Julia comes home today! Jeez, we missed her. We'll give her a nice homecoming, me and the Great Pee-er.
History lesson today: Gandhi and the Salt March.
In 1930, India was still firmly under British control. Mahatma Gandhi, famous in India for leading his non-cooperation boycotts, was sixty-one years old when he decided to lead a revolt on the British Salt Tax. Salt was a major component in Indian diet. The Salt Tax stipulated the following: It was illegal for any Indian to sell or produce salt. It was also illegal for any Indian to collect salt from Indian coasts. If an Indian wanted salt, they had to buy it (at raised, often unaffordable prices) from British merchants at British prices. This was abominable, for obvious reasons. In hot, scorching India, with laborers putting in long, endless days, salt was a necessary mineral for the body - and why should these Indians pay for a resource they could get for free?
On March 12, 1930 Gandhi and seventy-eight other male satyagrahis (exponents of nonviolent resistance) set out on the 240-mile journey from Sabarmati to the coastal village of Dandi. It was a two-mile long procession that took a little over three weeks. On April 6, with many reporters watching, he picked up a clump of mud and salt and boiled it in seawater to produce salt; the other satyagrahis followed his lead and did the same thing. Gandhi, who had sent the Viceroy a letter claiming what he had intended to do, wasn't arrested until a month letter, as protest against the Salt Tax became more and more common. Thousands of Indians were arrested and so, in early May was Gandhi.
Eventually, of course, Gandhi's imprisonment led to (and was preluded by) further boycotts and protests and a long march by protestors to Dharshana in which many non-armed protestors were bludgeoned by police officers.
(Women satyagrahis weren't encouraged by Gandhi because he felt they wouldn't incite and provoke law enforcers like males could.)
(Thanks to: http://thenagain.info/webchron/India/SaltMarch.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/gandhi_mohandas.shtml
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Dandi.html)
Oscar winners
The 1970s:
- Patton (1970) Should you watch it? No.
George C. Scott is the whole deal here, and that's not a bad thing. Scott, along with the actor in the next film, was one of the greatest actors in the history of the medium, and he's commanding here, as ever. The film (**1/2) is logy, drawn-out, occasionally exciting, quotable, but with battle scenes that seem very old.
- The French Connection (1971) Should you watch it? Yes.
Very exciting, very modern, visceral and well-paced. Gene Hackman, blunt and restless, in an iconic porkpie hat, is the very definition of an antihero, and the ending is so haunting not because of its inconclusiveness but because of what it says about Popeye Doyle. The car chase is justifiably classic, and Fernando Rey is a dapper, detestable villain, William Friedkin's direction taut and forceful. (****)
- The Godfather (1972) Should you watch it? Well, if given the choice between this and Oliver, opt for this one.
Simply, one of the greatest films of all time. (****)
- The Sting (1973) Should you watch it? Yes.
It must have been a slow year for movies if this won. Sure, it's fun, with undeniably chemistry between Robert Redford and Paul Newman, the ragtime music is catchy and well-suited to the period detail, the final twist at the end clever. But it's very slight, throwaway entertainment, the kind of film they make better today: Could you see Ocean's Eleven winning Best Picture? (***)
- The Godfather II (1974) Should you watch it? Yes.
There's a scene here with the young Robert DeNiro selecting fruit from a vendor's stand and you sit there in awe of the way he expresses himself with his hands, his words coming out in a mellifluous Italian, and you think - yeah, Coppola got it just right again. (****)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Should you watch it? Absolutely.
Still a knockout entertainment, funny and poignant and pointed (I haven't read the Kesey novel, so I can't really size it up as an adaptation), and still one of the only films to win the five major Oscars. Louise Fletcher, too - what a villain! What a one act-wonder! (****)
- Rocky (1976) Should you watch it? Maybe.
Director John Avildsen (The Karate Kid) isn't the subtlest or slyest of directors, and Stallone isn't the subtlest or most coherent of actors, but the story does have a tugging underdog force. It helps to know, too, that this was Sly's one shot at glory - he wrote the damn thing, putting all his heart into it. "Adrian!" Running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You've seen the images. Talia Shire, Burt Young, and Burgess Meredith, along with Sly, all managed Oscar nominations in cliched roles, bringing depth and conviction to them. (**1/2)
- Annie Hall (1977) Should you watch it? Yes.
