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Monday, October 12th, 2009
I wanted to write a post tonight about Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which Sylvia and I watched last night and just loved; and I wanted to make the point right up front what a visual treat the movie is. Of course I went looking around the web for stills; and I found a lot of them, but none that quite communicates what a rollicking lot of fun it is to watch this movie... The one above is about the closest I could get. So you'll have to take it on faith I guess -- walking out of the movie you feel like you've been at a feast.
The movie is extremely clever -- there are a lot of the Pixar-style asides making jokes to the adults in the audience, they are very well-done: they made me laugh without hitting me over the head what was going on. And more, the jokes seemed true to the characters and situations. What was lacking in Up, I thought, was nuance; this movie has nuance and subtlety. It is able to make a standard-issue children's lit point -- about (in a nutshell) smart kids being ostracized and having trouble getting anywhere in life, but sticking to their dreams and eventually finding self-realization -- without slipping into after-school special sentimentality. It is, in addition to being tons of fun, moving and uplifting.
posted evening of October 12th, 2009: Respond
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 This is an evening of links! Today at Manosuelta's Weblog, I found some lovely pictures of paintings by Rogier van der Weyden, a Dutch artist whom I'd heard of before but never really looked at. Manosuelta is writing about a new exhibit of van der Weyden's work at the Musée de Leuven in Belgium (another review is at The Independent); I was very happy to turn to Google images and find troves of van der Weyden all over the web.
Besides the Magdalene to the right (who seems like a appropriate emblem for this site), I was really taken with this picture of Philippe de Croÿ, the right half of a diptych:
posted evening of October 12th, 2009: Respond
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 It was Harvey Pekar's 70th birthday last week -- I missed it -- Happy Birthday, Harvey! At MetaFilter, I find a link to his latest project, biweekly web comix at Smith Magazine's Pekar Project, working with four illustrators. Great stuff, go take a look. To celebrate his birthday, the site inaugurated a gallery of Harvey Heads drawn by different artists; also you can watch video of Pekar's February NYC appearance on the Josh McCutchen Show.
posted evening of October 12th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, October 10th, 2009
What a way to be introduced to a character! From Juan Goytisolo's La guardia:
Recuerdo muy bien la primera vez que lo vi. Estaba sentado en medio del patio, el torso desnudo y las palmas apoyadad en el suelo y reÃa silenciosamente. Al principio, creà que bostezaba o sufrÃa un tic o del mal de San Vito pero, al llevarme la mano a la frente y remusgar la vista, descubrà que tenÃa los ojos cerrados y reÃa con embeleso. ...
El muchacho se habÃa sentado encima de un hormiguero: las hormigas le subÃan por el pecho; las costillas, los brazos, la espalda; algunas se aventuraban entre las vedijas del pelo, paseaban por su cara, se metÃan en sus orejas. Su cuerpo bullÃa de puntos negros y permanecÃa silencioso, con los párpados bajos. 
I remember well the first time I saw him. He was sitting in the middle of the courtyard, his torso naked and his palms resting on the ground, laughing silently. At first, I thought he was yawning or he suffered from a tic or from St. Vitus' Dance; when I raised my hand to my forehead and cleared my view, I found he had his eyes closed and was laughing, in a trance. ...
The kid had sat himself down on top of an anthill: ants were crawling across his chest; his ribs, his arms, his back, some were venturing among his tangled hair, passing over his face, entering into his ears. His body swarmed with dots of black and he remained silent, his eyelids down.
Wow. This is a real trip to visualize -- I've been looking forward to reading this story of Goytisolo's, which is the last one in the book of Spanish-language stories I've ben reading for the past few weeks, especially since Badger recommended him to me as a major influence on Pamuk... I'm not understanding this story well enough yet to talk about it in the context of literary influence or parallels... but man! What a stunning image.
 Update: added a little context from the first paragraph.
posted afternoon of October 10th, 2009: 1 response
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Ellen and I went to see Comme Toujours Here I Stand last night, and had a good time. It is a fun show, though without being a masterpiece or a great work of art -- I may have gone in hoping a bit for a masterpiece based on the Cléo de 5 à 7 connection... What seemed to me like the big limitation of the show, what kept it from being great, was that although it was billed as a dance production, and the players were dancers, there was a lot of time spent on dialog, when they were not moving. The dialog was OK -- some of it was taken directly from the movie, some of it was funny twists on what was in the movie... but the players were not actors, and their delivery of dialog left a lot to be desired -- I would much rather be watching them move. The show's conceit was fun and self-referential -- rather than trying to do a straight remake of the movie, the narrative was of a group of film students or art students trying to create a work of art derivative from the movie. The woman who was playing Cléo was also supposed to be the director of the piece, and she was portrayed as a narcissistic prima donna, and there was a lot of broad humor about her being difficult to work with; I thought this worked pretty well, Ellen thought some of it got old. When they did shut up and dance, they were gorgeous -- and maybe the very best bit of the show was the interplay between the director's need to be in charge and the movement of the dance -- there were complex bits where she would criticize another player while they were dancing, stop, rewind, take 2... They could have pruned the dialog quite a bit and still gotten their storyline across, and there would have been room for a lot more dancing.
posted morning of October 10th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, October 4th, 2009
He notado que esas personas hablan con la mayor liviandad, sin tener en cuenta que hablar es también ser.I've noticed that these people [European colonists] speak with the greatest frivolity, without taking into account that to speak is also to be.
