Sickie, Sickie

Word of the day : unwieldy
                                            : not easily handled, managed, or used
                                            : cumbersome

Well, Gabriel is a little under the weather today, so we'll keep him home... which means he now will have, by my count, eleven days off.  Good God!  What to do with him?  Well, we're gonna take him up to Charleston one day... the other ten?  Help! 

Here are the new movies opening this weekend: 

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part II    This franchise, despite how much money its made, just feels over.  The usual crew is here - Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Peter Facinelli, Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning - and director Bill Condon, who did the last one, is back too.  Critics say it moves glacially but is self-aware and occasionally rousing.  The end.  Now we wait for the film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's The Host. 
Verdict: Not Interested  

Anna Karenina    Despite some very talented filmmakers - screenwriter Tom Stoppard and director Joe Wright - critics are saying this bold, modern take on the Tolstoy perennial is a miscalculation, overdirected and overwritten, with some flamboyant touches; too much style and too little substance.  The cast is getting pretty good notices - Keira Knightley (the director's muse it seems, after appearing in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement), Jude Law as her aloof husband, Aaron Johnson as the Count she is drawn to, Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Matthew MacFayden (Mr. Darcy in Wright's Pride and Prejudice).  It seems as if all the film's Oscar expectations have filtered away.
Verdict: Mildly Interested 

Price Check    It seems like it has been a long time since Parker Posey has had a plum role and really run with it.  Well, she has one here in a slight comedy playing the Boss From Hell, a ruthless, mean, acidic, sarcastic employer who makes life hell for the new guy (Eric Mabius) on his way up the corporate ladder.  He doesn't know how far he wants to climb, however, if it means turning into Posey (who's forty-four now; Parker Posey's 44!).
Verdict: Mildly Interested 

*

A pick for tonight?  Well, I need to re-group after a disappointing 7-6-1 record last week.  The Dolphins seems like they're fading, and the Bills had a great showing - on a loss - at New England last week.  Both teams have very slim playoff chances.  I'm at a loss here.  It's in Buffalo, where the weather will probably favor the Bills.  However, Fred Jackson is hurt, and the Dolphins defense is probably licking its chops after a terrible showing last week against Tennessee.  Tough call.  I guess I'll give it to the Bills, in a close one, though it could go either way.
Buffalo 20, Miami 17

*

 
The National Book Awards were announced yesterday.  I was glad to see a book I just checked out yesterday from the library, won the award for Best Non-fiction:  Katherine Boo's look into the life of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity

The fiction award went to Louise Erdrich's Round House, a unanimously-praised drama/mystery about a woman attacked on a North Dakota Indian reservation.  Erdrich has been writing acclaimed fiction for decades - all revolving around modern Native American lives and issues and customs - and this one had been described/pitched as the Native American To Kill a Mockingbird.

*  

Finally, to wrap up this Thursday, let's select another one of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time (according to me):

 
Gene Hackman   
as Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in The French Connection (1971) 

Hackman's first Oscar win and one of the most unsentimental, streamlined, unglamorous, unsettling, lived-in portraits of a police detective ever put on screen.  It's an exciting movie and performance - still, forty-one years later - and Hackman never seems to care whether you like Doyle or not; he is who he is - relentless, flawed, racist, and, ultimately, fatally wrong. 




Images courtesy of: 

http://www.theweeklydriver.com/files/2011/01/hackman.jpg

http://www.characterblog.com/assets/CA-katherine-boo-1.jpg

http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/screencrush.com/files/2012/11/anna-karenina-review.jpg

RLS

Word of the day : eructation
                                               : an instance or act of belching 


Well, it was a beautiful weekend and Monday.  We had a fantastic time in Savannah, going to the Veteran's Day parade and art show and even discovering a new bakery.  Gabriel had a fun time going to the park a few days in a row, and there were some good football games too.  And Sunday's episodes of Homeland and Dexter were, as usual, immensely entertaining.

*

On today's date, in 1850 Edinburgh, Robert Louis Stevenson was born.  Stevenson just might be the most famous novelist you've never actually read.

He was a sickly child, attended and read to by his nurse; early on, Stevenson displayed an interest in religious issues and Scottish history.  At Edinburgh University, he was a below-average student, interested in his own writing - and bohemia.  To his father's disappointment, he chose to become a writer rather than an engineer.  He began writing humorous and philosophical essays and even travelogues of his journeys, through places like France and America.  Stevenson started a relationship with a married American ten years his senior, Fanny Osborne; eventually the two ended up back in England after a stay in the Napa Valley, where Stevenson's flailing health was given time to improve.

