tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38850351347004495872024-02-21T23:24:46.907-08:00The Shine BoxMcCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-91702478922346499362014-04-05T16:09:00.003-07:002014-04-05T17:09:13.240-07:00Baby Yaga (1973) Corrado Farina.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
This DVD was purchased by The Shine Box for a dollar at the 99cent store on Wyckoff Ave. and Stockholm Street at the border of Ridgewood, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn. The box gives the title <i>Kiss Me, Kill Me</i>, directed by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker and Jean-Louis Trintignant. The Shine Box joined <a href="http://www.pulpserenade.com/">Pulp Serenade</a> over a few beers to watch the flick.Turned out the actual disc inside was a different Italian movie, called <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069753/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Baby Yaga</a></i>. This can happen when buying a movie at the 99cent store, and in this case it was serendipitous.</div>
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<i>Baby Yaga</i> is an adaptation of an illustrated series of <i>fumetti</i> by Guido Crepax. <i><a href="http://alistasi.com/2012/03/16/comics-and-the-expressionist-eurotrash-witch-film-baba-yaga/">Fumetti</a></i>, a new term for The Shine Box, are imaginatively wrought comics published in Italy, genre-bending erotic soap-operas that targeted adult readers. Not directed by cannibalaestro Umberto Lenzi, the movie is a good watch, helmed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003165/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm">Corrado Farina</a>, a director with a vision, who made documentaries and wrote novels. Valentina, the hip photographer heroine, is shot upclose as if etched and colorized on the screen, and the music is grooved out. Carroll Baker is in it, as the Devil Witch, but no Jean-Louis... </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr3PPYsy1m9-ja-HxIr7wgC3j9wwXXBYkUWXNhmU0Z3znX0jGU6hZklW_Nbh9PE5Rv6KXj-RhW1JTZULpFDlMM4a3gOfHtaFm-V1k8xS4thEv4w2hwz-OLMKA_xuBNE6Rqetw2PkZoXf4/s1600/BabyYaga2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr3PPYsy1m9-ja-HxIr7wgC3j9wwXXBYkUWXNhmU0Z3znX0jGU6hZklW_Nbh9PE5Rv6KXj-RhW1JTZULpFDlMM4a3gOfHtaFm-V1k8xS4thEv4w2hwz-OLMKA_xuBNE6Rqetw2PkZoXf4/s1600/BabyYaga2.jpg" height="308" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHOFCXgmxFFGrQj3GnoqLkIptNiBY423qzItNOttAapA_mNLz4iVRgM5VVk7ZoLdK8nUtQOVtsqsozkdSk5dOpCRrVUvjwkDITlQlk999lBA_Mh2fJgHht9aoxWBw3dAiUsgObQWJGdo/s1600/BabyYaga1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHOFCXgmxFFGrQj3GnoqLkIptNiBY423qzItNOttAapA_mNLz4iVRgM5VVk7ZoLdK8nUtQOVtsqsozkdSk5dOpCRrVUvjwkDITlQlk999lBA_Mh2fJgHht9aoxWBw3dAiUsgObQWJGdo/s1600/BabyYaga1.jpg" height="310" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbar5l0CUO6-R3qWeUGXmzUMBPg1lttGVkMhjkzIvKUu428Gnqd5hG_DFT0Y-yUd-sD1pXrXbYYXJjN0R9Rxg1YyER127OoYjAUgYKvsXFBMEdhnsO8p7KUuN1KEJXVYNWBIavvh9__j4/s1600/BabyYaga4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbar5l0CUO6-R3qWeUGXmzUMBPg1lttGVkMhjkzIvKUu428Gnqd5hG_DFT0Y-yUd-sD1pXrXbYYXJjN0R9Rxg1YyER127OoYjAUgYKvsXFBMEdhnsO8p7KUuN1KEJXVYNWBIavvh9__j4/s1600/BabyYaga4.jpg" height="308" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYbLVusK5jxY2J8oTiogZZNbjzr4pqg0Xy4QkHwTPb1tYegcWSTs2198ST7Y-_UwohxXfXQVOSWV31ogZJkNcGW6RL14KXcG63vOCxawkl6OiaVkCEQpa-1sRhoupPBNw4z3K66b-bMWM/s1600/BabyYaga3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYbLVusK5jxY2J8oTiogZZNbjzr4pqg0Xy4QkHwTPb1tYegcWSTs2198ST7Y-_UwohxXfXQVOSWV31ogZJkNcGW6RL14KXcG63vOCxawkl6OiaVkCEQpa-1sRhoupPBNw4z3K66b-bMWM/s1600/BabyYaga3.jpg" height="303" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-85325995861011287832013-10-16T21:38:00.000-07:002013-10-21T20:41:47.255-07:00“So What?” <span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"><i>The Violent Years</i> (1956)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">dir. