On today's agenda:
- a trip to the library
- Gabriel's speech therapy
- a little basketball
- Daisy's walk
- Roman hash dinner
- a romantic movie
Talk about an easy day!
Here are the movies this weekend:
John Carter God, no! Seems like it's going to be a bomb in the making. Disney's $250 million adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel about a Confederate military captain (Friday Night Lights' Taylor Kitsch - can he carry what will be a three-film franchise?) transported to Mars, which is having its own civil wars. Critics aren't being too kind - it looks awful - but there may be an audience for this junk. The ubiquitous Ciaran Hinds, Willem Dafoe, Dominic West, Thomas Haden Church, and Samantha Morton co-star. The first live-action film for Andrew Stanton, who gave us Finding Nemo and Wall-E.
The Silent House Critics are split on this one, but it sounds interesting. Elizabeth Olsen, fresh off last year's acclaimed turn in Martha Marcy May Marelene, stars in a horror film by the directing team of 2004's scary Open Water. The film - about a woman mysteriously abandoned in a haunted lake house - has a huge gimmick: The entire film is shot in one take!
Friends With Kids Sounds like my kinda movie. Written and directed by Jennifer Westfeldt (who also stars, alongside Adam Scott, who's getting superlative reviews for his droll, touching work), the film is a comedy about a young couple who observe what having kids does to their friends. Good reviews - although most say the first hour is the best, the movie becoming conventional in its final legs. But it's a Bridesmaids reunion, folks! That's what's up: Jon Hamm, Kristeen Wiig, Chris O'Dowd, Maya Rudolph. Megan Fox and Edward Burns are here too.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen This sounds appealing too. Only slightly average reviews. What critics like about it are the same qualities others don't: too light and small, minor, ultimately too rom-com-y. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) adapts Paul Torday's novel; Lasse Hlastrom directs. Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt seem like they would have good chemistry. A visionary sheik enlists the help of Britain's leading fishing expert (Ewan) to bring the sport of fly-fishing to the desert. Kristin Scott Thomas co-stars.
A Thousand Words Eddie Murphy in a non-screened movie about a fast-talking literary agent (guess who?) and a Bodhi tree (!) from the director of Norbit. I'll pass, thanks.
Diane Arbus (#7)
You hear Arbus (1923-1971) and you automatically think of freaks and loners and societal outcasts. The New York-born Arbus learned about photography form her husband Allan (a military photographer in World War II). They started out together in advertising and fashion photography; they worked for Vogue. Diane studied with photographer Lisette Model. It was during this period that Diane began to develop her craft and shoot the images she is famous for: morgues and seedy hotels, etc. Esquire and MOMA noticed. In 1959, another mentor of hers, Marvin Israel, used his position as art director of Harper's Bazaar to publish some of her stuff.
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| Identical Twins, 1967 |
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| Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, 1970 |
The controversy with Arbus, of course, was how well - or indeed, if - she really sympathized with these outcasts. Was she relating to them or laughing at them? Critics and audiences were puzzled and turned off by Arbus's conviction that these were "normal" people.
Arbus's subjects often stare straight at the camera, confrontationally. To convey psychological truth, she often uses direct flash or frontal lighting. She often used flash in the daylight too, so that the faces were in no way blurred by the lighter background. Hence, she achieved something slightly creepy.
She was good friends with Richard Avedon and famed photographer Walker Evans, among others. Struggling with the dissolution of her marriage a decade earlier, a fear of fame, and a stifling depression, she committed suicide in 1971.
Here's a six-page article in 2004 by Smithsonian on the artist, if you're interested: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/arbus.html
I'm reading a juicy book right now, the second in Michael Stanley's detective Kubu series. This one is a mystery set a bush camp in northern Botswana. The Rhodesian Bush War looms large in the story. It's a very complex, bloody history. Here is the simplest, most accessible site about the War that I could find:
http://africa.factoidz.com/causes-of-the-rhodesian-bush-war/
I might write more about it.
Finally, I'm continuing to enjoy the William Boyd novel I'm reading, which almost seems to work as a history of 20th century Britain. His character, Logan Montstuart, goes to Garsington Manor at one point. What is Garsington Manor?
A Tudor building near Oxford owned by socialite/patron Lady Ottoline Morrell. Through World War I and the 1920s, Morrell and her husband, who restored the property and created the still-prospering Italian gardens, used the home as a pacifists/writers retreat and salon - for not only those objecting the war, but to the Bloomsbury Group and other famous writers: D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell (who later became Morrell's lover), E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats. Morrell was a six-foot tall, red-headed, dominating woman, and she mixed beautifully with all classes of society. Many of her guests talked behind her back, even featured a version of her in their writings (not too kindly); she sold the place in 1928.
It can still be visited today.
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