New Week

Word of the day :

ceorl : a freeman of the lowest rank in Anglo-Saxon England 


A new week in Stinksboro, but why think about this town?  Let's talk instead about this list:

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20483133_20694515,00.html

Here's what looks good to me:

Definitely: 

Love is All You Need
Black Rock 
Before Midnight
The Way, Way Back  
The Conjuring
Fruitvale 
Blue Jasmine 
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters 
You're Next 
Don Jon

Possibly/Probably: 

Iron Man 3
Peeples
Frances Ha
The Hangover Part III
Now You See Me 
Man of Steel
World War Z  
The Bling Ring 
The Heat
White House Down
I'm So Exited!  
Grown-Ups 2
R.I.P.D.
Girl Most Likely 
Only God Forgives 
We're the Millers
Austenland
Ain't Them Bodies Saints


Always worth a look:

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/traveler-magazine/photo-contest/2013/entries/gallery/outdoor-scenes-week-2/?source=hp_dl4_travel_photo_contest_20130429

Movies, Movies, Movies

Word of the day :

lamia : a female demon


Well, it's Saturday - grass to cut (?), work to do, basketball and art history programs to watch, walks to take, potty training lessons to begin, itineraries to plan...

Here are the movies opening this weekend:

At Any Price

Dennis Quaid is reputedly at his best as an esteemed, ambitious Iowa farmer who wants his son (Zac Efron) to take over the family business.  Zac wants to ride, though - race cars.  Roger Ebert, in one of his last reviews, called this drama a great American film.  It's about family and the toll the economic crisis has had on the small farmer.  Directed by American-born Iranian filmmaker Ramin Bahrani. 
(YES)

Pain & Gain 
No, thank you, and here's why: it's a Michael Bay (Transformers) film.  Cue the hyperkinetic visuals and sensory assault.  This one is "inspired" by a true story - about three Florida personal trainers (Mark Wahlberg, The Rock, Anthony Mackie) who get involved with a local criminal millionaire (Tony Shalhoub).  Ed Harris and Ken Jeong co-star.  Critics are calling it really dumb. 

Mud
One of the best-reviewed American movies of the new year, Jeff Nichols' follow-up to the terrific Take Shelter (whose star, Michael Shannon, has a role here) is a relatively short (90 minutes), Arkansas-shot-and-set, Huck Finn-esque tale about two boys who find a mysterious guy (Matthew McConaughey) hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River.  The man needs the boys to help him get back to the love of his life (Reese Witherspoon).  She is waiting in town for the man - Mud - but is Mud what he seems?  Has he killed a man?... This could be McConaughey's long-overdue Oscar nomination - he has a cracked front tooth, dirty hair - and he's supposed to be outstanding. 
(YES)     

The Big Wedding 
Dreadful reviews for this all-star comedy.  Robert DeNiro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Katherine Heigl, Topher Grace, Amanda Seyfried, and Robin Williams are all here, in a remake of a French comedy about an acidic divorced couple (Bob and Diane) forced to play nice at the wedding of their adopted son. 

Also:

Love is All You Need, a comedy-drama starring Pierce Brosnan as a lonely Danish architect who meets a hairdresser on his way to Italy to attend a wedding.  Good reviews.  (YES)

Kon-Tiki, an Oscar-nominated Norwegian film about Thor Heyerdahl's famous voyage by raft from South America to the Polynesian Islands.  (YES)

Arthur Newman, a low-key road movie about a depressed man (Colin Firth) who tries to change his identity and meets up with a bruised, down-at-the-heels suicidal woman (Emily Blunt) who becomes his companion.  Filmed in North Carolina - average reviews. 

*
 
Bachelorette (2012) wants to be a female version of The Hangover but, honestly, it's not even as good as The Hangover 2.   Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, and Isla Fisher (appealing comic actresses all) are three nasty, drunken, bitchy and slutty bachelorettes who come together for the wedding of their friend (Rebel Wilson).  Stop right there: Why cast Wilson in this underdeveloped straight role if you're not going to give her any good lines?  There's not a likable character around - not even the usually dependable James Marsden or Adam Scott as two of the best men.  Some funny parts here and there, but someone forgot to inform or notify director Leslye Headland (who wrote the screenplay and the play (!) the film is taken from) that the background music she employs in almost every single sequence drowns out most of the dialogue.  Which might actually not be that big of a loss.  Not terrible, but disappointing indeed.     