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Wm. M. Morgan</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">In <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMU8Gyh_6Xw">The Violent Years</a></i>, the suburban inland hills of 1950s Southern
California are besieged by a primly-dressed teenage girl gang.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil4G7DYGTizqMcjV9NQ9DIdjcXKTlzL3T6_uR1tNLwh0UGA4bQcRx5AtqQQbvATaILIJyk1ic4dfHXfXbi1d7rbUNyVNOjiJ6tqQfLMi0gWmD5Y9xyYzHOTrsNn4QB3ZhQ-tcVjnjrXfU/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil4G7DYGTizqMcjV9NQ9DIdjcXKTlzL3T6_uR1tNLwh0UGA4bQcRx5AtqQQbvATaILIJyk1ic4dfHXfXbi1d7rbUNyVNOjiJ6tqQfLMi0gWmD5Y9xyYzHOTrsNn4QB3ZhQ-tcVjnjrXfU/s320/1.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The young ladies rob gas stations, trash the high school,
rape a man, and kill cops.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ2s8JTGlK-hbHFK2z8qOoNmbmeJPFK-eUETGilO4bvU4buDHvHOF7UE5DRsvk2AeOniCheu1d7tF4nGBj5md2r6hkqrZ2kbvQUjKl-vmslF_0Z5lwcWZ3ghve8exs0pR6pyPq9K_0Qtk/s1600/2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ2s8JTGlK-hbHFK2z8qOoNmbmeJPFK-eUETGilO4bvU4buDHvHOF7UE5DRsvk2AeOniCheu1d7tF4nGBj5md2r6hkqrZ2kbvQUjKl-vmslF_0Z5lwcWZ3ghve8exs0pR6pyPq9K_0Qtk/s320/2.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The usual image of the ‘50s “girl gang” evokes the raiment
of <i>derriere</i>-tight capri pants, heavy thunderbolt
eyeshadow, and a beehive doo in which razorblades are hidden to slash rival chicks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfpuJ5qRf-CgeCoNlF8keMxaRz_8x75qtEYCOKes5O8jtcoXAaRRCPjInNWoGQjrKghUBh2_P1xOjgwP9PLXi-SQOV4YG2emB2N23c7W6xj-MWHrPMrD7z0IQIoY4gEFbSCdVyw1ERz4Q/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfpuJ5qRf-CgeCoNlF8keMxaRz_8x75qtEYCOKes5O8jtcoXAaRRCPjInNWoGQjrKghUBh2_P1xOjgwP9PLXi-SQOV4YG2emB2N23c7W6xj-MWHrPMrD7z0IQIoY4gEFbSCdVyw1ERz4Q/s320/3.jpg" width="252" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The nubiles in <i>The
Violent Years</i> do not dress with street thuggess flair but like a <i>McCall’s</i> pattern foursome, in sleeveless
Judy Bond blouses, high-waisted checker skirts, Sally Gee headscarves and quaint
picnic flats. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDhrarP6u3Er50GfZcs_c4lIJG4qKdhfw04FIz_08YYjhlzgSwX9u_ZlpFmPVZD2_vEu9OI6ApdKNEPyQlceFfIHlOdUAQqH8uVAzKh3AyFCn4-MRGLJR6fC_qOvudN86LYQ65eTfdZcI/s1600/4.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDhrarP6u3Er50GfZcs_c4lIJG4qKdhfw04FIz_08YYjhlzgSwX9u_ZlpFmPVZD2_vEu9OI6ApdKNEPyQlceFfIHlOdUAQqH8uVAzKh3AyFCn4-MRGLJR6fC_qOvudN86LYQ65eTfdZcI/s320/4.JPG" width="239" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAHTT_aNITedMYQi5tGgaZmn2hlCb_RFEKCmj9Wb8b7p-s4RDJX2-ylTqqmd8N5E0mTRy9zHjRIeefPlS0IqzMMZZdorMNKKYSeUIo_ybOkjfPvAMh6jPJ5uQPNjugfgybdZ63S0mEp9I/s1600/5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAHTT_aNITedMYQi5tGgaZmn2hlCb_RFEKCmj9Wb8b7p-s4RDJX2-ylTqqmd8N5E0mTRy9zHjRIeefPlS0IqzMMZZdorMNKKYSeUIo_ybOkjfPvAMh6jPJ5uQPNjugfgybdZ63S0mEp9I/s320/5.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The wardrobe is by “Victor Most… of California,”
