Lonely movies

Well, the weather was warm enough to go outside for a few days inbetween last week's snow storm and this one. Not too many movies. Or at least movies that I'll admit to watching. I need a movie muse. Perhaps a new name. Bosley, can you help?

Well, Bart, I'm dead, but I'll try. How about that nice movie reviewer the New Yorker had, Pauline somebody? She never liked me, but now that we're both dead I can forgive her. Take her name. Pauline Bart has a nice ring.

It does, Bosley, but it's already taken. She's a real person and a real doctor. A professor at UCLA.

You don't mean . . . ?

Yes, I do, Bosley. Her web page has listings from her students addressing her as Dr. Bart.

Wow, I bet your mother would like to see that. You probably have it bookmarked just to see your name next to Dr.

No.

Bart, did you get excited when Bart Bryant almost beat Tiger Woods last week or when you heard the mother on 6 Feet Under refer to her church as "St. Bart's"?

No. Maybe.

Did having a name that rhymes with so many lovely playground words make you a stronger person?

Stronger than what, Bosley?

I'm not sure. But what about Bart Starr? He's probably old hat as is Bart Maverick. What about that cartoon kid?

Him? He's a brat.

What about a movie review?

I still need a name, Bosley.

Bart, take mine.

OK, first on the docket:

Chalk-- a silly satire on high school teachers and using hand-held cameras that should be banned except by real independent movie makers like Charles Burnett.

Next:

My Brother's Wedding-- a very serious, funny, and loving portrait of an individual, a family, a neighborhood; directed by Charles Burnett of Killer of Sheep fame and a grad of UCLA where DR. Bart teaches (thanks to Tish for recommending that movie). It doesn't look like a hand held camera like Killer of Sheep, but it is definitely handmade. Great use of non-professional actors. There's gotta be an extra prize for any movie that gets made even after the main actor takes off for a year and can't be found until someone spots him preaching in New Orleans. Also, Burnett used leftover film from the MGM studio which should qualify him for a negative carbon tax as well as endear him to vegan fans. No Country For Old Men had a box at the end that said the movie was made with a neutral carbon footprint. The Coens could have posted an ad about having a negative footprint if they hadn't made the movie at all. Or they could take lessons from Charles Burnett. I'd rather watch movies like his than much of the Hollywood shlock that makes money for somebody.

Burnett has a great sense of telling the day in and day out story of living regardless of race. But, one scene would have only worked in a movie about inner-city African Americans. There's a black lawn jockey statue in the front yard of one of the neighbors. There was a movement at one time to paint them white so they wouldn't be offensive. But then most of us learned that the first Kentucky Derby jockeys were black and that there is a legend that they were used for signals on the Underground Railroad. So now black lawn jockeys on black lawns aren't so offensive. But not on my yard, probably. Of course, I'm not black. But I know some black people.

What might have been offensive if it had been in almost any other movie was a line spoken by the fiance and the brother. She says to her fiancee about his brother who keeps insulting her, "Is he retarded?" Her fiancee responds, "No, just ghettoized." It needs to be seen in context possibly like Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Obama fame. And I need to figure out the difference between fiance and fiancee. But I did manage to get the Burnett and Wright name mentioned in the same e-mail.

Next:

La Vie en Rose--

the Little Sparrow, Edith Piaf. Beautiful voice in her recordings and a beautiful voice by the singer who dubs in most of the singing in the movie. Also, great acting by Marion Cottilard who lip-synched like a genius.

I've loved Piaf's music for years, but had no idea she had a life that rivaled Johnny Cash and Ray Charles put together. Sad movie. Worth watching. You can see the real Edith on YouTube.

Last and keeping in the French theme (speaking of French, there is a powerful book called The Last of the Just by Andre Schwarz-Bart which I only mention because the author's name somehow reminds me of DR. Bart):

Amelie--

Lovely, funny, creative, maybe 30 minutes too long, kind of like my e-mails. Otherwise, well worth watching for a retelling of the Abraham/Eliezer story in Genesis. No, seriously, Amelie is a wanna-be shadchan/messiah who tries to make the world a better place and gets to learn about her own salvation in the process.