 

Buffalo

Word of the day :

occlusion:  a shutting off or obstructing of something 

Waiting... waiting... waiting...

Always waiting for something here in SE Georgia.  Waiting for the weekend, waiting to get out of town, waiting to her back from a job, waiting to get out of the country... Always waiting...

But, hey, that's why we invented books, right? 

Here are some recent reviews: 

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (2007), Gail Tsukiyama

A poignant, delicately-written (a phrase you can but probably shouldn't mistake for 'slow-paced') novel that follows the lives of two brothers through about twenty-five years of Japanese history.  One brother is interested in being a sumo wrestler and eventually does, becoming the highest-ranked (a yokozuna, which may ring a bell to some wrestling fans of old), while the other brother becomes a highly-skilled mask maker, in demand by the Noh theater actors and artists.  Tsukiyama traces these tight-knit brothers as well as some other characters and does so with skill and command.  It's just an easy novel to read, never quite a soap opera, and it was nice to see the WWII experience and aftermath from the non-western side. 

Drawing Conclusions (2011), Donna Leon

Leon has kept her Inspector Guido Brunetti mystery series going for twenty-years now, with this year's The Golden Egg the 23rd entry in the bestselling, critically-admired series.  I'm a newbie to the mysteries, and I was rewarded for my efforts with drew me to the book to begin with: a smart, lived-in portrait of Venice.  All the books take place in "The City of Water," and, to Leon, it's both a magical and mundane city, a city of dreams and transients, tourists and thieves, enchantment and faded glory - all of which, I suppose, is what makes it so compelling.  I'm definitely going to read more of these books, even though this one is never anything more than a solid effort - not great, not bad.  Brunetti is investigating the murder of an old woman who housed battered foreign women.  What kind of seamy stuff eventually did her in?  Or does it have something to do with an old will she knew was fake?  Brunetti is an appealing, level-headed character. 

Black Irish, (2013) Stephan Talty

Nonfiction author Talty (who has written books about Napoleon's ill-fated army, Captain Morgan - the pirate, not the liquor - and mulattoes in America, among others) sets his fiction debut in his hometown of Buffalo.  And boy does he know the streets and highways and beliefs of Buffalo inside and out, particularly the clannish neighborhood of Irish Town, which is where his main character, Absalom Kearney, grew up, raised by an Irish cop father.  Kearney, after a stint in Miami, is a detective in faded Buffalo now, working its depressed, often-hostile streets.  A series of gruesome murders has the city panicked, and Kearney is tasked with solving them.  Seems the victims were all members of a nationalist Irish group with ties to the NRA.  Who is picking them off?  And is Kearney's father, a looming, decorated officer now on his last legs, on the list?  Talty is a smart writer and the convincing milieu he limns is the most absorbing part of the novel.  We've seen this plot before - the brilliant serial killer who mutilates his victims and leaves a calling card behind - a hundred times.  Still, the final-act revelation is triumphant.  Stephan Talty, you've hooked for me life now!           

*

Crime novel readers, try this quiz: 

http://www.sporcle.com/games/Mavis_Cruet/pen-names

It's hard!  If you can get half right, you really know your stuff! 
(I won't tell you how many I got, but I will say that I am a mystery-novel expert, so I expected to do well...)

4-22-13

The Cyclops, 1898

Happy birthday, Odilon Redon! 

Redon (1840-1916) was a French Symbolist painter.  Born in Bordeaux, Redon started painting at an early age.  After serving in the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to Paris, where he worked in charcoals and lithographs.  In the 1890s he began using oils and pastels and did so for the rest of his life.  Throughout his life, Redon (who was also a printmaker and draughtsman) was interested in literature and architecture.  His charcoal work, called his Noirs, were not publicly successful, but hugely influential on the Parisian avant-garde of the time.  Redon - an artistic ally of the writers Baudelaire and Mallarme - was arguably the greatest Symbolist painter of his generation.  In the 1890s, his works became brighter, more decorative, but still featured dream-like imagery and suggested intense internal states of mind, improbable and invisible beings. 