From 1880 to 1887, Stevenson's health continued to wax and wane, and he was traveling constantly.  This, however, was the greatest period for him as an artist: Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and, of course, Treasure Island (1883).  The latter novel originated with Stevenson drawing a treasure map for his 12-year-old stepson and then thinking up a story around it; the novel was serialized over the course of three or four months in a boys' magazine.

Stevenson wasn't a great artist in the sense that Dostoevsky or Zola was; he admitted that he was in the entertainment business first and foremost.  He wasn't interested in realism (which was the mode of his era) but, rather, escapism. 

His art seemed to commercially dry up and his health and depression worsened.  He and Fanny (and hi stepson and mother) took a long South Seas cruise in in late 1888: from Hawaii to Tahiti to Samoa, the Australia, and dozens of islands in between.  He wrote diaries, letters, and essays documenting the wildlife and cultures he saw; a lot of his political views of the various societies and peoples he saw (and tended to sympathize with) were quite radical.  He was a champion for the poor and oppressed. 

He never returned to Scotland, but died in Samoa in 1894.  His death sent shock waves throughout the literary community and world.  Incidentally, it was his work about the South Seas (his travel writings, essays, etc.) that was seen by critics as his strongest work, though his beloved adventure novels are the ones that are synonymous with his name.
   
Information courtesy of:

http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/stevensonbio.html

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One of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time, according to moi:

Johnny Depp
as Edward Scissorhands (1990)

You either really like or really don't like Tim Burton's bizarre, tragic, outsider-romantic fantasy, but either way, you, um. cut it, Depp's creation - aided by Colleen Atwood's magnificent costume design and Stan Winston's makeup - is one for the ages.  Depp's Edward (created by a wacky inventor, played the late, great Vincent Price) is a sad, soulful figure, eternally unable to fit in; Depp's eyes seem to cry out from a cold, friendless void.  The actor makes Edward funny and touching and, as characteristic from this inventive actor, weird and charismatic.  I can't think of one other actor who could have pulled this role off.  


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Don't forget to check my other blog, http://mybookylife.blogspot.com/, for some recent reviews!  



Images courtesy of:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2011/4/22/1303501517149/BE047683-006.jpg

http://afcadam.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/600full-edward-scissorhands-photo.jpg

FRIDAY

Word of the day : kaput
                                       : utterly finished, destroyed, or defeated
                                       : outmoded 
                                       : useless; unable to function 

Beautiful weekend down here in Romney-ville.  I don't have too much today - the Fischer family is just itching to get out of town and go to Savannah - but I might as well give my football picks for the weekend: 

- NY Giants over Cincinnati
- Baltimore over Oakland   (the Raiders and Bengals' seasons will be kaput after this weekend)
- Denver over Carolina
- Tennessee over Miami    (I don't know, now that their owner has called them out, I'm expecting the Titans to respond in a game in which I think they have more talent)
- Detroit over Minnesota  
- New England over Buffalo    (the Bills never win in Foxboro.  Never.)
- Tampa Bay over San Diego   (tough game to pick)
- Atlanta over New Orleans   ( I want to pick the Saints in this one, but I feel like I keep under-estimating the Dirty Birds)
- Seattle over NY Jets
- Philadelphia over Dallas    (Who knows?  I mean, Christ, who knows?) 
- SF over St. Louis
- Chicago over Houston    (great game, could go either way) 
- Pittsburgh over KC 

Last Week's Record: 10-4 
Season Record: 83-49

* 

Let's keep with sports today.  I'm pumped about the start of the college basketball season too, which is right around the corner.  Here's the AP top 25:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/ncaa/men/polls/

Wow, the top 4 are all "Tri-state" area teams, with even UC making an appearance at the bottom of the poll.

*

A performance today for my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time:

  
Robert Ryan 
as Montgomery in Crossfire (1947) 

Pretty much the movie that put the often-cast, criminally-underrated Ryan on the map, this tough, cracking, message-heavy film noir stars Robert Mitchum and Robert Young (a lot of Roberts here, folks) as a cop and sergeant, respectively, trying to discover which  member of a group of de-mobilized soldiers who killed a Jewish man.  Ryan, earning his lone Oscar nomination for his powerful turn, is the anti-Semite, embittered man most likely responsible.  Ryan, nasty and bile, makes his prejudice raw and (sad to say) invigorating; what a scoundrel! 