The movie is on a lot of people's lists of movies that changed their life. What's on your list?

There's a scene in Amelie of a television show featuring Sister Rosetta Tharpe. You can see the whole performance on YouTube. Sister Rosetta Tharpe will change anyone's life which is kind of a typical middle-class white person statement. Very funny blog at StuffWhitePeopleLike.wordpress.com which I found by searching for "So you want to be loved for yourself, like the poor people? What's left for the poor people, then?" which I found at the end of a post on IMDb about Amelie and seemed to sum up the main character in My Brother's Wedding.

Another post on the Amelie IMDb site pointed out a controversy that came out after the movie was made. A French writer criticized it for pretending to show Paris as it is but having no black characters. The director defended himself by saying that that the actor who plays the simple-minded but saintly grocery clerk is of North African descent (hard to tell) and that some of the posters used as scenery had black people pictured.

I think the director should have kept his mouth shut.

OK, I'm signing off now, Bosley.

Ok, Bart. Dare I say DR. Bart?

Sure.

Here's a translation of one of Edith Piaf's songs, translated thanks to the miracle of Babel Translator service.

Edith Sparrow

Padam Padam

This air which obsesses me day and night
This air was not born from today
It comes from also far as I come
Trailed per a hundred and thousand musicians
One day this air will return to me insane
Hundred times I wanted to say why
But it cut me off the word
It speaks always in front of me
And its voice covers my voice
Padam... padam... padam...
It arrives while running behind me
Padam... padam... padam...
It makes me remember the blow of
Padam... padam... padam...
It is an air which shows me a finger
And it trails after me like a funny error
This air which knows all by heart

It says: "Remembers your loves
Remember since it is your turn
' there does not have reason so that you do not cry
With your memories on the arms... "
And me I re-examine those which remain
My twenty years make the drum beat
I see entrebattre gestures
All the comedy of the loves
On this air which always goes

Padam... padam... padam...
"I love you" of fourteen-July
Padam... padam... padam...
"always" that one buys with the reduction
Padam... padam... padam...
"you" in here are per packages want
And all that to fall right to the corner from the street
On the air which recognized me

...
Listen to the uproar that it makes me

...
As if all my past ravelled

...
Is necessary to keep sorrow for afterwards
I have a whole musical theory of it on this air which beats...
Who beats like a wood heart...

The Frisco Kid

We lost a pet cat when the boys were much younger. She had eaten a plant that poisoned her. We buried her in the backyard among the trees and wildflowers. Thankfully it wasn't winter time. Trying to bury a pet in Minnesota in the winter is a challenge. We lost a hamster a number of years ago in December. Explaining to young children about dead pets is hard. We wanted to provide a burial but the ground was too frozen for even a hamster-sized hole. So we did what everyone else does in Minnesota: We put him in a little box and put the box in the freezer. Of course, this meant that for the next four months, on a daily basis, one or the other of the boys would take out the box and try to revive little Hammie.

We had a favorite children's book when the boys were young (er), Blumpoe the Grumpoe Meets Arnold the Cat by Jean Davies Okimoto. Currently out-of-print (again, after being reissued several years ago, but available on ebay). Sweet and very funny story about a grumpy man who checks into a hotel which has cats that stay with the guests. Blumpoe gets Arnold for the night. By the morning, he isn't grumpy anymore.

Sadly, the hotel is real and so are the cats. It's the Anderson House in Wabasha, MN, and just a few hours drive from St. Paul. So, of course, we took the boys, 5 and 7, on a trip to Wabasha with the book in hand and cats in our hearts. We checked in happily. The next day the parents checked out grumpy. The boys were ecstatic. They didn't care that no one got any sleep. One room, two cats, two boys, two parents. You do the math. Linda and I looked at each other and said "never again." So, the next year the boys and I went back. Linda had to work. Also, she had better sense. One room again, two cats, two boys, one parent. Ok, they loved it. But this time I found that one feature that historic hotels have: A bathroom down the hallway with a big clawfoot tub. A pillow and a blanket and sleepy time.