Symbolism was both an artistic and literary movement, an attempt to see through Realism, to look at the world subjectively, to express reality through artists' spirit and intuition.  Color, line, and shape were not in alignment with the visual, optical image, but at the mercy of personal emotion and insight.  The images were dream-like, fantastic, mysterious.  Symbolist artists - Redon, Gustave Moreau, even at time Henri Rousseau - proved influential to writers of the time and later artists such as the Fauvists and Edvard Munch.        

*

Word of the day :

transpire : to take place, occur, or develop

*

Well, it's Monday morning in Statesboro, which means back to school for everyone.  Only a few more weeks before our Big Summer Trip and there's plenty to do around the house before we go, plenty of lose ends to knot up, a few necessities to buy, a few TV shows to watch, etc.

Not much on the news front this weekend, nothing Too Horrible happened... oh, wait, I'm reading about a shooting in Seattle... (let's just  skip over that for the minute...)

E.L. Konigsburg, the young adult writer best known for the engaging YA classic From the Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler (a book I highly recommend), died this weekend at the age of 83.  She won two Newberry awards, for Mixed-up... and 1997's The View From Saturday.

*

I love this National Geographic article by historian Hampton Sides on Wrangel Island (a place I had never heard of), which is sort of the Northern, colder version of the Galapagos Islands. 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/wrangel-island/sides-text?source=hp_dl1_ngm_wrangel-island_20130417   







Image courtesy of:

http://silverandexact.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/cyclops-odilon-redon-1914.jpg

Don't Touch That Fish!

Word of the day
xenophobia : fear and hatred of foreigners or strangers or anything that is foreign and strange
                                                  

Julia and I saw a frightening, alarming eco-thriller last night, Barry Levinson's The Bay, a found-footage, faux-documentary about some very scary organisms coming out of Chesapeake Bay.  The Maryland-native Levinson - Rain Man, Diner, Sleepers - gets back to his indie roots and combines real-life problems (the fact that 40% of the Bay is lifeless, isopods - the film's spooky, insidious monsters - have found their way from the Pacific to the Atlantic, etc.) with an inventive narrative technique: the film is told solely from Podcasts, computerized images, security cameras, home footage, I-Phones, etc.  Using a no-name cast, Levinson is able to summon up quite a horrific scenario: A July 4th weekend festival in small-town Maryland is ruined as its citizens, all of whom have been exposed to the Bay's waters (and the steroid-aided parasitic organisms infesting them), begin to bleed and vomit and lose body parts.  A movie with a conscious, it's a smart throwback to the sci-fi/ creature-films films of the 50s.  Check it out. 

*

Playing For Keeps (2012) is a decent if demeaning rom-com starring nobody's favorite hunk Gerard Butler.  Cast here as a once-famous soccer star now living in suburban Virginia, trying to have a relationship with his young son, Butler is his usual sloppy, slobby, messily-"charming," slurry-brogued self.  If, like me, the appeal of Butler eludes you, don't worry, because this is a good role for him.  Butler's poorly-groomed George has never been much of father, but his son and ex-wife (Jessica Biel, who gives the movie's one grounded, likable performance) still believe in him.  Where the movie takes a brief foray into the disastrous and puzzling is when George starts coaching his son's soccer team and the mothers of the kids start desperately throwing themselves at him.  I wasn't sure why, for George doesn't particularly seem to incite or welcome such attention.  Filling in some of these caricatures are actresses who should know better: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Uma Thurman, Judy Greer.  Dennis Quaid plays the pushy, obnoxiously "friendly" husband to Thurman's bored housewife.  The last half-hour of the film (shot in Shreveport) is the best, when all these crazy women are left behind (or just written out of the picture) and Butler-Biel get back down to the reuniting business.  Directed by Gabriel Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness).

