Pictures for the Children

We're taking pictures
of things that will no longer exist.
They will resent us
for rubbing it in.
The fresh dew, the leaves, the abundance
Now a leather fruit engineered to withstand
the boiling rain is what they're given
We had it all, the fresh dew, the cares free.
They will resent us for rubbing it in.

Movie: Down in the Valley

A reverent mixture of Taxi Driver & Badlands, with maybe a dash of Shadow of a Doubt (although I never really saw that movie all the way through for some reason). Norton's performance is incandescent and the script holds its own for almost 2/3 of the movie. Unfortunately, aside from the father's (David Morse) great volatile performance, the casting falls down. The girl is bland and her kid brother seems to have been cast for his value as a still. He looks the malnourished alienated representative kid, but in his effort to portray it through his behaviour he's just directionless at best and at worst embarrassingly phoney. To wit, the moment when he discovers the gun and the blood on the bed--it's as if he's a silent film actor being yelled out off screen to do each little thing--caress the gun, look worried, look up, look shocked... Norton just throws off such a captivating performance that it would seem that as foils these nonactors need only respond and revere him, but it just doesn't play out that way--they're so bad they detract, and the end of the film when they strew his ashes in mourning despite the damage he's done them simply doesn't play. The last 3rd of the movie hews just to suspense formula and everything interesting bleeds out of the movie. The moment of Norton's shooting the girl, shot on him, just hearing her wheezing, was very effective, but that kind of marked the end of the movie being worth watching. All in all, the movie betrays its laid on concept, about our ambiguous relationship to illusion as a response to this alienating world we now live in, at the expense of the life of the characters. It loses its speficity and lets itself be quashed by plot, and Hollywood plot at that. It's too afraid to be rough and true as Norton's character would have it be, were he the filmmaker, psychotic as that might seem. But that's what Cassavetes did, and that's what gives life to a film. The film couldn't have done much poorer box office; they should have gone for broke. Casting Bruce Dern shows they were onto it, but lost their nerve.

The Pleasures of Difficulty

I think we may be failing to teach Sevi how effort can be identified
with pleasure. This isn't surprising, since it's a lesson we
ourselves could learn better, or I could certainly. There's a
negative reinforcing going on, probably here at home, and I'm
guessing it carries over into school. She feels inadequate to a
challenge, so she evades it or laughs it off, clowning it off with an
edgy nonchalance. The fear of more failure leads to disengagement
and increased concern about what other people think of her, which
begins to take over focus and leave her even less mental attention
for concentration for doing well at the matter at hand. I continue
to want to see her engage in some activity that she really takes to,
to see how with effort she can do well at something, even
exceptionally well. This lesson can then naturally color her
approach to other things, opportunities to rise to a challenge that
can be ultimately pleasurable.

Of course a part of me does have a distaste for the aggressive drive
to "excellence" because I feel that imagination can be the first
casualty. But maybe there is no dichotomy here. Imagination is an
appeal to something larger and unknown, a receptivity to it, and
wouldn't that also flourish with a more confident attitude?

the digital age

is all the rage
running through rackety hallways
hollering mad
slamming doors
shrieking get me there
scraping
bumping awkward
smarts
shame
all alone
don't stop for a second
you're sore
lost
get with it
or out

Dissection of Anger

It has two parts, always:
1. Injury
2. Desire for retribution.

Janus Collection - 50 yrs DVDs

• ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), Sergei Eisenstein • ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958), Andrzej Wajda • L'AVVENTURA (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni • BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (1959), Grigori Chukhrai • BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946), Jean Cocteau • BLACK ORPHEUS (1959), Marcel Camus • BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945), David Lean • THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), Carol Reed • FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959), Kon Ichikawa • FISTS IN THE POCKET (1965), Marco Bellocchio • FLOATING WEEDS (1959), Yasujiro Ozu • FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952), René Clement • THE 400 BLOWS (1959), François Truffaut • GRAND ILLUSION (1937), Jean Renoir • HÄXAN (1922), Benjamin Christensen • IKIRU (1952), Akira Kurosawa • THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1952), Anthony Asquith • IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART II (1958), Sergei Eisenstein • LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939), Marcel Carné • JULES AND JIM (1962), François Truffaut • KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949), Robert Hamer • KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962), Roman Polanski • THE LADY VANISHES (1938), Alfred Hitchcock • THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • LOVES OF A BLONDE (1965), Milos Forman • M (1931), Fritz Lang • M. HULOT'S HOLIDAY (1953), Jacques Tati • MISS JULIE (1951), Alf Sjöberg • PANDORA'S BOX (1929), G.W. Pabst • PÉPÉ LE MOKO (1937), Jean Duvivier • IL POSTO (1961), Ermanno Olmi • PYGMALION (1938), Anthony Asquith • RASHOMON (1950), Akira Kurosawa • RICHARD III (1955), Laurence Olivier • THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), Jean Renoir • SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), Akira Kurosawa • THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), Ingmar Bergman • THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973), Víctor Erice • LA STRADA (1954), Federico Fellini • SUMMERTIME (1955), David Lean • THE THIRD MAN (1949), Carol Reed • THE 39 STEPS (1935), Alfred Hitchcock • UGETSU (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi • UMBERTO D. (1952), Vittorio De Sica • THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), Ingmar Bergman • VIRIDIANA (1961), Luis Buñuel • THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953), Henri-Georges Clouzot • THE WHITE SHEIK (1952), Federico Fellini • WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957), Ingmar Bergman • THREE DOCUMENTARIES: THE GREAT CHASE (1962), THE LOVE GODDESSES (1965), and PAUL ROBESON: TRIBUTE TO AN ARTIST (1979), Saul J. Turell

Scot-free

The dead body
Sloughed off like a costume
Grins unaccountably
All he convinced you of
Written there, but silly, dangling...
You're the one holding the bag.

