My Commute Home and Two Consecutive Days of Smiles

San Francisco is bereft of tourists these mid January days. This made for a near empty trolley car as I left work in the Fisherman's Wharf area. Nice. I buried my head in an Alan Furst novel -- high end junk writing pre WWII spy novels set in Europe fun stuff and a break from real history or Joyce or Pynchon or the like -- and listened to Eric Burdon and The Animals Greatest Hits on my iPod.

Then a Mexican chap sat in front of me. He'd slathered himself in aftershave and it was an odor much offensive for being so overdone. Happening to look back before getting off I noted that I'd been riding on the bald white man express. Several shaved heads glowed under the lights. Odd. Travel in bunches they do.

Walked purposely to BART and the subway ride back to East Bay. Here I was on the pretty blonde girl express. Much better. One with a slight and sexy overbite was draped all over a nattily attired lad. Two others were sisters and helped keep each other upright as they rode standing in mid packed train. A fourth sat sullenly glowering at whatever texts she was getting. There were also two older blondes. One was about 100 trying to appear 20. Bad move grandma. I'm blonde too but a guy so I don't count.

I stood reading about foreign correspondents in Prague just after the Nazi occupation. The writing is exceptional for spy stuff and historically accurate evocative of time and place. I read one helluva lot about Nazis both fictional and non and hate them to pieces. But lordy they make for good reading both fictional and non. Compelling if awful characters. Awww.

There was one grade A jerk on the train (not me!) who kept his backpack on and he seemed to be carrying a baby grand piano in it. Grandma blonde asked him to take it off and complained that it was hitting her and he paid no mind. I commented that he didn't care. He glared at me for a second but said nothing and did nothing. Kind of illustrated how civilized society can be. This guy is a real outlier in terms of commuters 95% of whom are considerate and when need be thoughtful.

Got home to the cat complaining loudly probably about the heater having been off or there being no lobster in her food dish. The mail was of no great interest and the wife wasn't home yet. I do hate coming home to an empty house. I was alone with my laptop and jazz on the stereo (Miles Davis Kind of Blue) for a good quarter hour before my beloved entered and again I smiled.

Lunch with the Boys and Other Fine Things

Had lunch with two workmates today.  Let's call them Ezekiel and Colfax (not their real names their real names are totally different like Ed and Bob or Sam and David or Roy and Cory -- ya know more ordinary.)

Sandwiches. Except Colfax had already had lunch so just had coffee and a roll though the place specializes in the most awesome sandwiches you've ever had on fresh sourdough so the coffee isn't so good as Colfax found out much to his dismay. See Colfax was just along for the ride the real intention of the lunch being me kind of paying Ezekiel back for a favor which I won't reveal but involves reading something of mine and making suggestions that will turn this something into a literally masterwork that will make me fabulously rich and famous and turn the literary world on its ear though come to think of it I don't know that the literary world has an ear. 

Did I mention the sandwiches? Really good. 

We talked.

They asked me about my time as a middle school teacher which I kind of look back on now as if it was time served though I did get paid so not so much like prison. Anyway prisons are more organized and structured than middle schools and deal in a nicer clientele. I'm just kidding -- no I'm not I'm being serious. Middle school is way worse than prison. Not really. 

As if.

We also talked about music which was cool because they're both musicians and Colfax (not his real name -- or is it? I could have just totally thrown you a curve. Just google Colfax Soil and see....gotchya) is even a professional and just works at the school because like a lot of artists he can't quite afford to quit his day job. I think that Ezekiel plays just for fun but I've heard him on the flute and he's good.

Miles Davis. Neil Young. Bill Evans. Freddie Mercury. Paul Simon (he's kind of dickish it was revealed). Were a few names that came up. Later a ribald story about Steven Tyler was told. He of Aerosmith and later American's Got Voice Talented Idols.

There was no talk of sports because Ezekiel and Colfax don't follow them. I found this pleasurable. Too many sports conversations do nothing. I find it increasingly difficult to have a discussion about sports that isn't lame uninteresting and just a regurgitation of what someone wrote on the internet. Or a recitation of numbers. Blah blah blah. 