* 

Best song I've heard so far this year:

Adele's new theme song from the James Bond pic Skyfall:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HKoqNJtMTQ 

WOW!  



Image courtesy of: 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYHVTt95alLtfYn6O8JqVB65NnZpB8XsWty5O_u87S4UMoEZiYsEN9riDmq_WdeakvhOb5Ugeub-l00TiRlWlCxKGetpb2Uz2_-b4kWpjrq20Ue0tHT7nZYBnxJIiNZ-83EEVqiRg04KA7/s1600/2731275311_26c8b7a550.jpg

Allergy Thursday

Word of the day : stem-winder
                                                  : one that is first-rate of its kind ; especially, a stirring speech

Oh, the allergies!  South, you kill me!

Ah-choo, ah-choo... well, let's get to the new movie openings this weekend:

Skyfall    50 years of James Bond, ladies and gentleman, and this is supposed to be one of the all-time best.  I'm not sure people thought that Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) was the right man to helm it, but critics are unanimous: this is one terrific actioner.  Daniel Craig is back, as is Judi Dench, who is supposed to have more to do than ever, as M, and who can go wrong with Javier Bardem as the villain?  Albert Finney, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, and Rhys Ifans co-star, and Adele's theme song is supposed to be a knockout.  But I've never seen a James Bond movie and won't start now. 
Verdict: Not Interested 

 
Lincoln    Oscar nominations galore are waiting for Steven Spielberg's long, talky epic of one of the most famous Americans of all time: in the role, Daniel Day-Lewis (talking in a reedy voice) is supposed to be nothing less than spectacular.  Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln will surely be an Oscar front-runner, as will Tommy Lee Jones for his scene-stealing turn as Thaddeus Stevens, a radical anti-slavery Republican.  Tony Kushner's script doesn't focus on battles or much Civil War fighting as much as it does political maneuverings.  It's leisurely paced, which might turn off some viewers.  A large cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Lee Pace, Jared Harris, Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes, and Jackie Earle Haley.
Verdict: Very Interested 

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A prediction for tonight?  Well, I think the Jaguars are the worst team in the league - them or the Chiefs.  Talent-wise, I don't think they are very far behind the surprising 5-3 Colts, who are the shocker of the year and a possible playoff contender.  I think the Jags will come out tonight inspired and... still lose.  The Colts and Andrew Luck won't let themselves get swept by the lowly Jaguars.
Colts 24, Jaguars 17      

*

A performance today for my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time? 

Paul Newman
as Frank Galvin in The Verdict (1982) 

As a drunker lawyer scraping for redemption and confronted with one of the most challenging cases of his life - a medical malpractice suit - Paul Newman is absolutely flawless.  It's a pleasure just to listen to him talk.  Surrounded by a terrific cast - including James Mason's Oscar-nominated work as a cagey lawyer - Newman oozes desperation and smarts, and you just can't take your eyes off him.  The movie's never as good as you want it to be - but Newman is. 






Images courtesy of:

http://writlarge.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/verdict_1.jpg

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/i/2012/11/06/lincoln-daniel-day-lewis.jpg

A sigh of relief perhaps... or not?

Word of the day : comestible
                                               : edible

Are you happy or sad this post-election day?  The country sure is divided, no?   

Alas, we don't talk politics on this blog.  For that, you need to go elsewhere. 

On this date ninety-nine years ago, one of the 20th century's greatest writers was born: Albert Camus (1913-1960).  He grew up in Algeria, but came to France in the late 1930s.  He held deep interests in philosophy and revolutionary ideas.  Camus joined the French Resistance during WWII and worked as a political journalist during the war.  He became even more active in theater and fiction; he had already written essays and novels at that point, but he started gaining more and more recognition - thanks to his work in the theater - after the war. 

What we most remember Camus for today is the existentialism.  Hopelessness, dissatisfaction, loneliness, isolation.  The Stranger (1942) is, of course, his most famous novel - about a man involved in a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.  Camus claimed he wasn't so much an existentialist as he was an absurdist, which is similar to existentialism and nihilism, but slightly different in that existentialists believe that the existence of the individual is above and more important than anything else, whereas absurdists believe that personal meaning and existence isn't that important at all.  Camus' essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" has been credited as one of the first works of art that is absurdist without necessarily being existentialist.