who designed Mardis Gras Poplin Pants, silk shantung tops, and lurex lame knits
sold at Collegienne Sportswear in <a href="http://departmentstoremuseum.blogspot.com/2010/05/bullocks.html">Bullock’s
Department Store</a> on Broadway and Hill
Street in downtown Los Angeles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcfNBwrIWMqbF4vp6ITSSq5Oor5DlrQhPKksstaid8Nqf5326Qij5cfrE48CcAtZLxKme0kYpr5rucWmQVDL1SDYww3hYV04N0D00UigqHhg8EADV4QOL52EexQ0huh_qnPzi7S1KyMNs/s1600/6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcfNBwrIWMqbF4vp6ITSSq5Oor5DlrQhPKksstaid8Nqf5326Qij5cfrE48CcAtZLxKme0kYpr5rucWmQVDL1SDYww3hYV04N0D00UigqHhg8EADV4QOL52EexQ0huh_qnPzi7S1KyMNs/s320/6.jpg" width="193" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPh9UUoIRKO7giOa-yIbcsAqu_DlZ097FqY19o788L2uCj9Fdp0KPBGpI0ddKGrnWjixEPk9y7GYiBhvb0aHxO0RZ9oPnpbk-Z8hE9Dp1TnRJNoY_uj-e_8gaWww_ZR4IDSOIVhr967Zo/s1600/6A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPh9UUoIRKO7giOa-yIbcsAqu_DlZ097FqY19o788L2uCj9Fdp0KPBGpI0ddKGrnWjixEPk9y7GYiBhvb0aHxO0RZ9oPnpbk-Z8hE9Dp1TnRJNoY_uj-e_8gaWww_ZR4IDSOIVhr967Zo/s320/6A.jpg" width="290" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">At a running time of just less than an hour, <i>The Violent Years</i> peculiarly <a href="http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/94841/The-Violent-Years/notes.html">credits
no scriptwriter</a>, though it is understood among prescient midcentury Z-movie
hagiographers that the screenplay was pounded out by Ed Wood, Jr., the famed
zilch-budget imagineer. In addition to
Ed Wood’s beleaguered motion picture work, the author penned numerous <a href="http://www.boo-hooray.com/ed-woods-sleaze-paperbacks/">“adults only”
paperbacks</a>. Wood’s friend and actor
Paul Marco often witnessed the writer impassioned by the page-churning life: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">He was always like a
Liberace, banging away, bouncing up and down on the sofa, banging on the
typewriter… just like Liberace did when he played the piano.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSF99R9Fa_WizMXu9Aus3JOfQ7zyHYtGLYNIhzNpML_dSPq6VD8J0iHELGBYyWiU3veloOOZ6nUu1EI8TuQPC4BrMPOYR9xGKGAunyrgd4YtLhT16qJTnB_Eru5Av3EoyRAx9GL_ZdTs/s1600/7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSF99R9Fa_WizMXu9Aus3JOfQ7zyHYtGLYNIhzNpML_dSPq6VD8J0iHELGBYyWiU3veloOOZ6nUu1EI8TuQPC4BrMPOYR9xGKGAunyrgd4YtLhT16qJTnB_Eru5Av3EoyRAx9GL_ZdTs/s320/7.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_FP_g34SlLrlZwypoX_An6YQRK5wcYq1D_-Q7eVvG7_0a5SSeak7mHxmqOOvcmdeI5NLMhXztdV7LcQPFNGdc_uF7YacqrmeWyK76hfkqTiuaBhqDqKrdWnFJLCaM5V85Y8eeJ_FsMuc/s1600/7A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></a><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_FP_g34SlLrlZwypoX_An6YQRK5wcYq1D_-Q7eVvG7_0a5SSeak7mHxmqOOvcmdeI5NLMhXztdV7LcQPFNGdc_uF7YacqrmeWyK76hfkqTiuaBhqDqKrdWnFJLCaM5V85Y8eeJ_FsMuc/s1600/7A.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_FP_g34SlLrlZwypoX_An6YQRK5wcYq1D_-Q7eVvG7_0a5SSeak7mHxmqOOvcmdeI5NLMhXztdV7LcQPFNGdc_uF7YacqrmeWyK76hfkqTiuaBhqDqKrdWnFJLCaM5V85Y8eeJ_FsMuc/s320/7A.jpg" width="201" /></a></span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The title sequence is followed by the introduction of each
girl gang member standing in front of a sinister classroom blackboard.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">A backlot studio voiceover intones the gravitas of public
service educational reels: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"> “<i>This is a story of
