All right, let's get started with the new movies opening up.
The Lorax An adaptation of Dr. Seuss' 1971 kids book with the voices of Zac Efron, Ed Helms, Danny DeVito, and Betty White, and Taylor Swift. Mediocre reviews - A.O. Scott of The New York Times calls it a "noisy piece of junk."
Being Flynn In 2004, Nick Flynn wrote an acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, about his father, Jonathan, who was a great writer - in his own mind. Jonathan was abrasive, annoying, eccentric, eventually ending up down and out in a homeless shelter. Nick, struggling to discover his own identity, eventually re-unites with his dad when Nick starts work at the shelter. The reviews are middle-of-the-road for the movie adaptation. Co-written (with Nick Flynn) and directed by Paul Weitz (About a Boy), the movie stars Robert DeNiro as Jonathan, Paul Dano as Nick; also co-starring Julianne Moore and Olivia Thirlby. Richard Roeper and Time are raving about the acting and poignancy of the story, claiming it is a moving return to form for the long-sleepwalking DeNiro. Other critics say DeNiro's over-the-top, his character insufferable, Dano evaporates from the screen and the movie is too Sundance-y and fake.
Project X I've been seeing way too many previews for this movie. Its plot seems spiritually reminiscent of Superbad: A high school kid, seen by many as a loser, plans a huge party in order to get the girl of his dreams. A big selling point is that the movie is "produced" by Todd Phillips (The Hangover). Critics are not impressed.
Helmut Newton (#3)
The German-Austrian, Berlin-born Newton developed the use of ring flash in fashion photography; this allowed him to soften the shadows and create circular highlights in the model's eyes.
Newton grew up in Berlin but, being Jewish, fled the country before World War II, traveling extensively in Europe, living in Australia, Paris, and London, working for periods at Australian Vogue, French Vogue (arguably his most fertile period), and British Vogue. He worked for Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Playboy and French Elle too. He specialized in nudes - erotic portraits of powerful, sexually confident women. His work is stylized, sado-masochistic, macabre, dangerous - bondage is a common theme. He did memorable shoots of sexually-charged celebrities too, from Mick Jagger to Catherine Deneuve, showing us the dark, theatrical side of the privileged.
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| Saddle 1 from series Sleepless Nights (1975-1978) |
Finally, a bit of history that I find chewy and fun from the David McCullough book I'm still reading.
The set-up:
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| Charles Sumner |
U.S. senator Charles Sumner, who having spent many years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris, in which a substantial number of his classmates were black, saw no reason for racial segregation in the U.S., particularly in schools. He was one of the U.S.'s most prominent advocators for the abolition of slavery, one of the founders of the Free Soil Party, a coalition of four parties which opposed the institution of slavery into the recently-settled western territories - Kansas and Nebraska. For Sumner, slavery wasn't the "natural order of things."
On May 22, 1856, the famous incident occurred.
Earlier that week, Sumner had controversially been launching into a series of attacks on the Senate floor. He denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was the result of legislation by the ambiguously-motivated Stephen Douglas. The Act allowed the settlers of the two new states to decide whether or not they allowed slavery in the two states. This was in direct opposition to the Missouri Compromise a few years earlier, which prohibited slavery from occurring in this territory. Douglas wanted it to be left up to the people - "popular sovereignty!" Why did Douglas do this? Did he want to appeal to the largely Democratic, pro-slavery South? Who knows? What resulted, however, was a rash of anti-southern sentiment in the south, anti-northern sentiment in the south. Which led to... you guessed it. (And the forming of the Republican Party too, which was founded by the large number of opponents to the act.)
Anyway, where was I? Sumner really had it in for South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler, a notorious pro-slavery politician and co-writer, along with Douglas, of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In a roaring speech, Sumner lambasted the absent Butler in front of the other senators.
The North, especially the abolitionists, loved Sumner's courage, loved the volume and force of the harangue. In the south, they hated it.
The action:
One South Carolina congressman, pissed off at Sumner's oratorical outrage, decided to do something about it. Preston S. Brooks, a slaveholder and relative of Butler, wanted to defend the honor of his absent friend and, really, the state of South Carolina.
Early in the afternoon of May 22, Brooks decided to make his move. He selected his weighty, gutta-percha cane as the weapon of choice. Sumner, alone at his desk, didn't see the sly, stealthy Brooks slip into the Senate Chamber. Brooks announced himself to Sumner, voicing his disappointment and anger over the speech, and then smashed Sumner's head with the cane. Brooks brought down the cane thirty times!
Sumner lay bloody and beaten senseless on the floor, unconscious. He tried to return to the Senate in the following year, but he could barely walk. His condition was described along the lines of "an oppressive stricture and weight on the brain." His spinal cord was damaged in "key places." He recuperated in Paris, but never fully recovered mentally.
What happened to Brooks? He wasn't even removed from office. A $300 fine was his sole penalty. In the south, he was a hero and many southerners mailed him replacement canes because Brooks' cane was shattered.
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| Preston Brooks |
What, you may ask, is gutta percha?
A natural form of rubber. The milky, sap-like fluid of gutta percha trees (found along the Pacific rim) is evaporated, then coagulated. It could then be toughened by heating and molding. Historically, it has been used as insulation for submarine cables, the inside of golf balls, dental fillings.
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| Can you imagine this hitting you thirty times? |
And one more argument for the relevance and validity of the late Davy Jones and the Monkees, from NPR of all places:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/03/01/147736081/now-can-we-induct-the-monkees-into-the-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame
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