*

The NBA playoffs start today:  a two-month long affair bound to be full of excitement, trash talk, hyperbole, and few upsets.  Here are my picks for the first round: 

New York Knicks over Boston Celtics (7 gms.)
Denver Nuggets over Golden State Warriors (6 gms.)
Chicago Bulls over Brooklyn Nets (6 gms.) 
Memphis Grizzlies over L.A. Clippers  (7 gms.)
Indiana Pacers over Atlanta Hawks (5 gms.)
San Antonio Spurs over L.A. Lakers  (6 gms.) 
Miami Heat over Milwaukee Bucks  (4 gms.)
Oklahoma City Thunder over Houston Rockets (5 gms.)

   

















Images courtesy of: 

http://blogs.bet.com/celebrities/what-the-flick/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/110112-celebs-the-bay-movie.jpg

4 Weeks Until Italy!

Persee et Andromede

Before we start, a painting today by French Symbolist Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), who passed away on this date 115 years ago.  Moreau was an Academy-approved artist who painted mythological and biblical imagery and scenes. 

*

Word of the day : milieu
                                        : environment ; the physical or social setting in which something occurs or
                                          develops

Well, the hits just keep on coming: 

- A tragic explosion at a fertilizer plant outside Waco has, according to the most recent reporting, killed 15 and injured at least 175. 

- The Senate voted not to pass gun-control legislation yesterday.  Although it's only a first setback, it was still shameful and disgraceful and an embarrassment to anyone in this country with half a brain.  I'll take that back: Most gun-owners should have rights and are responsible, and I have no problem with them owning guns.  I do have a problem - and I think everyone should - with a Congress that willingly ignores what the majority of Americans want done, the same Americans that voted them in, Reps and Dems alike.  Disgusting. 

Here are the new movies opening this weekend: 

Not much.  There's Oblivion, Tom Cruise's new sci-fi epic, co-starring Morgan Freeman.  Directed by Joseph Kosinksy (the Tron sequel), it's getting average reviews.  There's also director Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem, a disturbing-looking movie about a radio DJ in Salem, Mass. troubled by eerie visions of the past. 

*

Vamps, Amy Heckerling's campy, affectionate tale about two members of the undead (Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter) trying to be young and romantic in New York City, is a vampire movie that - thank God! - doesn't take itself too seriously, unlike the Twilight movies.  It's a jokey, silly movie with mediocre-at-best CGI but there's actually an affectionate, nostalgic undercurrent here - about living outside your time, watching the world (and history) go by without being able to do anything about it.  It's a movie about aging, folks.  Lot of pop culture references, of course (would you expect otherwise from the Clueless scribe?), and plenty of familiar faces, all of whom are in the cheesy spirit of the thing: Sigourney Weaver, Wallace Shawn (as a Van Helsing), Justin Kirk, Richard Lewis.    



Image courtesy of: 

http://art-magique.blogspot.com/2011/04/gustave-moreau-1826-1898.html

Orphaned

On a sad day in America, let's turn our focus instead to the newest Pulitzer Prize winner- the first in two years.  (Remember that there was no winner last year.)   


The Orphan Master's Son

What it's about :

Well, an orphan, as you can imagine.  Pak Jun Do is a parentless kid in North Korea who grows up in an orphanage and eventually goes to work for the state, as a kidnapper (!) and fishing boat signal operator.  For unknown reasons, Jun Do eventually assumes the identity of a North Korean national hero and is assigned to a highly risky, dangerous assignment by Kim Jong II. 

Who wrote it: 

45-year old, South Dakota-born Adam Johnson.  Johnson earned his PhD in English from Florida State in 2000.  He is currently an associate professor in English at Stanford University.  Johnson had previously written the novel Parasites Like Us (2003), the 2002 short story collection Emporium, and numerous other stories that have been published, in among other periodicals, Esquire, Harper's Weekly, The Missouri Review, and The Paris Review.   

Monday

Word of the day :
                            heinous : hateful or shockingly evil

Top of the week to you, readers!  Julia has an extremely busy week at school, Gabriel returns to school after his spring break, and hopefully I have a busy week too.  Will this be the week we get good news - or will be next week... or the week after?  We've learned that one of the great truths about life in small-town SE Georgia is that you're always in limbo, always waiting for that one opportunity that will take you elsewhere. 

I'm finally going to watch Lincoln this afternoon - I'm expecting a lot of acting and a lot of facial hair. 