So no sports.

Movies didn't really come up which was okay although I've had some pleasant discussions with both chaps about films before and doubtless will again. 

We did talk about girls because this is what guys do from puberty until they are buried or cremated. There is nothing wrong with this and so much that is normal. We are all three of us married and happily so.  Our states of marital bliss are no way effected by and in no way effect our desire to talk about females. Guys talk a lot and its harmless and fun and I've said that before.

We returned to school and taught more young people from across the globe to speak English. 

I later came home and watched last night's Downton Abbey with my missus. We had recorded it last night but not watched it owing to being tired from a fun weekend not that its' any of our business and shame on you for asking.

I listened to some Miles Davis and read about Diane Arbus and speculated on how wonderful it is to live in a world in which we have recordings of Davis playing trumpet and can look at Arbus' photographs and chuckle thinking about Monty Python or the Marx Brothers or even watch them. It's also a world with The Beatles, Ansel Adams, Woody Allen, Botticelli  and Hemingway -- how cool is that? -- and some really good sandwiches.

Enjoyed lunch and most of the last 24 hours. 

I am now smiling.

Not Seeing Ideas When They are All Around and Within and Not Even the Most Important Thing

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. - D. H. Lawrence.

A chap said to me that movies have to be about ideas.

Seriously.

I thought about the film I referenced in my last post, Elevator to the Gallows (1958). The scenes of Jeanne Moreau walking the streets of Paris at night with the strains of Miles Davis in the background. Was this a barren wasteland bereft of ideas? Or was this an example of cinema at its most beautiful with the perfection of mood?

Imagine dismissing the cello because it has no ideas. Imagine ignoring a scenic vista because it makes no intellectual argument. Imagine turning ones back on the ethereal beauty of Cocteau's La belle et la bête (1946) because it lacked a significant argument.

Intellectuals are right to seek new truths and strong statements in works of philosophy in novels and even in theater. But to disregard a film that is all about evoking emotion and touching our deeper self is to deny one of the great powers of art.

Hmmm watching a film as one reads a book with no spatial sense no angles but no effort to imagine. And to not feel? Quelle tristesse!

The movie in question was Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009). Of all the movies to assert has no ideas! A movie in which the director/writer makes a a revenge fantasy in order to promote a greater point -- as Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker put it -- "a larger point about the universal nature of heroism."

I offer this from David Bordwell co-proprietitor of the website Observations on Film Art: "nearly every scene is an interrogation. This entails that someone in authority (Landa, Aldo, Hitler, the Germans who question Archie’s accent in the tavern, Zoller) is trying to pry information out of someone else. Intimidation through interrogation gives every scene an urgent shape. Now Tarantino’s digressions (three daughters, rats and squirrels, a card game, the correct pronunciation of Italian) don’t read as self-indulgence, but rather as feints in a confidence game...." And this: "There is cinema that asks you to empathize with its characters. Then there is cinema that aims to thrill you with a cascade of vivid moments. There is How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Citizen Kane (1941). I think that Tarantino’s films mostly tilt to the vivid-moment pole, seeking to win us through their immediate verve, the way film noir and the musical and the action movie often do."

Tarantino is a fearless and manic film maker whose Pulp Fiction was not only one of the few bright spots of 90s cinema but set important trends in stylized post modern story telling. He subsequently lost his way with the overkill (no pun intended) of the Kill Bill films but the verve was back and then some with Inglourious Basterds. While not quite as poetic his latest -- Django Unchained -- is another fulfillment of a promise to make modern classics.

Of course there are ideas in Inglorious Basterds (not that we need them). Plenty. Questions are asked about our perceptions and uses of history and the audacious notion of re-writing it for artistic purposes. Ahh and revenge fulfillment as is also carried on in Django. Instead of robbing the hangman as Hitler did we see him blown to bits; just as Django blows away so many overseers. There is a visceral satisfaction there for those of us who've lived through endless renderings of the brutality of slavery and the holocaust. A curative. There are even moral questions and perforce intellectual ones asked by both films.