To most people, this is still the Woodman's masterpiece, his autobiographical tour-de-force, his foray into drama - and it's still pretty funny too, though it is evidently a product of the 70s. Diane Keaton is Woody's greatest muse, and there are memorable sequences everywhere: the shellfish; Marshall McLuhan cutting the pompous know-it-all down to size; Christopher Walken's zombie-like death wish. I've come to like other Allen movies more, but this is still an essential film. (***1/2)
- The Deer Hunter (1978) Should you watch it? Not essential, but worth a look.
A great cast (DeNiro, Streep, Walken, Cazale, John Savage) in a surreal, loony, almost cartoonish Vietnam. Director Michael Cimino wasn't a subtle guy either, and a lot of the big dramatic moments don't entirely work - mainly because we're aware of how moved we're supposed to be by them. Way overlong, too, and I liked the pre-Vietnam portion of the film better than the actual war stuff. The shot of Meryl, astonishingly young and assured in her fragility, sliding down the lane with her bowling ball in hand, about to throw, is a beautiful image. (***)
.
- Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) Should you watch it? Yes.
I suspect a lot of the appeal of Robert Benton's film (***) is due to how novel the subject matter was - a newly-single dad raising his son and fighting for custody of him too. Certainly Oscar-minted Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep have been better, but they are indeed very good. Sensitive and intelligent, like most of Benton's work (Nobody's Fool, Places in the Heart) but overrated, to be sure.
Tomorrow: the 80s
Martin Parr (#10)
The Surrey-born Parr (b. 1952) was encouraged at a young age by his amateur photographer grandfather. He studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 70's and supported himself throughout the decade and through the 80's with various teaching posts. His work in the 80's captured ordinary English people, suffering through the Thatcher era. Parr's images are striking, ironic, provocative. He attacks consumer culture - the decline of communication, boredom, the preposterousness of modern life, vanishing values. He charts the decline of the spiritual and existential crises of the middle and lower classes. He does have a sense of humor, though. He joined Magnum Photos in 1994.
From his book Bored Couples:
And of course... (In 1992, Parr photographed in the first McDonald's in Moscow.)
Book review:
I finished William Boyd's masterful Any Human Heart. What an outstanding book. Every page indicates the intelligence and bravura of a great writer at work. But it's not "great" in a showoff-y, exclusive, frustrating-to-read kind of way; it's accessible.
The story is a fake biography recounted in almost a century of journal entries by Montevideo-born Logan Mountstuart, who is, at various times, a student at Oxford, a Naval Commander stationed to spy on King Edward VI in the Bahamas, prisoner of war in a Swiss villa, under-the-radar novelist, philanderer, cuckold, anti-Fascist spy, reporter, art dealer, gallery manager, English professor in Nigeria during the Nigeria-Biafra conflict - among other things.
Throughout, Logan - whose life includes either acquaintances, friendships, or run-ins with Joyce, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the aforementioned Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, Churchhill, Evelyn Waugh, Pollock, Picasso, Anthony Powell, Ian Fleming - maintains a sense of humor and striving. Despite what could come across a literary stunt, Mountstuart remains complex, multi-faceted, simultaneously pitiful, charismatic, defeated, naive, intelligent, full of ambition, worthless, sharp-minded. It's a freewheeling, well-researched history. Throughout, you might wonder what is the point of this fake biography? What is Boyd trying to say?
I think a passage at the bottom of page 454, with Logan old and physically ailed in France, gives us a clue:
That's all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck that you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up - look at the respective piles. There's nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man's condition, as Montaigne says.
I want to stress how fun of a book this, a portrait of a lived life long and full and well. The detail is extraordinary (it took Boys thirty months to research and write it), the picture of history clear-eyed, sympathetic, amusing. It's the kind of book that gives reading a good name. It's an affirmation of the joy and randomness of life, and it succeeds at a high very level.
No comments:
Post a Comment