NBA Playoffs start next weekend.  It's hard to envision anyone beating the Miami Heat.  Watching them play yesterday, I realized - if I hadn't already - how deep they are.  It's hard to make up any ground when their second unit is in: Ray Allen, Rashard Lewis, Norris Cole, Birdman Anderson, Mike Miller.  From the West, it sure looks like it's going to be the Thunder - maybe a Thunder-Grizzlies conference final. 

Total Recall (2012), the Len Wiseman-directed remake of the Paul Verhoeven 1990 adaptation of the Philip K.Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," is atrocious - atrociously bland, unoriginal, and forgettable.  There's nothing in here you haven't seen done better in The Bourne Identity and Minority Report, movies this one apes.  Rather than talk about the tedious staging, the boring plot or the overreliance on unexciting CGI-digitially enhanced futuristic worlds, I'll instead pose some questions:  Has director Len Wiseman, in his third collaboration with wife Kate Beckinsale, actually done anything to enhance her career - all he does is direct her in junky movies where she is often in a provocative state of undress.  Does Jessica Biel ever make any good movies?  And, more importantly, how irreplaceable is Arnold Schwarzenegger?  In the last five years or so, three Schwarzenegger sci-f tentpoles from his heyday have been re-booted - Terminator, Predator, and now this, all with superior actors (Christian Bale, Adrien Brody, and Colin Farrell, respectively) - and yet they've all stunk and the lead actors have all been less successful in the parts than Arnold was.  Goes to show you can't replace an icon with an actor.

Animal of the week:

Fennec Fox
What it looks like:  The smallest fox in the world, but with Big Ears, the fox is cream-colored, with a black-tipped tail.  It has thick fur and hairy feet and those ears both radiate body heat and keep the fox cool. 

Where it lives:  The sandy Sahara and throughout North Africa, in small, territorial communities. 

What it does:  A nocturnal creature, the fox forages for insects, rodents, reptiles, and eggs.  It can go long periods without water.

Is it endangered:  Likely.  Although its population is unknown, its adorable appearance has made it a favorite of the illegal-trade hunters and sellers - deplorable people all. 

(Information courtesy of:  http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/fennec-fox/)


*

Finally, an overdue selection to my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time list

Irrfan Khan       
as Ashoke in The Namesake (2007)

The great Indian actor Irrfan Khan is probably best known to American audiences for his small parts in Slumdog Millionaire, A Mighty Heart, or Life of Pi.  But his best role, his most rounded part, is in this intelligent, overlooked adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's fine novel.  Khan and Tabu (also superb) play a young couple who emigrate to the U.S. in the late 1970s to raise a family, and throughout the course of the movie we see this relationship evolve from its cold, scary early days - where the arranged couple hardly knew each other - through the formation of their family.  Khan is mesmerizing here, a lifetime of wisdom and accumulated knowledge - disappointment, happiness, comfort - in his eyes and voice, and he breaks your heart too when he tells his son Gogol (Kal Penn) why he was named after the Russian author.  






Images courtesy of: 

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/files/2013/03/fennec-fox-baby.jpg

http://thisdistractedglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/namesake-2007-tabu-irrfan-khan-pic-3.jpg

5 Weeks Till Italy!

Word of the day :
                            indissoluble : incapable of being dissolved or disintegrated
                                                 : permanent
                                                 : incapable of being annulled, undone, or broken 

Well, Julia's back - interview went well.  Pray that she gets the job, we move to Chicago, and say sayonara to fuckin' Statesboro!

The Louvre closed its doors yesterday - too many "aggressive" pickpockets. 

Massive thunderstorms, storm system in the midwest, tons of snow up in Minnesota and Canada.  Guess we should be grateful we live down here in Georgia, but how thankful can you really be when every time it rains hard and long, the septic tanks act up?  If you want great weather and no calamities, move to New Mexico. 

Animal of the week: (new feature)
 

Pangolin
What it is:  "A scaly anteater." 

What it looks like:  Covered in brown scales.  Dark grey to black sin, no scales in its underparts.  Small head. 

Where it lives:  Mostly in Africa and Asia.  Bush and savanna country.  Rocky hills and open flood plains where there is sandy soil and, hence, plenty of anthills.