Movie: Little Children

Good performances, great unfold of the plot, shots and cutting all
their own and effective. Only toward the end did I start to feel the
contrivance. The first I felt it was in one particular shot, a
medium shot with the belligerent friend and his megaphone at night in
the front yard with the addled mother of the pariah alleged sex
offender right as she collapses--it started to seem a bit
unintendedly silly there. Also the way expectations were played
with, in the thriller genre at the climax, seemed unworthy of the
film, although perhaps hardwired into the book. Perhaps my distaste
for it has to do a certain allegiance I feel to misfits and their
validation, where the whole point of this film from the title on down
was revealed at the end to really characterize the affair as an
illusory feat of immaturity. Then it was that I saw that the film
really does take this stance toward its characters, a sort of moral
high ground that only gives lip service to an actuality. And then
there are the huge lacunae that exist to make that case. For
instance the absolute irredeemability of Kate Winslet's idiot husband
and his panty-sniffing internet obsession is just a pastiche, and yet
it's this that somehow constrains her to this "kept" unhappiness
likened to Madame Bovary's? In the book club scene Winslet argues
heroically (against the pastiche of a suburban automaton) for the
validity of Madame Bovary's hunger for life, yet the film ultimately
doesn't embrace this position wholeheartedly. Its idea of maturity
seems to be to resign oneself to mistakes made in marriage rather
than confront or transcend them. What, after all, of promise is
there to be found in the huge gap between the failed lawyer's living
in the past and his narcissistic wife and her distrusting eclipsing
mother. Are we to imagine some kind of reconciliation? The more I
think about it, the more this film is a simulacrum of the message it
purports, briefly, to believe in. It signals things constantly about
the characters, such as Jennifer Connolly gazing adoringly into the
narcissist's mirror of their sleeping child, calling him "perfect"
over and over again. The framed professional bedside portrait we see
later of she and her husband, with her nearly blocking him out and
absorbing twice the light while he peers at camera over her
shoulder. These things are all signalled so that, as Roberta once
observed, we get them intellectually, but do we really feel them?
Has what's being put over in the film really got into the ring and
engaged us on that level, in the raw way that say a Cassavetes film
would? This film would not dare to stick its neck out, to be made a
fool of, to leave conclusions dangling. In a film like "In the
Bedroom" there was something much tighter going on with the story
that made it almost archetypal or mythic, and ironically the actors
within that (also owing to the tragic tone) could find something that
was less in danger of this kind of falsety. Here, while I really do
admire the film, I find the predisposition of it ultimately a little
confining. It came so close to the real, yet its shortfall was that
much more evident. I heard an interview with Todd Field by Elvis
Mitchell on "The Treament" (KCRW) and a remark by Field that struck
me was his view of characters as defined by the many different
situations they find themselves in and other characters they play
opposite. As in life, we are strikingly different people in
different situations. I saw this at work in the film, and it was
delightful to see. Yet, like a stereopticon, which gives you an
illusion of 3D, it differs here from the fullest reality which I
think is achievable even within a story, by being a series of flat
planes arranged in three dimensions, with all the control and insight
required to achieve that, but lacking, ultimately, the courage to
punch those planes out into the true 3 dimensions that they occupy.
I think maybe that the courage to take that on was a little more
childish, possibly ruinously foolish, than the filmmaker or the
writer would allow themselves without violating the theme of this work.

Revkin's comment back

Kevin, to my mind, has hit the nail on the head. Faced with a trajectory toward risks on a global scale, but without hard evidence, is it possible for humans to adjust current behaviors and investments to protect generations yet unborn? Not clear at all yet that this is possible. In fact, that’s the question I plan to explore in depth next year in The Times and subsequently in my next book.

As for what the world may be like, some modelers have looked out into the 22nd century, where the picture of possible futures actually in some ways is clearer than in the short term because the levels of greenhouse gases are potentially so very high.

I did a story precisely one year ago that is accompanied by an animation loop showing temperature trends in one scenario.

posted on October 31st, 2006 at 5:48 am 

Keepin' Busy

All of these who grandstand
About world peace
In the event of world peace
Might be doing less laudatory things
True
But that's not an advertisement for war
Nor to impugn the employment

The Preocuppied Piper

Vita

Vita breva
Ars bubble
Whilst Earth
Wobbles
Throwing off
Vita

Earth Smother

The old kind were wonderers
But we who make the seas sweat
The soils crumble
Can no longer wonder
With impunity