Tarantino's films are rich stews in dialogue tension action character and bravura style. It was said best in a comment left by Tudor Queen after my Django post -- he is sui generis.

As Camus said: "an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." Meanwhile we watch Tarantino. C'est Magnifique!

Four Films Four Million Messages and Then Some

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity. -- Herman Melville.

Visions I have seen. Now part of who I am. My conscious mind grappling with unconscious desires. The love of beauty and the beauty of love. I have seen....

Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows (1958). Louis Malle's first film a richly gorgeous noir though on a higher plain. With Moreau hauntingly stunning roaming the streets of Paris looking and wandering as the best laid plans go awry. The Miles Davis soundtrack accompanies her meanderings. Soulful. Is this a film about the impossibility of perfection? The mad way the muddled way of life disrupts our perfect dreams hopes wishes fantasies. Left grasping for what should have alit on our open palm.

Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940). Snappy slappy happy dialogue that positively sings. Oh it rings. Fast talk. Patter. And so smart. So many stories in one. There is the politics of it of course for one. But really the love between these two people. Their compatibility. How wonderfully wise they are and so damn street smart and sensitive to the rhythms of the world they embrace. Attuned is what they are. Gracefully savvy. They need want each other and together make more than a couple but a team as all great duos do. A team of ten twenty. Unbeatable even in loss but here they win.

That said mad woman in Vincere (2009) Ida Dressler captured by the oh wow! Giovanna Mezzogiorno. She believes herself to be the rightful wife and co parent of no one less than Mussolini (yeah that one).  Their passion early in the film is of the unbridled kind that films so often get all wrong but this is so right. Ms. Mezzogiorno plays Dressler as a driven crazy groping hungry sensual woman who takes stubborn determination to the nth degree and well well beyond. No quit all insanely self assured that her rightful place is right smack dab next to Il Duce. A story of how obsession in the face of reality can -- when bathed with love -- can end so badly. So sadly.

Passion of Anna (1969) from the singular Ingmar Bergman is of course about many peoples passions. How maddening it is to be trying to cope with all the complications life throws our way and then there is love and relationships mixed in. Oh my. Our isolation. It can be so easy to escape to within deep in ourselves and thus so easily avoid others and actually experiencing life through someone else's eyes for the brief moments possible. Never to know another view. Then someone is let into our world as we step into theirs and....There is the clutching passion. There is pulling back. There is confusion and remorse and its a wonder that thinking people can stay in a relationship. And here they are on an island where innocent animals are being butchered and one lonely man blamed and....But Bergman with cinema photographer Sven Nykvist tell it so beautifully.

Oh Heavens! That Gate's About to Bust

Happy

Used to be that New Year's Day was for being depressed and hungover watching bowl games in which teams I didn't like defeated teams I didn't care about. Yesterday I had a massive headache as if at least part of my body wanted to relive the old days. The rest of me was fine and not at all hungover owing to my being abstemious.  These days I generally eschew watching football except for the real kind they play in England and other parts of the world. And so today I watched my favorite British footballers, Arsenal, battle to a one all draw with Southampton. That was it for me and sports for the day.

I tittered at twitter. I body surfed the web and was sucked momentarily out to the sea of ennui that comes from idle interneting. I dabbled unsuccessfully at chores the best of which was planning the France/Italy trip the missus and I are taking in May. But a sizable chunk of my first day of 2013 was taken up by my first ever viewing of Heaven's Gate (1980). All three hours and thirty nine minutes of it.

I paused a few times to stretch my legs get a bite to eat and yell at the stupid cat who couldn't decide whether she wanted to be in the house or out stalking mice. During one of my earlier breaks I went to Amazon.com and added the new Criterion edition of Heaven's Gate to my wish list in hopes that I get it for my birthday (hints all around).

So yes. I liked it a lot.

