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| marantzo |
 Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 10:23 am |
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Joined: 30 Oct 2014
Posts: 278
Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
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Betsy, are they the dogs that I met? Very nice dogs. (Do you still bake your potatoes in the microwave?)  |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 11:40 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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I live in the Black Hills....you think I could spell "rein." Good catch, BW.
Betsy, I remember the story now, you talking about the crazed wheelchair guy. He sounds like a sad person. I am sure you rein in your dogs and are conscientious about it. We have a neighbor who lets their dog roam, and he likes to poop under my porch. But he is a sweet mutt, never barks, always stop and visits with us, so I have no issue with them. This town is pretty libertarian about things, the leash law is generally ignored and the dogs socialize with their packs happily.
Syd, I enjoy your reviews of art films, probably more than I would enjoy actually watching them. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 4:13 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3784
Location: AZ
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Funny you should mention reign, Billy. I have taken to calling my mini labradoodle Princess Charlotte.
Gary.. My dog with the loud bark is the pharaoh hound - great pyrennees mix. I don't think I had her when you were here. She doesn't like baked potatoes....
Bart....no wheelchair, just ptsd from Desert Storn and traumatic brain injury and a fondness for video cameras and detailed, inaccurate spreadsheets of dog barking. |
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Lost in my own private I dunno. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 6:00 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| For some reason, I want to write a poem or story with the phrase "detailed inaccurate spreadsheets of dog barking." It seems to sum up something about life in the digital age. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 6:53 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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| Gary, I don't ever remember a discussion here about My Winnipeg. I couldn't get past the first twenty minutes, which to me was a long, boring poem but with interesting, albeit repetitive, night winter cityscapes. Did I do right? |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 9:04 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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bartist wrote: I live in the Black Hills....you think I could spell "rein." Good catch, BW.
Betsy, I remember the story now, you talking about the crazed wheelchair guy. He sounds like a sad person. I am sure you rein in your dogs and are conscientious about it. We have a neighbor who lets their dog roam, and he likes to poop under my porch. But he is a sweet mutt, never barks, always stop and visits with us, so I have no issue with them. This town is pretty libertarian about things, the leash law is generally ignored and the dogs socialize with their packs happily.
Syd, I enjoy your reviews of art films, probably more than I would enjoy actually watching them.
Basically avoid the Electra, but maybe give the Oedipus a chance. Pasolini made several of these classics, including a Medea with Maria Callas. That sounds worth checking out. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 11:35 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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yambu wrote: Gary, I don't ever remember a discussion here about My Winnipeg. I couldn't get past the first twenty minutes, which to me was a long, boring poem but with interesting, albeit repetitive, night winter cityscapes. Did I do right?
My Winnipeg is great fun.
I hope you got past the set-up stuff with the train which serves as prologue/demented explanation. He decides to film his way out of Winnipeg! Then it goes on to replicate his family with dead dad rolled up in the living room carpet. That's where it picks up and gets wacky. I wasn't as enamored on re-watch, as it doesn't all cohere as well as it could. But its inventive and zany and an odd tribute to the city and his childhood. |
Last edited by gromit on Sun Dec 13, 2015 7:19 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| gromit |
| Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 3:27 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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Really enjoyed Rossellini's film Pascal. He made a whole series of historical films (some out on the Eclipse line), and I had watched The Taking of Power by Louis XIV a while back and didn't connect with that at all. Pascal is a somewhat somber film, full of philosophical thoughts, weird unhelpful medical treatments and religion. But it's really good at capturing a period and a way of thinking. Religion is very mixed in with the everyday. Medical science and science in general is grappling with things not understood. Even the theory of blood circulation is new and controversial. The nature of a vacuum and whether one can exist is tied up with God's creation and existence.
It really conveys the era and the groping towards enlightenment.
The specific details are really terrific.
I like when Pascal casually asserts that we do not understand the properties of light and posits that we never will. Or when superstition (removing all the water from a room so the sick person's soul doesn't drown!) is more benign than the medical treatments.