Other important novels from Camus are The Plague (1947), set in a small North African town, and 1956's The Fall, about an amoral Parisian lawyer.  In 1957, he became the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (only Rudyard Kipling was younger); two years later, he died in an automobile accident.

Information courtesy of: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus-bio.html

*

Well, we're a week into the new month and I haven't added any selection to my list of the 200 Essential American Films:

Here are this month's selections:

 
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  (2004; Michel Gondry)
                 A terrific cast meets an ambitious director full of visual ideas meets a brilliant design team meets a one-of-kind screenwriter.  Doesn't get much better and or more creative than this for a romantic drama.  

Groundhog Day  (1993; Harold Ramis)
                 One of the slyest comedies ever, with a brilliant Bill Murray.  Repetition (i.e. modern existence) as hell.  And yet, oddly, a movie you can watch over and over and over again.

In a Lonely Place  (1950; Nicholas Ray) 
                  A blistering, sad, noir-ish mystery (taken from the Dorothy B. Hughes novel) about an alcoholic screenwriter (Humphrey Bogart) who might have committed a murder and the neighbor across the way (Gloria Grahame) who might have seen him to do it - and might love him anyway.  Drenched in the glorious fatalism of the great Nichols Ray. 

King Kong  (1933; Merian C. Cooper)
                  Peter Jackson's remake was good, but it's got nothing on the grandaddy of them all.  

Mulholland Drive  (2001; David Lynch)
                 The mind-rape of all time.  I've seen it three or four times and am still utterly hypnotized and baffled by it.  Naomi Watts is absolutely incredible as the bright-eyed actress new to L.A. - God help her!

 
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988; David Zucker)
                  One of the funniest movies I've ever seen.  "I have to get up early tomorrow - it's Arbor Day."

Shadow of a Doubt  (1943; Alfred Hitchcock)
                 Hitchcock's thoughts on suburbia - right here, folks.  Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright are memorable as a woman-killer (literally) and the niece who suspects him.

The Sweet Smell of Success  (1957; Alexander Mackendrick)
                 Tough, tough, tough.  Burt Lancaster is an unprincipled, everything's-for-sale newspaper columnist who starts messing, tragically, with the life of press agent Tony Curtis.  Relevant and brilliantly performed. 

Touch of Evil  (1958; Orson Welles) 
                 Visual razzle-dazzle, Orson Welles' last major, fully-inhabited performance, great lines...

Vertigo  (1958; Alfred Hitchcock)   
                 Hitch's deepest, most profound film, Jimmy Stewart's greatest work, but it just might bore you.  Patience, people!
          
*

 
The Raven (2012) isn't as bad as critics say it is; I had a mildly good time with it.  It's one of those serial-killer movies that doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you scrutinize it too closely, but it's got a decent plot and central performance by John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe, whose last days are left scrambling around Baltimore, trying to outwit a serial killer who is using the works of Poe as his inspiration; Cusack is strident and pushy here, but at least he's entertaining.  (**1/2)

Which reminds me... It's about time John Cusack made an appearance on my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time, right?

 
John Cusack     
as Rob Gordon in High Fidelity (2000) 

In this effervescent, spot-on, very appealing and smart adaptation of the London-set Nick Hornby novel, Cusack is at his charismatic, puppy-eyed, fast-talking best as a Chicago record store owner with an annoying staff of two (Jack Black and Todd Louiso), a list of reasons why his love life hasn't worked out, a stunning vinyl collection, and a new love who might just be the one for him.  Cusack makes neuroses lovable and catching; he's a guy we all know and love.  Great body language too.











Images courtesy of:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/files/2012/01/Albert-Camus.jpg

http://www.impassionedcinema.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/600full-eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind-screenshot.jpg

http://www.jaxhistory.com/kingkong.jpg

http://bplusmovieblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/the-naked-gun-14.png

http://opionator.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/john-cusack-being-the-tortured-artist.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9n9s7wYgqAGEcBgz0y4GMwXy1QGxkR9TAPiPDj03o4RAAzEQTEJQoo8rXGMqejl32Qcl93HzJJGbbugiuS-_Nvg7WXYjkrYbLNkaUgGajmLI601NVpoAaqNsJmNpSzyAOp5z5Kvj-Oj0Y/s1600/HighFidelityJohnCusack.jpg

E-Day

It's Election Day, which means there won't be any new post until tomorrow. 