Of course the film has a notorious history having brought down a studio and destroyed a brilliant young directing career. It cost a J.P. Morgan like fortune to make and critics were not initially wowed (in that they hated it) and audiences stayed away in droves. This is as much as I knew about Heaven's Gate for decades aside from Christopher Walken and Kris Kristofferson being in it and being set in the range wars of 1890s Wyoming. In recent months I have become increasingly aware that an increasing number of film enthusiasts have increasingly warmed to it and increasingly there have been those who have called it a masterpiece. Increase.

Much of the reassessment came after a director's cut release at the Venice and New York film festivals last Fall followed by the Criterion release two months ago. Of course Heaven's Gate's first  reviews were based on the butchered version then released to theaters. They were also negatively influenced by the stories of director Michael Cimino's wretched excess during production including astronomical cost overruns. To be charitable Cimino's behavior during filming was eccentric and uneconomical. Perhaps a more even handed assessment is that he went bat shit. But that's a story I'm not well enough versed in to detail. The book Final Cut by Steven Bach evidently details the whole story. Goddamn it I guess I need to read that book now too.

The Heaven's Gate I watched yesterday is in the great tradition of American historical fiction story telling. Epic. In its sweep and intent Heaven's Gate is as rich bawdy brash unapologetic and outsized and ambitious and bloody as America itself. There is an unflinching and focused eye on the very rough and tumble and murderous and ugly forming of the continental United States. It is also one of the most gorgeous films I've ever laid eyes on. Scenic backdrops like Glacier National Park in Montana have a little something to do with that.

Cimino likes grandeur. As his previous film  -- Deer Hunter (1978) which won the best picture Oscar and made him a hot enough property that he could call his own shots -- demonstrated he's not averse to long scenes of pomp circumstance and dance. One of his idols a fella by the name of John Ford also loved these types of long pauses in his action films but Cimino took them to a new level. Some feel these scenes are drawn out. Well not me.

I really liked pretty much every frame of Heaven's Gate. I loved the attention to detail the minimalist dialogue the well drawn characters and the manner in which the camera held certain shots just a tick longer than you'd expect. I loved the fearlessness of it. No bloody wonder it took a studio down with it. No wonder it was reviled and mocked and avoided. It ate itself. A victim of its director's excesses. How symbolic that a story of this nature detailing greed and unbridled hatred and perversions of justice would wreak so much havoc itself. Yet here it is over 30 years later and it is alive and well in a new form and is as vibrant and meaningful as the best of Ford and Tarantino. In fact I'd argue that there is a bit of Heaven's Gate in Tarantino's last two films (Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained -- if you don't know) but with less seriousness and more dialogue.

Heaven's Gate also features scenes at a Harvard graduation and on a yacht off Newport. It has a mean as bad whiskey Sam Waterston and a young Jeff Bridges and old Joseph Cotten and a luscious Isabelle Huppert and a perpetually drunk philosophizing John Hurt.

A

Master

Piece

Made for a New Year's Day well spent and the headache is gone and I really need to get to the gym and thank you for reading this far......Hug?

My Top Ten Films for 2012

1. L'enfant d'en haut (Meier)
2. Django Unchained (Tarantino)
3. Moonrise Kingdom (W. Anderson)
4. Gianni e le donne (DiGregorio)
5. Bernie (Linklater)
6. The Master (P. Anderson)
7. Lincoln (Spielberg)
8. Holy Motors (Carax)
9. Noordzee, Texas (Defurne)
10. Seven Psychopaths (McDonagh)

Honorable Mention: Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin); Argo (Affleck); The Deep Blue Sea (Davies); Generation P (Ginzburg); Any Day Now (Fine).

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)
Best Actress: Rachael Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea)
Best Supporting Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio (Django Unchained)
Best Supporting Actress: Edith Scob (Holy Motors)

L'enfant d'en haut -- released in the U.S. under the title "Sister" -- is my top film of 2012. You likely missed this gem as it quickly passed through a few select American theaters. It only played in Berkeley for a week. On the other hand there were months worth of Batmen Spidermen Ironmen and JamesBondmen. There is no underestimating the state of American culture. In any case look for Sister on DVD in the coming months enjoy and thank me later. It co stars the lovely Lea Seydoux who appeared in Midnight in Paris and had a small role in Inglorious Basterds. She features along with a young lad by the name of Kacey Mottet Klein. They are a very down on their luck duo (maybe brother and sister maybe not) living near a chichi ski resort in Switzerland. The boy supplies most of their income through common thievery and the young woman just wants to meet the right guy. It is a touching but never maudlin tale that Chaplin would have been proud to direct. However the director here was Ursula Meier directing only her second feature. Hopefully there will be more to come and hopefully they will enjoy wider releases in the U.S.