It's a slow film, rather talky, and not that much happens, but it really immerses the viewer into a bygone era.
Costumes are great -- most men are dressed either like pilgrims or the three musketeers. And much of the dialogue comes directly from Pascal's writings. Which is probably why his famous wager is presented in such formal and convoluted terms. There's also a interesting scene where Pascal listens to Descartes explain his approach to learning and Pascal responds with objections and an alternate approach. And Descartes says the objections are brilliant, but he had thought of most of them and rejected them, but will mull it over further. And their brief counterpoint is over. Interesting that it's all about the approach to learning and experience and not on any specific fact or theory. Sort of underscores how philosophy (and religion) were still bound up around science at this juncture.
Now I'll have to see if I can drum up the Descartes and Medici films ... |
Last edited by gromit on Tue May 19, 2015 12:12 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 9:11 am |
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Joined: 30 Oct 2014
Posts: 278
Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
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My Winnipeg is an excellent movie. When Maddin was asked to make the movie from the Winnipeg government (sort of), he asked if he could make it the way he wanted. They told him that he could make it any way he wanted, so he made it.
The movie was full of real things about Winnipeg and ridiculous things that never happened in Winnipeg. It was a lot of fun for me watching the wholesale and factory area that he filmed, with some people living on top of one of the buildings. Ridiculous of course. Our wholesale was in the picture. We had sold it by then. There was a scene that took place in the Hudson Bay Paddle Wheel restaurant. Marta (who really liked the movie) and I went to the Paddle Wheel after seeing the movie. We talked to a few of the people who worked there and none of them knew anything about the movie. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 11:12 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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Want to see "Pascal," but not sure if I can get hold of it (or Winnipeg o' my Heart) without getting the DVD mail service from Nflix. I'll look around for used copies. Maybe ebay.
Jon Favreau is solid in The Big Empty, which I had somehow missed when it released 12 years ago. There's a sly and clever sendup of the whole maguffin concept in film, a lot of desert weirdness (Sean Bean is a surreal evil cowboy UFO recruiter...and I've missed a few other adjectives that might apply, too), and some sleazy/fun romance. This is a good antidote to the Bad Maguffin incident I reported a couple weeks ago in The Bag Man. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Fri May 22, 2015 6:26 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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Watched Dragon Seed (1944), a Hollywood film about the WWII Japanese occupation of a rural Chinese valley. Wonder who thought to cast Katherine Hepburn as a headstrong Chinese peasant? She starts off severely deglamorized, with bangs and slanted eyes. But later she looks more like her usual self. I swear her eye shape and and angles change throughout the film. And she still has her clipped patrician voice. But on the whole this is a sort of gritty film for such a production.
The family members are well-delineated (except for the oldest brother). Walter Huston is very good as the wise earthy family-oriented father/village elder. The angry edgy youngest brother is interesting; as is Agnes Morehead as a nasty busybody relative, concerned only about her own survival (and maybe that of her lazy scholar-husband).
I liked the running joke/commentary about the stranger on the other side of the world who is farming "their" land, as their ownership surely continues all the way down. It's amusing and evolves from capitalist (ownership, he's a thief) to socialist (he is like me, we can share).
There are some gritty moments, such as when the Japanese come hunting the villagers and the 1st son's wife gives herself up to save her two children. It's pretty clear that the lecherous Japanese soldiers are going to rape her (they already talked leeringly of women), but even I was surprised that the family brings her back as a corpse. In a later scene, the head Japanese cook clearly has lecherous designs on Hepburn, ready to take advantage of her supposed hunger.
The Chinese are portrayed by big strong good-looking Westerners with minimal "yellow face," while the Japanese are depicted as small, and much more Asian. Of the three Japanese roles, only the one played by a whitey was listed in the credits, while the two Japanese actors don't make the credits -- a legacy of the war I assume.