Bart, it sounds awful for you.

Yes, but not as awful as what I recently found out about a favorite movie, The Frisco Kid with Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford.

I saw it again last week, as it's on my life list of movies to see once a year and wanted to see it since I had brought up Gene Wilder with the Bonnie and Clyde connection.

Let's not go there again, Bart. It's a sore subject.
Ok, Bosley.

The Frisco Kid is a sweet and very funny movie (just like the Blumpoe the Grumpoe book). Gene Wilder plays the klutsy rabbi in what becomes, among other things, a buddy movie with Harrison Ford. The two actually have a romp on the beach with each other in their long underwear. Nice to see that two men can touch each other in the movies without it being a sex thing. Unlike Cagney and Lacey a few years later on TV who were never allowed to touch each other. The network even replaced an earlier actress for the Cagney role because she was seen as too "lesbian." Meg Foster, whose filmography shows that she played Hester Prynne in a TV series of Scarlet Letter. I wonder if she was too strong for the later movie role that Demi Moore got and totally ruined. What a disgusting movie! The book is amazing. The movie made Hester into a weak panderer, the opposite of what Hawthorne intended.

Bart, you're losing me again. What was so awful about The Frisco Kid?

Pauline Kael.

No, not her again.

Yes, Bosley.
Hold on.
She once said that the difference between casting for the stage and casting for the big screen is that we can imagine someone else playing a stage role. It is harder to imagine someone else in the role being played on screen. The awful thing about The Frisco Kid is that I read on the IMDb that the producers did imagine someone else playing Harrison Ford's role and while I don't mind that person in his own movies I don't want to imagine the possibility of him playing next to sweet, funny, innocent, pure Willy Wonka.

Bart, you don't mean . . .

Yes, I do. Sorry. The producers originally tried to get John Wayne.

Horrors! By the way, what's the big deal about typing a capital T for The Frisco Kid?

James Cagney already had a Frisco Kid movie and the The is like that New York State winery a number of years ago that tried to appear as classy as Champagne which is fermented a second time in the bottle it is sold in. The label on the New York wine said "fermented in the bottle" but what they did was to ferment it in a big bottle and then rebottle it into the bottle it got sold in. The Frisco Kid is playing a joke on us. Pretty tricky.

Horrors! But I think you're the only one who thinks it's a joke.

Beloved and Killer of Sheep

Beloved and Killer of Sheep came in the mail at the same time. I had not thought there was such a strong connection, but watching Beloved first and then Killers of Sheep gave me a sense of a post-slavery experience immediately after the Civil War and then one hundred years later.

Beloved is powerful, both the book and the movie which I had seen when it first came out and shortly after reading the book. I wanted to see the movie again when the boys were assigned Huckleberry Finn in school and I found out that Toni Morrison intended a connection between her book and Twain's. Rereading the book is a better way to see the connection but the movie still remains something to see again.

Jonathan Demme, who gave us Swimming to Cambodia with Spaulding Gray which I loved and Caged Heat which is on my life list of movies never to watch, directed. He opens and closes with the same bookending method that John Ford used effectively in The Searchers. The framing of the headstone with the one word, Beloved, is dramatic. The movie doesn't explain what the book does, which is that Sethe, the mother (Oprah Winfrey), wanted to inscribe Dearly Beloved but only had time for one word. Interestingly, the cable TV show, 6 Feet Under, uses a similar headstone in one of its openings.

Watching this again, I was deeply struck by how people's actions can change through the power of grace, love, and compassion. Watch the townspeople throughout the movie and how they look at the house where Sethe lives. Then later, as the house and residents become more and more possessed, the townspeople start looking inward at their own imperfections. They start responding with gifts of food and kindness and end with The Thirty Women using massive amounts of prayer as a way to bring comfort and healing to Sethe. (look for Irma P. Hall; she's always great) I am still overwhelmed at the power of that sequence of scenes.