Dr. Tarantino Prescribes What Film Goers Need -- Django Unchained!

I do not have to post this. I can write whatever I want so long as it's true.

I frequently write just after bouncing back from a cold or even as now when still suffering the sniffles the soar throat the chills. The easy agony of a common cold. When I taught middle school I would average three or four a year. Now that I work with an adult population I get by with one or two. Hallelujah.

Achoo!

Slept let today not having to go into work. Later oldest daughter and I saw Django Unchained which you may have heard about. Director Quentin Tarantino is an acutely self aware film maker. He knows exactly what he's doing and what effect he wants. There is a comfortable self consciousness about his desire to push our buttons. He is a film lover who wants his films to be loved. He is in fact a director who constantly puts himself in the the mindset of the audience. But the good thing is that Tarantino is not trying to sell tickets -- just please those who purchase them. He doesn't pander or sell out his vision indeed his vision is as clear as crystal.

You sit down for a Tarantino movie and your going to get what he thinks is best. Dr. Tarantino has your prescription. Swallow whole.

Why are his films so violent? I don't know why is life so violent? You ever read a history book or check out the news? People be getting shot everyday all over the place sometimes in great numbers. Film violence is wonderfully unreal with the big fat benefit of no one actually dying. In fact cinematic violence is often an effective story telling device as long as it is used in the forwarding of telling a story and not as an entertainment end to itself. Tarantino tells the types of stories that call for shots to be fired people to keel over screaming in pain and for blood to spurt. Django Unchained would not have worked if Eric Rohmer had directed it. Just as Tarantino could not have done justice to Clair's Knee (1970).

Think about -- tell me I'm wrong.

One thing that struck me about Django Unchained was how closely the antebellum slavery it depicts resembled everything I've read and for 18 years taught about the peculiar institution. The treatment of the slaves the look of the plantation the attitudes the dress the manner. Credit to Tarantino for nailing all that. It was an ugly unpleasant and very violent world and would that there had been a whole mess of real Djangos to extract a little --nah, a LOT -- of revenge. Pow! Bullet in an overseer's gut.

Django is freed and ultimately hired by a bounty hunter (Christoph Walz) who teaches him the tricks of the trade and how to bloody well read to boot. Waltz is just the sort of mannered self conscious actor ideally suited for a Tarantino movie. Match made in film heaven. Kerry Washington is Django's ravishing wife whose freedom they seek to gain from a plantation owner played to perfection by Leonardo DiCaprio. Samuel L. Jackson is the embodiment of the loyal Uncle Tom House Nigger (as called by field slaves). A fawning sycophant whose got it far far far better than 97% of those in bondage and ain't about to rock no motherfuckin' boat. Whitey could count on his house slaves.

Django Unchained is a buddy picture. A revenge flick. A twisted slice of historical fiction. It is most of all a way of giving a cultural corrective to the horrible image of the beaten and submissive slave who had to watch from his knees as his woman was beaten or sold or both. I never sugar coated my teaching of slavery. It would have been a disservice to make this sad history anything other than the horror that it was. It also needed to be (and still does need be) taught as precisely and accurately as possible. Full of the cruelty rape duplicitousness savagery and stench of high hypocrisy. There is no pretty little ribbon to be put around the real story of American slavery. Stink. Stank. Stunk.

So let's have this film where we can at least play with the notion of one ex slave extracting some revenge. And how about this message: a freed black man "going back" for a woman. The woman he loves.

It is a story told with bravado with rich charters aplenty an eclectic soundtrack brilliant visuals and yes large dollops of blood.

