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.