I loved Thandie Newton's performance as the title character. Her acting got trashed in the reviews but I think it needs to be looked at in the same stream of consciousness way with which Morrison wrote the book. As disturbing and mesmerizing as she is it is not as disturbing as her decision to act opposite three Eddie Murphy's at once in Norbit. That's on my life list to never see again.

Grace, love, and compassion enter as the translation in a morning prayer and really does describe for me what happens in the movie. The initials also happen to be the same as the model of the Mazda car that Linda owned when we first met and which we drove to Alaska on our honeymoon. It was a great little car which I think is what Mazda intended the initials to stand for. They're also the initials for godless, liberal communism which was getting a very funny reception at our Thanksgiving weekend last year.

Killer of Sheep takes place over a hundred years after Beloved. It is post-slavery, 1973 Watts. It's equally powerful but harder to watch as most of it was shot with a hand-held camera which, at my age, is like riding a rickety roller coaster. Not nearly as bad as the excremental Blair Witch Project but still too much for a second viewing right away which it needs to really appreciate. There is a wonderful sense of humanity that the director, Charles Burnett, draws from the scenes. At the beginning, it seems almost like the utter slowness of the movie is meant to portray the utter lack of humanity but I think that the difficult-to-watch scenes in the slaughterhouse and around the railroad tracks are meant to show how humanity perseveres. Also, the beautiful scene of the husband and wife dancing.

In one of the bonus shorts that Burnett made several years later, and which is included in the DVD, a character says that African Americans have survived slavery and discrimination and they will survive whatever else comes their way. That seems to be one thing that Killer of Sheep is saying but which could include any group of people whose lives are defined by extreme poverty and drudgery yet manage to find humanity in it.

There's a scene that only a nutcase like me could write an essay about so I will. The teenage son, or maybe preteen, is eating breakfast. I happened to watch this the same week as National Eat Breakfast Week which in the public schools means green eggs and turkey ham served for breakfast because it's also T. Geisel's birthday. Since my school is 95% free and reduced lunch everybody gets a free breakfast. Not everybody eats the green eggs. Yuck.

The teenager in the movie is pouring his second (at least) helping of frosted cereal. Not terribly bad given that some kids are eating that for dinner. But what happens next is horrific. He opens a box of Domino's sugar, the kind with the metal spout that you pull out. I went back and timed how long he poured out the sugar. It was almost two cups. Then he starts eating.

It is not too much of a stretch to connect nutrition to poverty. Wow, Bart, I never would have thought of that. Well, you should because I'm not going to write anymore about it. What I will write about is the Mom and Pop connection with Beloved and Killer of Sheep.

The daughter in Beloved talks about wanting to go to o'BERLIN College and the director of Killer of Sheep is named Burnett. Now what more reason could you need to watch them back to back?

Bart, are you OK?

Mishmash messiahs

Well, it's been awhile. You might think I had been doing something productive. You might think I had been reading a book or interacting with live people. You might be wrong.

Hah! Linda told me to buy a laptop while she was skiing in Colorado with a friend (she said later that she was joking). I've been busy ever since. Also reading and interacting, but mostly watching truly intelligent movies. The kind men can watch when their better half is out of town. "Better half" as in "better sense." Some of these guy movies just aren't for all guys.

I went to the theater with the husband of the friend who went skiing with Linda. We saw No Country for Old Men since it had "men" in the title which meant it was for us men. I might have to start watching Jane Austen movies on PBS if this is what I have to sit through as a man. Overly predicatable especially towards the end when foreshadowing really doesn't make much sense, too much of an attempt to upstage Bonnie and Clyde and have it thought of as an art film, not enough of the story that Tommy Lee Jones was trying to tell his wife but which kept getting kicked to the ground and covered up with blood. I didn't mind that the ending didn't bring anything to a conclusion since the Coen Brothers make that almost their trademark (and way too predictable; maybe they could try experimenting with reality and really scare the audience); I did mind that the movie couldn't get me to really care about most of the characters which is one reason I want to spend an evening with them.