What it does:  Forages nocturnally.  It uses its long, viscous claws to dig ants out of their holes and slurp them up with its tongue.  It moves slowly and has a repugnant odor to ward off predators.  When in danger, it folds itself up into a ball, its head tucked beneath its tail. 

Is it endangered:  Yeah, because Asians are slaughtering them for "traditional" medicine.  Did you expect anything different? 

*

New Movies Opening This Weekend: 

42    A square, old-fashioned biopic with newcomer Chadwick Boseman as the boundary-breaking Jackie Robinson, the Dodgers second baseman who became the first African-American professional ballplayer.  Harrison Ford is said to be gruffly entertaining as Robinson's manager Branch Rickey.  Critics are saying it's fine, not great.  Written and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential). 

Scary Movie 5    Um, nope. 

Disconnect    Richard Roeper gave this one four stars.  It's a tale of modern alienation, composed of different stories, all of which revolve around the dangers of the internet: from identity theft to online gambling and prostitution to cruel teenage pranks.  From the director of the fascinating doc Murderball, the film has a terrific cast: Jason Bateman, Paula Patton, Alexander Skarsgard, and Hope Davis. 
(Yes)

To the Wonder    Terrence Malick (Tree of Life) has to be one of the most overrated directors in the history of cinema.  He is a great pictorialist, has a great eye (with the help of his recent, brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki), but that's it.  His mystical films have nothing to say.  Some love him.  Some hate him.  Some are bored silly by him.  This new one is a largely wordless (!), vague exercise in which Ben Affleck (who has almost no lines) and Olga Kurylenko are an unhappy couple somewhere in the Midwest.  Javier Bardem (as a priest) and Rachel McAdams have some voiceover, but it seems Malick is slowly on his way to discarding actors altogether. 

*

After finishing and loving Robert Kurson's nonfiction book Shadow Divers, I thought that it was about time I sought out other true-life adventure books.  Here's as good a list as any:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0404/adventure_books_1-19.html 


No post till Sunday.  Have a nice weekend! 







Image courtesy of: 

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/files/2012/02/pangolin.jpg

http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/disconnect-hope-davis-jason-bateman.jpg


Information courtesy of: 

http://www.wildlifesafari.info/pangolin.html
 

Interview

Word of the day : doxology
                                            : a usually liturgical expression of praise to God 

Well, Julia is in Chicago today for a job interview - and God if I don't hope that she gets it.  It will be Gabriel and I all day, which equals A LOT OF FUN.  (Swinging - not that kind, pervs - cartoons, walks, Honey Bunches of Oats...)

I was so glad Louisville won the Tourney.  I like Michigan a lot, but I was glad Louisville prevailed: what a terrific game it was, one of the best Championship games of the last decade or so.  All Hail Luke Hancock! 
Too bad I thought Michigan would win - my tourney predictions were as follows: Correct 45 ; Incorrect 22
Brief Reviews:

- Phil Spector (2012), David Mamet's HBO film about the relationship between Spector and his defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden in the days before Spector goes on trial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, is an intelligent but at times pointless examination of the ambiguity of a deluded man.  The movie suffers from writer-director Mamet's typical elliptical, stagy dialogue.  As Spector, Al Pacino is flamboyantly watchful and can mesmerize when he gets some great dialogue to chew on; ass Baden, Helen Mirren is intense and focused, with a spot-on American accent.  The movie is short, but I never really figured out what the point of it was. 

- North Face (2008),a German film that follows the true-life 1936 exploits of four mountaineers (one German pair, one Austrian pair) to climb the notorious, intimidating north face of the Swiss Alps - the Eiger.  The first hour of the film, which features a subplot involving a newspaper reporter who grew up with the German climbers Kurz and Hinterstoisser and hopes to write a breakthrough story of the pair's ascent up the Eiger, is more involving, at least for me, than the second half.  The sound effects, production design, and location shooting are all first-rate; the film's rugged, muscular second half, in which Bad Things Happen, actually was a little boring for me.  If anything, it will give promising director Philipp Stolzl, a chance to make English-language films. 

*

I want to start getting more into classical music.  I used to be more into it and had more classical CDs (when I actually owned CDs) but, thanks to Liberal Arts, I have a goal - to be able to successfully identify these:

http://www.greatestclassicalmusicever.com/50GreatestPieces/   





 

Go Cardinals!