This line (from Walimai by Isabel Allende) is resonating, sticking in my mind as something deserving of further consideration. Not sure yet what to make of it...
posted evening of October 4th, 2009: Respond
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I've been poking around in Cuentos Españoles this weekend -- I got another similar book yesterday, Cuentos en Español (Penguin, 1999)* and the story that really caught my attention was La indiferencia de Eva, by Soledad Puértolas. The pace and rhythm of the story are almost perfect and I'm finding it easy to identify with her characters, to place myself in her scenes. I would like recommendations for further reading of her work, if any of you have read it -- she has several novels and collections of short stories, though I am finding nothing in translation.**
 * and apparently Penguin also published bilingual collections of Spanish stories in 1966 and 1972 -- I'm surprised at how much of this I am finding! ** This is wrong -- the novel Bordeaux has been translated; and at least Google Books thinks that one of her stories appears in the collection After Henry James, though I haven't been able to find any reference to this collection elsewhere.
posted evening of October 4th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, October third, 2009
Thanks to Mark for sending me this photo of Gazprom's headquarters in St. Petersburg -- this architectural monstrosity will be in my mind next time I pick up Inherent Vice:
posted morning of October third, 2009: Respond
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Friday, October second, 2009
(spoiler alert -- there is an argument to be made that this post contains information about Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window that would make watching the movie less enjoyable for someone who has not already seen it...)
The scene at the end of Rear Window where Stewart is fighting off Burr is really compelling for all the overall silliness of the movie -- there are things about the movie that just don't make sense. The impression you get is that Stewart is imagining things and is convincing people (women) to enter his hallucination just out of strength of character. So all movie long you have been sort of lulled into thinking it's a joke, then all that collapses in a few minutes, and you the viewer are pulled too into Stewart's hallucination. (Specifically your disbelief unravels in the scene where Kelly breaks into Burr's apartment. By the end of that scene you have forgotten any suspicion that somebody's joking around with you.) That really pulls me in to the fright and (literal) suspense in the characters' experience of the movie -- and then bang, the frame is colorful and bright again, it's back to a light comedy. The ending is probable the brightest, lightest scene in the film, and the relief/joy of being lifted back out of that paranoid moment of struggle is what the film leaves you with. Now I am watching a TCM documentary about The Thriller. Amusing stuff -- one line was that Grace Kelly is "more evidence that still waters run... weird..." If I want to stay up late, the midnight film is going to be Shadow of a Doubt!
↻...done
posted evening of October second, 2009: 4 responses
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Thursday, October first, 2009
More animation from Alexeïeff and Parker! I found a compilation of all their pinboard cartoons. The listing:
- 0:00 Night on bald mountain (1933) -- Just extraordinary. 7 years ahead of Walt Disney. Look at the metamorphosis about 1:40 in...
- 8:22 Parade des Sools (1936) -- Hats! and lots of 'em. (IMDB oddly has this piece listed as "Parade des Chapeaux" -- this accurately describes the piece but it is not the title.) Possibly Chapeaux Sools is a hat company, and this an advertisement for them?
- 9:38 Etoiles Nouvelles (1937) -- commercial for Davros Nouvelle Egyptian size cigarettes
- 11:04 Chants Populaires (1944) -- "Alouette" w/still image
- 11:42 En Passant (1943) -- bucolic scene, terrifying squirrels
- 13:04 Fumées (1952) -- smoke rings. Looks like a commercial for a brand of pipe tobacco called V.E.?
- 14:25 Les Rimes (1954) -- entertaining Brun Lune biscuit commercial
- 15:23 Pure Beauté (1954) -- soap commercial (Monsavon brand) / meditation on the female nude
- 16:25 La Sève de la Terre (1955) -- Esso commercial? -- totally psychedelic
- 18:26 Automation (1960) -- Renault commercial; boring/technically impressive
- 20:12 The Nose (1963)
- 31:33 Pictures at an Exhibition (1972) -- with a spoken introduction in English
- 42:25 Three Moods (1980)
I'm kind of taken with how Mussorgsky pieces bookend their career. It's interesting that all of their commercial pieces have titles and credits.
posted evening of October first, 2009: 1 response
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