And damned if it didn't make me completely my cold for two and half hours.

Achoo!

Office Christmas Parties!

Joy to the World and Especially to You Fanny and Alexander

We are all miracles. The odds against our being born are far greater than the odds against being elected president once we are born. We defy explanation. Passion. Love. Art. The music of Verdi. The paintings of Raphael. The poetry of Neruda. A long slow kiss. Fresh cherries. The films of Chaplin. Love. The overwhelming desire to be with someone to hold them to look into their eyes to be as one with another.

We interrupt our rapture for pain and insanity and cruelty and hatred sprinkled with terrifying moments when the entire world seems to be giving way from beneath. The pitch blackness that infects the mind and soul and leads us to sob or cringe or kill. Death -- not our own for that is easy. The death of those close to us. Their permanent departure from our lives. That void. How horribly final.

No wonder we are conflicted. A constant battle between joy and sorrow rages on within and about us. And it is always surrounded and often obscured by the mundane. Indeed we often cloak ourselves in the trivial (think of television) to find respite from the harder truths. And so we become numb. Awakening to one of the twin forces in times of clarity. Sure we deflect the awful but so often we fail to welcome the beautiful as if it were so great an effort to invite the wonders.

Miraculous.

And then there is the meaningful. The knowledge that abets our greatest hopes and worst fears (have you ever had the worst day of your life? Have you ever had your best? Do you reckon that more contenders for both will come along? Are you girded for the storm? Are you...). So often we confuse information for truth or understanding. Our brains collect trivia and we stamp ourselves smart then recoil at contradictions unable to break away from linear thinking.

As we aim to possess understanding it calls us weak and stupid and we shove it under a rug and tell more lies -- mostly to ourselves.

Celebrations. Why do I a non believer so love Christmas? I always have. As a child. As a teen. As a young adult. As a parent of children. Now as a parent of 20 somethings. It is -- you see -- colorful and different. Christmas comes with its own set of music and decor and lights and traditions and food and drinks and treats and of course gifts. Family feels so close. So secure. So loving.

Some will tell you that there is a war on Christmas. If so it has no chance. This entrenched holiday is everywhere for  a full month. The only blows it has suffered is the use of Happy Holidays in lieu of Merry Christmas and the elimination of a nativity scene or two. Christmas thrives because it is an economic force as well as cultural one. Xmas has barely suffered a few nicks and bruises.

Christmas also brings with its own set of films. (Please see the Christmas label on the right of this page for some of my past posts about Christmas movies.) A recent tradition for me this time of year is to watch the magnificent Ingmar Bergman opus Fanny & Alexander (1982). The full version as shown originally on Swedish TV. It is a rich sumptuous delight. The five plus hours (spread over two nights) spent with the Ekdahl family of whom the titular characters are two junior members flies by. How can it not with the rich cinematography of Sven Nykvist? Sets down to the tiniest prop that are brimming with beauty and color and evoke early 20th century Sweden.

Only the film's first hour takes place at Christmas and what a Christmas it is. Brimming with an amazing blend of tradition and spontaneity. Rich with food and gifts and fun. Downright sensual and ribald yet fit -- so very fit -- for a child. Here is life in full and the joys of family love and love of family. Here is the precursor of the troubles that are to come for out two young protagonists but the foreshadowing of their courage and their families devotion that will rescue them.

Amazing wonders and villains and strange heroes await the children. Steadfast are two uncles one a lout to his poor wife the other a loving if unfaithful husband who takes great huge gulps of life. Grandmother is so strong and wise and peaceful and kind. She even has a Jewish lover has had since before she was widowed. Wink. Wink. And mother. Widowed suddenly but a much older husband (whose ghosts regularly checks in with Alexander not the only apparition he will see). Mother beautiful loving but what a mistake she made in making the bishop her second husband. One of filmdom's great evil characters.

Fanny and Alexander is a wonder a miracle an amazing journey through all the darkness and light that life can throw our way with no wasted time on the plain the ordinary the mundane. Here in film is life in full. Huzzah!