Word of the day : gest
                                   : an adventure or exploit ; especially, a romance in verse

Happy birthday, Rene Lalique (1860-1945).  The most famous jeweler of his generation and a titan in both glassmaking an Art Deco deign.  (I just learned about him the other day.)

Information on Lalique: http://rlalique.com/rene-lalique-biography

Well, it's Arts Fest day for Julia (oh no!), a torridly boring, pointless affair/festival thrown by Georgia Southern to try and reach out to the indifferent local community of hicks.  Good thing Gabriel and I get to stay home and play and read and get ready for the Final Four tonight.

Picks:
Louisville over Wichita St. 
Michigan over Syracuse
(So far:  Correct - 43 ; Incorrect - 21)

*

I watched Shame (2011) yesterday, an often harrowing, often ponderous account of an N.Y.C. man (Michael Fassbender) in the throes of sexual addiction and forced to confront his own isolated, emotionally hollow existence when his needy artist sister (Carey Mulligan, in a sharp, vulnerable performance).  Director Steve McQueen (no, not that one) hampers himself with his own script, which gives no background and depth to Fassbender's Brandon, a white collar, handsome worker who thinks about and pursues sex around the clock.  Fassbender's otherwise riveting performance is shackled by his character's unlikable vagueness; he's contemptuous, cold.  The film is sleekly shot, but the film is drably moralizing at times too.  Because this is an Addiction, we can't revel in any of Brandon's behavior or consider its plusses.  (Hollywood couldn't have us enjoying sex.)  When Brandon does find someone he has a slight emotional connection to (Nicole Beharie's Marianne), he naturally can't get it up.  Very graphic. 



 


Image courtesy of: 

http://9.asset.soup.io/asset/1415/1161_d885_960.jpeg

Evil Dead!

Well, it's a rainy Thursday in Statesboro, which is fine by us, since I don't have any great plans for today.   Just spending the morning in my wife's office, taking Gabriel out for ice cream, catching up on Justified, starting the nonfiction book Shadow Divers, and doing God-knows-what-else. 

Here are the new movies opening this weekend (besides the 3D original Jurassic Park):

Evil Dead    Director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell approved (and produced) the remake of their cult 1981 original, one of the craftiest, funniest, most terrifying horror films ever made.   The new film is getting good reviews, critics saying that director Fede Alvarez honors the goofy spirit of the original - and serves up plenty of scares.  The story's the same, of course: five friends hole up in a remote cabin and stumble upon the Book of the Dead.  Beware.
(Yes)

Trance    A new Danny Boyle film is always an occasion, and this one is supposed to be twisty as all-get-out.  James McAvoy stars as a London art auctioneer who teams up with a gang of thieves to steal a Goya painting.  Things go wrong, of course, and McAvoy finds himself knocked out.  Upon awakening, he can't remember where he hid the painting.  Some critics find it too dizzying, too hallucinogenic, too much flash and style.  Rosario Dawson, Michael Fassbender, and Vincent Cassel co-star. 
(Yes)

The Company You Keep    A good week for movies continues with Robert Redford's all-star drama/thriller about a former Weather Underground militant (Redford) who has been successfully hiding out for three decades until a nosy reporter (Shia LaBeouf) discovers his true identity.  A cast of Oscar winners and nominees: Chris Cooper, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Terrence Howard, Stanley Tucci, and Richard Jenkins. 
(Yes)

*

Jussi Adler Olsen's The Keeper of Lost Causes, which introduced Danish detective Carl Morck and his understaffed, overburdened Department Q, was my favorite thriller of 2012 and one of my favorite thrillers ever, really.  Relentlessly exciting and scary, original, tense as anything, leavened with offbeat humor, it was a knockout - Scandanavian crime lit at its best. 

The second Olsen book, the next in the Morck series, The Absent One (2012) is a major comedown, a truly preposterous book that is full of bad writing and translation.  Nevertheless, I still breezed through it, enjoying it despite myself. 