The Chinese are largely brave and moral, with the exception of one relative who is a collaborator and another who is greedy/selfish, while the Japanese are uniformly sadistic and nasty. But the film does get at how occupation controls the lives of the peasants and confiscates the fruits of their labor. And changes the occupied into violating their moral codes, including killing and stealing, etc.
The film is a bit long at 2.5 hours. The one climax where Hepburn gives the Japs heartburn is a little clunky and melodramatic. And then oddly there are absolutely no repercussions or follow-up from killing off dozens of Japanese commanders and soldiers. I guess the film was getting overlong, but the film just cuts to a farming scene and the voice-over narration simply says that it got to be Spring. The title of the film is also kind of awkwardly squeezed in at the very end. You get the feeling that the original cut was even longer and the end got trimmed down significantly.
Overall, it's a good interesting film. There aren't that many films about the Japanese invasion and occupation of China, which predated WWII, and was intended partly to provide the Japanese with enough resources to carry out their war schemes.
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One interesting historical sidenote is that the heyday of Shanghai was rather shortlived. Mostly the 1920's when most major buildings and villas were built. The first Japanese attack occurred in 1932, followed by a truce, and then the Japanese took over in 1937. Though the foreign concessions - much of the city -- continued to be largely autonomous, having extra-territorial legal status. |
Last edited by gromit on Sat May 23, 2015 6:57 am; edited 1 time in total
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| bartist |
| Posted: Fri May 22, 2015 8:09 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| Watched Zombeavers, which is somewhat lesser a film than Dragon Seed. I believe the doting spirit of Ed Wood presided over the making of this micturition upon the art and craft of motion pictures. 3 chronically underdressed college girls, a remote lake cabin, 742 double-entendres (and really, sometimes they went straight for the single entendre) on the beaver-as-pudenda theme, and of course zombified beavers that are not content to prey merely upon trees and fellow aquatic creatures. The dialog and plot logic are sufficiently beyond all repair to render the film amusing and oddly absorbing. I liked it as much as Sharknado, and the implied homage to Schopenhauer was thought-provoking. Women are death. And death has nice boobs. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sat May 23, 2015 8:29 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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| Forgot to mention that Dragon Seed was based on a 1942 Pearl Buck novel. The Good Earth won her the 1932 Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a successful movie in 1937. No doubt MGM had that on their minds. Buck had also won the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature, and with WWII ongoing and the Chinese our ally/the Japanese our enemy, it probably looked like a perfect time to make and release Dragon Seed. If the film had been cut down to about 2 hours, I think it would have fared better. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sat May 23, 2015 4:29 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool is an interesting mix of fiction and documentary. In Chicago, a news cameraman falls for a single mom from West Virginia. Then towards the end, she is looking for her young son among the protest demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and walks among the ongoing police riot. The film has a bit of a loose 60's shagginess, trying to capture real life. I liked the boy who speaks his mind, and the scenes of the riots.
It's interesting to see some of the protest tactics. They chant a warning to the police "The whole world is watching!" When an NBC camera car is leaving, the demonstrators yell for them to stay and keep recording the confrontation, knowing full well the media affords them some protection from police brutality. I also liked the Sieg Heil chants directed at the police. And some of it felt eerily familiar, as the Army National Guard is on the streets with tanks and serious weaponry. Flash forward to Ferguson, MO ...
Some of the story behind the film is interesting, especially how Studs Terkel alerted Wexler to the Appalachian migrant community and provided entry to the black militants as well. Studs Terkel was like an honorary mayor of the underclass, was well-connected and trusted throughout Chicago. Wexler and his crew and actors couldn't get into the Convention Hall, until he ran into Warren Beatty, who pulled strings to get them in, as long as they shot a roll of film of Beatty in the convention hall, for possible use on a project he was considering. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sun May 24, 2015 7:23 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| How have I missed this? Was born near Chicago and Studs was intensely admired by our family. Thanks, I will add to my list. |
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