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| marantzo |
 Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 5:37 pm |
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| What is the familial attachment? Are you related to Lauren Bacall? |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 8:33 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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LOL!
I would agree with the "SF was thin on the ground" rationale for Blade Runner devotion. If I were picking something for non-nerds, I might have to look to the little golden age in the late sixties, early seventies - La Jetee, 2001, Silent Running, Logan's Run, etc. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 8:58 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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Quick amendment: Annette Bening was indeed very fine in The Grifters, her first major movie role. She was also aces in her one-scene cameo in Postcards from the Edge in her non-cliched playing of an airheaded starlet. So I have misrepresented her resume. But I still think she was very overrated early in her career.
And forgot to mention my extreme admiration for the double meaning of the title In a Lonely Place--describing both the murder site and the Bogart character's soul. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 11:50 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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| Don't agree about her in Postcards. Have for some reason or other never seen The Grifters. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 12:48 pm |
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| You should see it. It is very good. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 1:12 pm |
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marantzo wrote: You should see it. It is very good.
Everyone should see it. It's a marvelous film. I own it and have seen it multiple times. It gets better with each viewing. Just incidentally, it has a great final fadeout, one of the best. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 6:19 pm |
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I saw a straight to video (in the US) movie on TV this afternoon. Free Money, Well it was free, that I'll give you. Now get this as the cast, Marlon Brando, Charlie Sheen, Thomas Haydon Church, Donald Sutherland, Mira Sorvino etc.
A dumb movie for sure, but fun to watch as all the characters are hillbilly stupid. This is how it is supposed to be. If you want to spend some time with a goofball movie, pick it up. The actors are having fun. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 8:23 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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Been watching a fair amount of Satyajit Ray, trying to catch up on a renowned director I was really behind on. Really liked his debut Pather Panchali which really mixes realism with a light lyrical touch at times. I really liked the way that new scenes would begin. And the Ravi Shankar music is brillaint throughout.
The middle film didn't really hold my interest that much. It was also the film in which I felt I was missing some key elements of the cultural mores at play. By the final film, when his son runs out of the gate away from him, I briefly worried he'd get run over or something, the way everyone related to Apu kept dropping off. The World of Apu had some nice scenes and some resonance back to the first film, but didn't cohere the way the first film did.
The Music Room (1958) is a pretty brilliant film about the traditional world passing and the modern world intruding. Loved the shot of the messenger on an elephant in the background while a lorry goes zipping past the on the dirt road. The music and dance scenes are pretty fantastic, even though I really had no reference point for them. I'm usually not too keen on slow films about an aristocrat slipping into poverty and decay. But this was really deftly handled. Reminded me of Bergman in a way. Worth getting a hold of. Recently put out by Criterion in a nice edition.
I guess that covers Ray's 50's output.
Now I need to unearth my copy of Abhijan (1962) and Charulata (The Lonely Wife) (1964). Ray pretty much put out a film per year during the 60's and 70's. So there's a whole lot to delve into -- and I have two other Artificial Eye sets here. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 10:38 am |
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| I saw The Music Room way back when, on the big screen. Loved it. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 10:50 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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My town has a significant subcontinental population and the library has several Ray titles. I've been ignoring them for too long.
As irritating as the Elba politics forum can be, I'm already missing it (server went crash this morning). Anyone here want to pretend to be a neo-con warthog named Dick? Looks like the SCOTUS might shoot down the individual mandate. Time to talk broccoli. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 1:40 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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My hometown has a sizable Indian population, and the one neighboring a little India downtown, which combined must be one of the largest Indian communities in the US. There's a large Hindu temple and an annual festival which draws Indians from all over America.
Quote: In the 2000 Census, 17.75% of Edison residents identified themselves as being Indian American, the highest percentage of Indian American people of any place in the United States with 1,000 or more residents identifying their ancestry
And since there is almost exactly 100K pop, that's 17,750 Indian-Americans in my hometown, and another 2,500 in the adjacent town
Quote: The racial makeup of the township was 44.10% (44,084) White, 43.19% (43,177) Asian; 7.05% (7,046) African American ...
A lot of Chinese and Korean in that Asian number. There was a Korean-American mayor a few years back. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 8:32 am |
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If the national ban on incandescent light bulbs is enforced there, it will just be so wrong.
Probably wasn't as much of a melting pot back when Tom was stringing tungsten. Well, I guess it didn't technically exist back then - Menlo Park, parts of other townships were assembled together in 1954.
