-12-28T13:31:53.002-05:00Inside Job (2010)I wrote this five years ago, right after Charles Ferguson won his Academy Award. I think I have a pretty good idea now what Wall Street planned to package and sell next.<br />
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<em>Inside Job (2010)</em>, Charles Ferguson's exposé of the takeover of American government by greedy financiers, is full of information. It adds important details to the history of the worldwide financial disaster that triggered the Great Recession, and, even when Ferguson is being redundant, recounting facts that are generally well-known, he's entertaining. Sunday night, Ferguson won an Academy Award.<br />
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The question is: How relevant is the history of a ponzi scheme that caused a global financial disaster back in 2008 now that the folks <em>Inside Job</em> calls our "Wall Street government" have moved on to undermining civil liberties, torpedoing single-payer health insurance, busting unions and generally shredding the safety net we cobbled together during the Great Depression?<br />
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<em>Inside Job (2010) Economic Crisis Film LLC</em><br />
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Will Charles Ferguson's documentary film bring down the Wall Street government? Will it even break their stride?<br />
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I have no doubt that <em>Inside Job</em> will do what film and art are uniquely suited to do. It will change the way we look at the world. I don't think anyone who sees <em>Inside Job</em> will ever look at bankers and the finance industry, academia, our government, or the history of America over the last 30 years in the same way again.<br />
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<em>Inside Job</em> unfolds like a criminal trial as Ferguson carefully builds a case against the most prominent financial figures in America, many of whom are now in the Obama administration. By the end of the trial, the verdict of history -- or at least of the historian, Ferguson -- is clear. The finance industry and the government, on purpose, wrecked the world economy and destroyed millions of lives.<br />
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Ferguson's explanation of how subprime mortages were bundled as derivatives, called Collateralized Debt Obligations -- CDOs for short -- and sold in unregulated markets along with Credit Default Swaps -- insurance policies that paid off when borrowers defaulted on the subprime loans in a CDO -- is easy to follow. Because anyone could buy a Credit Default Swap against a CDO, whether they owned the CDO or not, firms like Goldman Sachs could sell CDOs and bet against them at the same time. AIG, the main writer of Credit Default Swaps, collapsed -- and got bailed out -- when it couldn't pay off on the Credit Default Swaps it had written. The financiers held on to the commissions and bonuses they made selling the CDOs and Credit Default Swaps, even after the bubble burst. The taxpayers held on to the dirty end of the stick.<br />
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Ferguson is a skillfull interviewer who balances skepticism with naiveté and knows how to follow up when he gets an opening. The big names in finance and government were smart to dodge his interviews. He is especially savage when he unmasks the academics -- the professors of economics and finance -- who sold out to the finance industry, covered up for crooks, and even invented economic theories to justify and defend Credit Default Swaps.<br />
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<em>Inside Job</em> is a film in the tradition of documentaries like Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly's <em>Harvest of Shame (1960)</em>. It combines interviews and narration with archival video and photographs to make a point. It's not particularly filmic, but the cinematography of Svetlana Cvetko and Kalyanee Mam is crisp and sophisticated. It fits the subject. The settings for the interviews are well chosen. A fast-moving montage of mansions, yachts, jets, drugs and whores -- but where were the male prostitutes? -- adds a dimension to the history of the meltdown that was missing from the Congressional hearings on C-SPAN. To his credit, Ferguson sees Wall Street's obsession with wealth and its use of drugs and prostitutes more as character issues than as moral ones. And he's not without humor. The irony of Eliot Spitzer being reluctant to use the personal vices of Wall Street underlings to force them to flip on their overlords is not lost on him, or on us. Equally ironic is the Bush administration's sacrifice of Lehman Brothers to "calm the markets," like Greeks, sacrificing to Poseidon to calm the seas. If <em>Inside Job</em> has a weakness, it's in the way Ferguson brings the pain of the financial crisis down to the individual level. Why interview workers in China when so many workers in the Midwest had lost their jobs?<br />
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<em>Inside Job</em> won the Academy Award for Best Documentary this year, but, in spite of Matt Damon's sappy reminder -- delivered as we gaze at the Statue of Liberty -- that "some things are worth fighting for," <em>Inside Job</em> may not accomplish as much as Ferguson hopes.<br />