At least Bonnie and Clyde gave us Gene Wilder.

Bonnie and Clyde is the movie that Pauline Kael praised and with which she started her lengthy career on The New Yorker (and her long friendship with Warren Beatty). It's also the movie that Bosley Caruthers did not praise and which began the end to his long career as the New York Times movie reviewer. Too bad since he did so much in the 40's and 50's to advocate for quality movie making and less control by the big studios. Kael's main defense of Bonnie and Clyde seems to be her lengthy claim opposing the view that people would be influenced by the movie's violence and try to imitate it. She made that claim, however, before computer games came out and made masses of educated mothers and cousins waste their lives on solitaire.

Speaking of mothers, we saw Keeping Mum. Very funny, clever, creative, and deadly in a much better way than Bonnie and Clyde or the sicko in NCFOM. A wonderful Maggie Smith (who upstaged Laurence Olivier in Othello 40 years earlier; Olivier said he wouldn't work with her again since she out-acted him), Rowan Atkinson showing he can really act, and a great and very scary Patrick Swayzy (scary because Dirty Dancing was a long 20 years ago).

Then I started an unintentional but delightful series of messianic mad men and child-like cavorters.

First, Milky Way directed by Jean Brunel, a Spanish surrealist and inspiration to the Monty Python gang. Made in 1969, it's about two pilgrims who set off to a shrine and meet all sorts of characters, from Hosea to Jesus to Marquis de Sade. Obviously shot on a very low budget, but very independent and thought-inducing. Well worth the time. Brunel hated the Catholic church so much that Orson Welles said that Brunel made such spiritual movies that if Brunel was an atheist then the church couldn't want a better friend. Watch the special features first or after in order to understand what all the symbols mean. When it first came out, background leaflets were handed out.

Then I watched Help mostly by myself. Alan started it with me then left. We had all gone to the theaters last year to see Across the Universe which was very good and the boys play that damned Be-a-tle music so much it's like living in the 60's so I thought they might like Help. They thought I might need help. Well, it was fun but not as much as I remember when I first saw it at the Druid Theater in Damascus (an odd name for a theater in a solidly red-neck town, segregated by race and class and length of hair on teenage boys; remember the white's-only swimming pool that we belonged to so Dad could have a vote in breaking the segregation? I don't remember actually swimming there but did hang out at the sign, smoking and joking).

Help does have the messianic story line about the search for the ring that's needed for the sacrifice. Great line at the beginning by the High Priest who realizes that without the ring there can be no sacrifice and without sacrifice there is no need for a priest which then would put him out of a job. There's also a scene of a character coming out of a Utility Hole with its cover on his head which faithful readers will recall had a significant part in Enchanted but may have been, in the pre-globalization 60's England-age, union made as opposed to the 33% chance that the Enchanted NYC Utility Hole covers weren't even fair trade.

Since I do actually read real books, I happened to recently come across a poem by Karl Shapiro entitled, Manhole Cover, which I will try to include it if I can find it online which will mean I won't have to type it.

Third in line for the messianic movies and crossing over into child-like cavorting was The Red Balloon. It's not available on Blockbuster but is on Netflix along with a full-length re-make with Juilette Binoche who faithful readers will recall should have won the Oscar for her role in the English Patient but, instead, went to Frances McDormand in Fargo for doing half the work Binoche did and which I'm not really still burned about. You can rent Red Balloon on the free trial period from Netflix and then switch back over to BB so I can get the commission from BB for having the right initials.

I happen to have a VHS copy of the 1956 Red Balloon (long-distance kiss to anyone who sends in the connection between Red Balloon and Juno; double kiss to anyone who sends in their stripper name; according to Jon Stewart, mine is Persia Saint Paul.