I encourage you to catch up on my other blog, http://mybookylife.blogspot.com/, if you have a few minutes.

And choose wisely today...

Weekend Forecast

Word of the day : sequacious 
                                                : intellectually servile

Ah, the weekend before the election, and I don't want to talk about it.  Let's talk instead about two movies I've rented recently that I think you should see. 

Magic Mike (2012)

Sure, you can think of it as the "Channing Tatum stripper movie," because that's what it is.  But it's also one of the year's better entertainments.  Tatum, in a star-making performance (that is, if he wasn't already a star), is Mike, an entrepreneurial young man who has ambitions to start his own business but is forced to earn a living as a male dancer/stripper at a nightclub run by charismatic owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey).  Mike, the star of the show and a 30-year old without one meaningful relationship, befriends a wayward nineteen-year old, played by Alex Pettyfer, and takes him under his wing.  It's a classic, film-like entryway into an exotic world - show it through the eyes of a newbie - and one of the things I like so much about the classically-structured film (directed with verve and energy by do-it-all Steven Soderbergh and written by Reid Carolin) is that it doesn't objectify the dancers and it also doesn't give us the pat moralizations we're used to: sure, these guys might do all right for themselves and make good money, but stripping is wrong, folks.  Like Boogie Nights, the film shows the pitfalls of the profession, but mostly it looks like a lot of fun.  Grandly entertaining and shot nicely by Soderbergh (using a pseudonym, as usual), who vividly contrasts the color tone of the nightclub sequences with the dirty-yellow, bright, unforgiving daytime sunlight of Tampa, the film features a somewhat blank performance by Cody Horn (as Pettyfer's sister and Tatum's love interest) but a hypnotic one by McConaughey, who steals all his scenes commandingly.  I'm sure the routine with Tatum dancing and stripping to Ginuwine's horny, propulsive "Pony" will be something of a classic and YouTube sensation.

(***1/2)  

Safety Not Guaranteed  (2012) 

Equally terrific and better than it has any right to be is this Sundance smash about three Seattle magazine writers (Aubrey Plaza, Jake Johnson, and Karan Soni) who decide to do a story on a strange man who placed an ad seeking a companion to time travel with.  When the trio shows up at the man's seaside town of Ocean Shores, they find him working as a cashier in a supermarket; the plan is to get the girl, the novice of the three, to befriend him and see what exactly he is up to.  She does so, and begins to find his eccentricity oddly endearing and attractive; the guy, Kenneth, is played compellingly by Mark Duplass (it's a tricky role).  I thought the whole thing would break under the weight of its whimsical premise, but what's remarkable in Derek Connolly's smart script is that the movie is engaging, strangely believable, and surprising scene after scene; I never knew where the film was going, and I was on board with the entire way.  Well-directed by Colin Trevorrow, the film is anchored by a good cast, at the vanguard of which is the breakout turn by Aubrey Plaza as Darius, the girl (virgin?) who sets about finding what makes Kenneth tick.  Plaza is funny and sharp and witty, and by the time her character takes a leap of faith at the end, it's clear that it's earned.

(***1/2)


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I was going to do a bio today on... well, I forget.  I don't know many people have really been reading my blog lately anyway, so I'm not gonna bother.  Instead, here are my NFL picks for the weekend:

Denver over Cincinnati  (a very easy game to pick)
Baltimore over Cleveland
Green Bay over Arizona
Chicago over Tennessee
Miami over Indianapolis    (tough one)
Washington over Carolina
Detroit over Jacksonville  (though the Jags displayed signs of a passing game last week)
Houston over Buffalo    (I can just smell the Buffalo turnovers in the air)
Tampa Bay over Oakland  (though the Bucs never win on the west coast)
Seattle over Minnesota
NY Giants over Pittsburgh   (maybe the game of the week)
Atlanta over Dallas    (Big D's last stand for 2012 - but the Dirty Birds are awfully good)
Philadelphia over New Orleans   ( a shoot-out, regardless)


Images courtesy of:

http://roccosrevolution.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/magic-mike-0.jpg 

http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/mark-duplass-interview-safety-not-guaranteed.jpg









Last Week's Record: 8-6
Season Record: 73-45