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What we -- the survivors -- need now, instead of warnings and history, are tools. We need to know how to get on down this Cormac McCarthy kind of road, past the charred, asphalt-covered bodies of the refugees who died when the death ray caught them pushing shopping carts, burdened with their last belongings, along the interstate. We need stuff we can use.<br />
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And we need to know what the overlords -- the financiers who are, as Ferguson reminds us, still in power -- are going to do next. What will they package and sell to create the next bubble? Maybe we can get in on the ground floor.<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ub25WjEK0">A link to the complete film is here at YouTube.</a>Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-86943491878510689462015-12-06T09:46:00.000-05:002022-12-28T13:31:59.543-05:00Gasland (2010) Dick Cheney's LegacyEvery race has a dark horse, running at long odds. In this year's race for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, the dark horse may be <em>GasLand (2010)</em>, a film by Josh Fox that takes on almost everyone in the Oil and Gas Industry, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton over the use of "fracking" -- hydraulic fracturing -- to extract natural gas from vast deposits all over the United States.<br />
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While he was Vice President, Dick Cheney forced a bill through Congress that exempts fracking from the reporting requirements of the Clean Air and Water Act. The drillers don't have to tell the public what's in the fracking liquid they mix with water and shoot into gas deposits where it can seep into the water supply or return to the surface, either to evaporate or to be carried off and dumped. <br />
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Fox makes the case that fracking injects dangerous chemicals deep underground to break up rock and shale, releasing vast quantities of natural gas, while polluting the water supplies of homes and towns near the wells, which, if natural gas drilling proceeds as planned, will be just about every home and town in America. The industry denies the charge that fracking poisons the environment and the people and animals who depend on the environment for clean water.<br />
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Formally,<em> GasLand</em> is about as simple as documentary film gets. Maybe a Ken Burns special, cobbled together from old photos, with voice over and dramatic music, requires less of the film maker, but not much less. The subject of <em>GasLand</em> is Fox and his quest for information about what fracking is and what it is doing to people and the environment. We tag along, learning as we go. The form will be familiar to anyone who has seen <em>Supersize Me (2004)</em>, <em>Religulous (2008), </em>or any of Michael Moore's films. <em>GasLand</em> adheres closely to the form. We take a road trip, talk to people who have had their water poisoned by the frackers, see some drinking water catching fire right out of the tap, animals losing their fur, sick people describing their symptoms, big names in the oil and gas industry, including Boone Pickens, refusing to be interviewed, politicians ducking and obfuscating.<br />
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Fox has a personal stake in the issue. He owns 14 acres of unspoiled land in Pennsylvania -- his boyhood home -- that the gas industry is trying to lease for $100,000. Fox doesn't try to make the industry's offer into a will he lease or won't he lease cliff hanger. We find out he won't early in the film. The element of suspense in <em>GasLand</em> is situational. The issue of fracking is far from settled. Legislation to undo Cheney's exemption of natural gas drilling from the reporting requirements of the Clean Air and Water Act is still working its way through Congress, and Pennsylvania and New York are struggling with the problem of how to protect their water supplies from the frackers. All of that counts in <em>GasLand</em>'s favor. Timeliness is a plus for documentaries.<br />
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Fox is immensely likable. His rap is pleasant, his voice easy on the ears. Strangely enough -- and maybe it's the landscape he's traveling through -- he reminds me of Don Johnson in <em>A Boy And His Dog (1975)</em>. That Fox is able to conjure up an apocalyptic premonition of the future, using video of natural gas drillers at work in people's backyards and tap water catching fire, is a sign of his considerable talent. <br />
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Nevertheless,<em> GasLand</em> is a dark horse in the Oscar sweepstakes, because it's ahead of its time. To work as exposé, it has to make fracking relevant and build some outrage against the natural gas industry. Two of its competitors, <em>Inside Job</em> <em>(2010)</em> and <em>Restrepo (2010) </em>just have to tap into the outrage over the global financial meltdown and the war in Afghanistan that already exists.<br />
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<em>GasLand</em> is available on <a href="http://tinyurl.com/lphuh62">YouTube here</a>.Billy Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.com0