The story involves another cold case: The murder of two teens at a summer cottage in 1987.  It seems that the man serving a sentence for the murder was one of an elite group of wealthy boarding school students - the members of which, Olsen reminds us repeatedly, grew into the "jet set" of Danish society: wealthy, amoral, violent, soulless criminals. 

Morck and his assistant Assad are joined by a new partner, Rose, who seems to exist solely as lame comic relief, consistently annoying Carl; although I must say that Olsen's writing is so bad here that I wasn't sure what exactly Rose was doing to annoy Carl.  She seemed helpful and idiosyncratic. 

Anyway, as Carl narrows in on the "jet set" group, it appears that a lost member of the group - the group's lone female member, Kimmie, who has been hiding on the street for years, carrying around her aborted fetus (!!!!) - is also stalking her old comrades, for reasons to be discovered. 

Everything comes to a head at a hunting weekend on one of the criminal's lavish estate.  The ending was ludicrous but rousing.  There is a lot of animal cruelty in the book; the one-dimensional villains hunt endangered game for sport.  In fact, the villains are so over-the-top in their villainy that it almost defies belief: they watch A Clockwork Orange for kicks, get blowjobs from their illegally-employed workers, rape and beat on the weekends, kill without remorse.  Has Olsen a subtle bone in his body?  You wouldn't think so based on this book. 

So why did I like it?  I'm not sure.  I still Carl and Assad compelling enough characters (though we learn nothing more about them this time around) and Olsen's style is so your in-face and he can grip with you his plot machinations like a pro. 

It's a good Bad Book. 
But I hope the next one's better. 





 

I'm Coming For You, Byron!

Word of the day : boulevardier
                                                   : a man about town ; specifically, a frequenter of the Parisian
                                                     boulevards

Thoughts this Wednesday: 

- Rutgers head basketball coach Mike Rice (and AD Tim Pernetti) should be fired immediately.  Immediately.  Throwing basketballs at players heads?  Calling them 'f----ing f---ots?"  Unreal.  The president of Rutgers should be fired immediately. 
Here is the short video of the footage (condensed from a half-hour):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbaYqcMMZ6A

- Book review: 

Justin Evans' The White Devil (2011) is set at Harrow, a real-life English boarding school that Evans himself went to - along with other famous men: Winston Churchill, Robert Peel, and Anthony Trollope.  It's a literary ghost story that follows 17-year old American Andrew Taylor, a troubled kid who has bounced around various schools, who arrives at Harrow and immediately finds himself an outcast.  It doesn't help that before long Andrew begins seeing a white-haired spirit who appears to be the ghost of alumnus Lord Byron's lover.  Andrew, you see, physically resembles Byron, who he is playing in the school play.  The ghost, John Harness, was a poor town kid who attended Harrow and fell in love with Byron and was later spurned by him.  Now it seems he is back and willing to knock off any one who is close to Andrew.  An elegant thriller, nicely written, not scary so much as stately in its moodiness.  A good throwaway read with an increasing tension, which succeeds in making you want to read more of Evans' work. 

- Book review #2

Julia Alvarez' acclaimed In the Time of the Butterflies was a huge disappointment for me.  If you're interested in the real-life characters that Alvarez follows here, the Mirabal sisters, you would be best served reading a non-fiction book or even a Wikipedia article about them.  It's set during the period of Trujillo's dictatorship of the Dominican Republic, a time that would be interesting to read about.  Alvarez does succeed in giving us enchanting yet terrifying glimpses of Trujillo's country: opulence, the silencing of enemies, paranoia, job creation.... One of my problems with the book is that Alvarez, in her telling of the story through the four sisters' point of view, doesn't make it particularly easy to chart what exactly is going on.  It's very easy to lose track of characters, forget names, remember which kid is which or which is the husband of which wife.  I often found myself not remembering events (or whom they happened to) a few pages before.  More importantly, I never found the women - extraordinarily brave in real-life - to be that courageous or inspiring; they never seemed that revolutionary or daring.  They came across more as pests to Trujillo.

- Looking forward to seeing Sarah Chalke and Elizabeth Perkins in the appealing-looking sitcom How to Live With Your Parents, which ABC has given a plum post-Modern Family slot.          

- Animal photo of the day: 

(from the Cincinnati zoo)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/photo-of-the-day/?c=y&date=04/03/2013