Considerations...: Almost the weekend...

Word of the day : unfettered : free and unrestrained

Well, the weekend is only a day away. Everyone needs to get away for a few days, including Daisy the Dog.

More importantly, I might also possibly maybe perhaps hopefully have a good lead on a job prospect. Or at the very least, an interview.

Oklahoma City completed their stunning surge against the Spurs last night and advanced to the Finals, where I'm already picking them as the favorite of whomever comes out of the east. I don't think the Celtics will have much left in them, and as for the Heat? Who knows? What a disappointment they've been this series.

A Soul Track for today? Certainly.

"Private Number," by William Bell and Judy Clay, a churning, love-sick duet that hit the top 20 on the R&B charts in 1968. Bell was a monster at Memphis's Stax Records (Bell's hometown), though he was never a household name and really had no big pop hits. He had a great voice, though, great phrasing, and a terrific songwriter (he co-wrote Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign") and had a load of good, gutbucket soul albums with a catchy pop feel to them, evidenced in the 1967 song "Everyday Will Be Like a Holiday." Clay was a longtime soul singer who had early success with the group The Sweet Inspirations, found a home at Stax, and later worked as backup singer for artists like Ray Charles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeuVS6vnN7w

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New Movies Opening This Weekend:

Prometheus    This is the big one of the weekend, Ridley Scott's return to Alien territory. A group of explorers (Noomi Rapace, the Swedish version of Lisbeth Salander, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba) venture into deepest space to try to find the origins of mankind and instead find some really gooey, nasty creatures. Critics are having a problem with some of the film's wonky, unclear mythology, but they say it is a scary, tense ride, with great production design (think cold, loud, wet, moistness when you think of Scott). The intriguing Michael Fassbender plays the android of the crew, a HAL-like figure who has picked up a lot of his knowledge from Lawrence of Arabia.
Verdict: Interested

Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted    The three-quel finds the lion, the zebra, the hippo, the giraffe, and more back, hiding out in a traveling European circus. As par for these things, the vocal cast is a treasure trove: Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer, Chris Rock, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frances McDormand, Jessica Chastain, Martin Short. The reviews are about the same as the first two films.
Verdict: Not Interested

Lola Versus    The sensationally appealing, lanky, offbeatly gorgeous Greta Gerwig, she of the masterfully loopy comic timing, has been in a lot of romantic comedies the last few years and here's another one - a so-so reviewed film with critics praising her as the best thing in it - with Greta as a woman dumped a few weeks before her wedding and forced, with the help of her two best friends (including the funny Hamish Linklater of the late undervalued sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine) to start over before she turns thirty.
Verdict: Interested

Safety Not Guaranteed    "From the producers of Little Miss Sunshine" comes an indie comedy about a paranoid, eccentric supermarket clerk (Mark Duplass, about to go big this summer) who pens an unusual classified ad that draws provokes three Seattle folks to seek out the author behind it. Critics really like it, calling it a redemptive, persuasive comic fable, co-starring Kristen Bell.
Verdict: Mildly Interested

Bel Ami    From the novel by Guy de Maupassant, this is a reputedly bland, uninspired drama set in 1890s Paris that is only notable - marketing-wise - as a vehicle for Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattison, who plays a seductive cad who uses sex to gain influence and power in society. Blah. The actresses - Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci - inevitably blow Pattinson away.
Verdict: Not Interested

Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding Three generations of women (Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Elizabeth Olsen) come together for a weekend at Fonda's Woodstock, N.Y. farm for a journey, no doubt, of laughs, self-discovery, long-hidden truths, etc. I'm a little intrigued, particularly because of the cast and director (Driving Miss Daisy's Bruce Beresford), but the reviews are unkind, one critic even labeling the film as a remake of the awful Lindsay Lohan-Fonda movie of a few years back Georgia Rule, a death curse indeed. An appealing supporting cast - Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patricia Arquette, Kyle MacLachlan). I don't know, it looks like throwaway fun.
Verdict: Mildly Interested

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Happy Birthday, Paul Gauguin!

The casual cultural person probably best knows Paul Gauguin, born today in 1848 Paris, via his competitive friendship with Vincent Van Gogh and his long sojourn and stays in Tahiti. The most famous Symbolist painter in the history of art, Gauguin rejected Realism and Impressionism, instead believing art to be a dream-like, abstract synthesis of natural forms, meanings and expressions experienced by a spirit that was free of the modern industrial world's influences.

Gauguin traveled twice to the South Seas - a two-year stay in Tahiti; and then, for the final years of his life, a return to the Pacific, where he died (the island of Hivaoa) in 1903. The above painting, his masterpiece of masterpieces, Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? (which can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), is his quintessential work on Polynesian life - full of island imagery, with various Tahitians in an earthly paradise completely devoid of European influence. Like many of Gauguin's works, the painting is not to be taken as natural or realistic, but, rather, to evoke a dreamy mood and it emphasizes Gauguin's own desire, own urges, to get away, to be free of the modern world's ensnaring pitfalls. He constantly gave us visions of his own personal mythologies, visions of the glories of a return to primitive culture. In the painting, all his figures contemplate the question of human existence. The Blue Idol seen towards the back left is Gauguin's representation of the Great Beyond. The oldest character in the painting, the woman at the far left, seems resigned to her fate, accepting her diminishing time on earth.

An 1892 masterwork, Manao Tupapau (in the collection of Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery) is perhaps compositionally similar to Manet's landmark Olympia, but is thematically similar to most of Gauguin's South Sea work, perhaps an implicit nod to island religion. It's a musical, mysterious piece, the living (represented by the prone woman) linked to the spirit of the dead (the hovering, watchful spirit behind her), Gauguin trying to communicate to us otherworldly feelings he may not fully understand.

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Things this week

How about this Week's list of Things being, in light of my third viewing of the rich, jazzy, twisty The Lincoln Lawyer (with the best Matthew McConaughey performance to date), 5 Underrated 2011 Movies?

Colin Farrell rocked in the remake of Fright Night.

The well-cast Tower Heist was never explosively funny, but well-staged, with a lot of fizz.

Yes, it was stupid, but I laughed throughout all of The Change-Up.

Sexy, funny, raunchy, and sweet, with a hilarious cast - yep, that's No Strings Attached.

Larry Crowne wasn't what anyone wanted, or expected it to be, but it was a load of fun for Julia and I.

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One more feature for today. Yep, our journey through Professional Photographer's 100 Most Influential Photographers. Clocking in at #47 is...

Mary Ellen Mark

Mark, born in Philadelphia in 1940, came of age during the flowering, fertile period of the great documentary photojournalists of the 1960s and 1970s; Mark was one of them. Her work has displayed a sensitivity towards people - in particular, those living on the edges of society. She's one of our great humanist photographers, her work featured in The New Yorker, LIFE, Vanity Fair, among others. She is well-known for her photos of India: Mother Teresa, street performers, Bombay brothels. A photo essay she did on runaway Seattle street children was the inspiration for an Oscar-nominated documentary by her filmmaker husband, Martin Bell (Streetwise), the documentary itself providing basis for the Jeff Bridges-starrer American Heart (1993). She mostly works in black and white, her images driven by an underlying social urgency; for Mark, everyone - whether poor or homeless - has a story to tell. She's worked as a unit photographer (someone who photographs movie sets or shoots the cast and sets as a way of building up hype and marketing press for the upcoming release of the film) for films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (below), 2010's True Grit, Apocalypse Now, and Network.