I'd move there just on the hope of more affordable places to eat dal. Lincoln has two Indian restaurants and both are overpriced. That seems to be the local theory of food service: if there's only one or two of us, then we are exotic and can charge you more. Once a third one opens, then it starts to get more competitive. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 10:39 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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Yes, in Edison there is a whole range of Indian food -- fancy, buffet style, cafeteria/fast foodish, north and south Indian, fully vegetarian, etc.
Back in Thomas Alva's day it was farmland, and there were still a handful of small scattered farms when I grew up. Now it is hardcore suburbia. So much overdevelopment that my parents get up to 8 deer, a family or two of raccoons, even some wild turkeys coming to their backyard for food, since a good deal of their habitat is gone and now they cross some busy roads to get food. Kind of sad if you ask me.
There's an Edison light tower monument thing in the Menlo Park section of Edison. It has a small museum building with a few interesting gadgets. And the tower has speakers about 10 feet up going around it which pumps out patriotic music. Kind of amusing. High school kids used to get drunk in the woods/clearing behind the monument, but not my crowd. When we had nowhere to go, we'd drink beer and smoke dope and maybe toss around a frisbee on the golf course.
There is no national ban on incandescent light bulbs. There is an efficiency standard which they need to meet, which is being phased in slowly based on wattage. Incandescents just need to meet an efficiency standard. I believe a traditional incan light bulb converts electricity into around 90% heat and less than 10% light. The new standard is to produce a minimum of 30% light. Efficient incandescents can still be sold. There seems to be a market for incandescents, so I expect someone will produce efficient ones (I know a few companies were working on it). |
Last edited by gromit on Thu Mar 29, 2012 10:45 am; edited 1 time in total
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 10:41 am |
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Well Menlo Park is an affluent suburb and very close to San Francisco which is one of, if not the, most expensive city in the States. Might be hard to find an affordable Indian Restaurant.
After reading gromit's post, I guess you might find some affordable Indian restaurants in Edison. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 11:08 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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Menlo Park is a section of what is now Edison, NJ. As in the Wizard of Menlo Park. The place in Cali with the same name always seemed a little confusing to me. Primarily the name lives on today in Menlo Park Elementary School.
There's also a Nixon section of Edison, with the name primarily living on in a small strip mall called Nixon Plaza. That area was the site of Nixon Nitration Works disaster, where early style plastic -- flammable nitrate as in what the early films were made of -- blew up a large area. Pretty much destroyed the industrial town of Nixon and nearly set the Raritan Arsenal ablaze.
The Raritan Arsenal has long since been converted into an industrial park. But we used to joke that the Soviets would have old maps listing a big arsenal very close to NYC, and so Edison would be one of the early target sites for Russkie nukes. What's odd is that still today they find grenades and mortars and shells and whatnot -- things they get pushed to the surface by tree roots or erosion or whatever. About every ten years some old WWII or earlier bombs are found there.
NJ was one of the early sites for industrialization, and lots of sites are horribly polluted form back in the days when chemical companies would just bury drums of toxic crap on their property. NJ has strict environmental laws, and all property transactions have to be carefully vetted, because the law is that the new owner is fully responsible for any needed environmental cleanup. You can get indemnified by the previous owners, but usually the cause of the pollution traces back to some paint factory or battery factory or whathaveyou that went out of business in the '50's. So there's extra legal costs and time involved in buying property in NJ.
An interesting sidelight to the Nixon Nitrate Kablooey is that part of what exploded so well was explosives salvaged from WWI shells.
The guy who was doing it seems like a real wild character.
Quote: Charles A. Levine earned a fortune as a result of his companies' contracts with the federal government to salvage shells.[23] In 1927, he financed an effort to become the first to fly from New York to Paris, only to have Charles A. Lindbergh reach Paris first while Levine's plane was grounded by a restraining order obtained by the navigator he had employed.[23] Levine dissolved the injunction, freed the plane, and became the first transcontinental air passenger, reaching Germany from New York in a flight two weeks following Lindbergh's.[23] Meanwhile, the federal government sued Levine's companies, claiming overcharges for their salvage work.[24] Many lawsuits and prosecutions of Levine and his companies followed, including prosecutions for counterfeiting French coins,[25] conspiring to smuggle Tungsten powder from Canada, and smuggling an alien refugee from a German concentration camp into the United States from Mexico.[23] |
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