I showed The Red Balloon to my class after we read the book. They loved both. That's a lot to say considering I had 8 kids with low-to-medium functioning autism glued to a book and movie that is pretty complex but not action-oriented in the Disney sense. They got everything: the boy's loneliness, the bus conductor's rule, the principal's strictness (time outs in a locked office?), the love story with the blue balloon, and especially the bullies. Wow, the ending is incredible to watch and to watch the response of children who could easily get bullied when they see someone they can identify with experience salvation from a gang of bullies. We watched it again the next day.

Anybody play Risk? A triple kiss for the connection between The Red Balloon and Risk.

The next movie blurred the line between messianism and child's play. Up the Down Staircase. I had read the book as a teenager and Mom sent me a copy several years ago. It has always left a powerful impression on my sense of history as a teacher. Sandy Dennis plays the teacher, Sylvia. Jean Stapleton, of All In the Family fame, is wonderful as the secretary. The movie was filmed in a NYC high school in the summer and used many of the neighborhood teenagers as extras. Great way to get a feel for teaching in that time. A very funny, almost jarring moment was when Sandy Dennis puts paper in a trash can. Wow, I haven't seen a teacher do that in 20 years.

Interesting choice of first name for the main character. Sylvia Ashton-Warner was a very influential teacher from New Zealand who was teaching about the same time. She wrote a book called Teacher and had a movie about her called Sylvia. I used to have the book and remember seeing the movie years ago. I think both may have been what got me thinking I could teach.

The director of Up the Down Staircase, Robert Mulligan, had also directed To Kill a Mockingbird. Sandy Dennis had just finished Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf which caused the Production Codes to turn into the Motion Picture rating system and let the movie keep "hump the hostess" but made them take out "screw you."

I don't have a problem with movie ratings. It seems to be a marketing tool more than anything else. I am very curious, however, about what seems to be a double standard like the one National Geographic used to have regarding female nudity. They would cover up the breasts of nude, white American women but show the breasts of nude African tribal women. The overwhelming implication was that American women were too pure to have their breasts shown. They changed that practice in the 70's although they may have just decided not to do strip club spreads anymore. I do remember some news article about NG changing the practice after reader protests.

The last two foreign PG films I've seen, were Milky Way (1969) and The Golden Door (2006). Both had female nudity in a non-sexualized context and both were rated PG. The Golden Door even had full frontal. When was the last PG American movie you saw that had nudity? Sean Penn's bouncing butt in Racing With the Moon doesn't count even though it started out R and then got changed to PG on appeal and Valda Hansen as a Scandanavian hooker in PG-rated The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) doesn't count as the camera blurred her so much it was hard to tell what was what. (Robert Duvall is great in this otherwise odd mix of historical and geographical inaccuracies. Some people bring the mountain to Mohammed; others bring it Northfield, Minnesota, a lovely town 45 miles from here and which replays the real bank robbery every year and does not have snow-capped mountains. Good thing southern Oregon does, otherwise they couldn't have used them for a backdrop to Northfield.)

I'm going to write to the Classification and Rating Board about the nudity thing. I'll let you know. Now you let me know the connection between Up the Down Staircase and The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. No kisses for this. It's too easy. And it is not connected to Bel Kaufman being Sholom Alecheim's granddaughter. Although her last name might be a hint.

Ok, Bart, this was rambling even by your standards, but what the hell is messianic about Up the Down Staircase?

Two words, Bosley. Albert Shankar.

That wasn't even remotely funny, Bart. And Shankar was not in the book or the movie.

Think about it, Bosley. The book was written one year after Shankar became president of the NYC teacher's union. Or maybe it's like Pauline Kael says, "You have to be sophisticated to appreciate it" (as she pretty much said in her review of Bonnie and Clyde and in a sideways slam to Caruthers)

Ok, that wasn't funny, either. Bart. But I would agree that Shankar was mesmerizing as a messiah in Woody Allen's Sleeper.


Manhole Covers
by Karl Shapiro

The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?

Like medals struck by a great savage khan,

Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,

Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,

Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,

But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed

With the great company names

(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).

This rustproof artifact of my street,

Long after roads are melted away will lie

Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,

Bitten at the edges,

Strong with its cryptic American,

Its dated beauty.