violence…</i>”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmzr5ZP7JKDoohA28tfphmLt5tms0NBFqxPHcUPdsYlIpY-bjQYO2JzbTasMVvLuhXxxa0eAnPwPaCBhjyb3GPXB-IcA-i-pi1AYtuhB6rQojYZE-8yFIBuzQ-gkbZ6tXtymcRsiH_VMs/s1600/9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmzr5ZP7JKDoohA28tfphmLt5tms0NBFqxPHcUPdsYlIpY-bjQYO2JzbTasMVvLuhXxxa0eAnPwPaCBhjyb3GPXB-IcA-i-pi1AYtuhB6rQojYZE-8yFIBuzQ-gkbZ6tXtymcRsiH_VMs/s320/9.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The remarks of the needledick narrator take inflammatory
aim at culpable parents trapped in a “smug little world of selfish interests
and confused ideas.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Father Carl Parkins is editor of the local <i>Daily Chronicle</i>, which long and stressful
hours “will be the death of him,” and which estrange Father from home life. Mother Jane has no time for a
“heart-to-heart” with Daughter Paula, and is busy scheduling her appearances at
charity functions where she looks forward to the “nice flattery” from peers,
and “ ‘my my how pretty and young you look, and you with an 18 year-old daughter…’
” </span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Paula is granted permission that evening to use Mother’s Mercury
roadster. She picks up Geraldine,
Phyllis and Georgia, who like Paula are facemasked in bandanas and Gatsby caps. Tonight they will boost a gas station dressed
as lads—the gang’s seventeenth heist that month. </span><br />
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The girls take orders from a dacron-dyke crime queen
called Sheila, who runs a small-time racket from her Sun Belt deco apartment
complex.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY1lRfEV-YvNOPV0Z7HhZqhXTnTWEQA9xkH0X5Mkf9ESCTO2qPHhURpbHYV3le-7BL6MIdZMKX2dRn_OuDiw_FCheD6jutSjdrdDDYwhTSr7h9i6m4mMCozVlNNIWzx0eAg5k3_E9vzZ8/s1600/11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY1lRfEV-YvNOPV0Z7HhZqhXTnTWEQA9xkH0X5Mkf9ESCTO2qPHhURpbHYV3le-7BL6MIdZMKX2dRn_OuDiw_FCheD6jutSjdrdDDYwhTSr7h9i6m4mMCozVlNNIWzx0eAg5k3_E9vzZ8/s320/11.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> But Paula does not care about the boosted dough, and is rabid
to behave bad. “It’s the principle of
the thing… the thrill that gets me…”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1PYzC7FMHvONSYL-R5q-M2Owd9-HJ1QnQyJjQ7Xaxnnh3LjozdCxJ9wDhZMVHvL0hFoXUK-fIQbfBbhA_6oEy-Y2EjfiNzU52L5N0UUggmKHYhZBCL0edXF8dGZhVAqq3Lt69yD6Mok/s1600/12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1PYzC7FMHvONSYL-R5q-M2Owd9-HJ1QnQyJjQ7Xaxnnh3LjozdCxJ9wDhZMVHvL0hFoXUK-fIQbfBbhA_6oEy-Y2EjfiNzU52L5N0UUggmKHYhZBCL0edXF8dGZhVAqq3Lt69yD6Mok/s320/12.jpg" width="133" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The brutette bobbysoxers ambush teen couple Johnny and
Shirley canoodling in a parked convertible.
Shirl’ is comely in her pale slip after the gang forces her to unclothe
and tie herself up in the backseat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyMBN2C-dqLDf3_wclAlOcIytgngqVf6s_rsTgjvQAsdzbTWSpGWhKjcP3W-3M4pbv-WF8VuXG7xBwOw5BbSiZxcRME1fqlGm3cHIIk_iB7de6VYtel4knLd8Rn-Tew2XKQ5PaKEItA-M/s1600/13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyMBN2C-dqLDf3_wclAlOcIytgngqVf6s_rsTgjvQAsdzbTWSpGWhKjcP3W-3M4pbv-WF8VuXG7xBwOw5BbSiZxcRME1fqlGm3cHIIk_iB7de6VYtel4knLd8Rn-Tew2XKQ5PaKEItA-M/s320/13.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6E1ihJ_gRboL_H-aDJabORbp3yu8k3JnUrPa10AsDtJeuTQFK0qGUoMEQ3x2QVi0kzqTEzWkkPf9ql6jsZNB5tyH_UJ9oBdoElrvCRVYL9ZI9blUWHxzY-ao0YFm2Q0s7SmTMjIg8frs/s1600/14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6E1ihJ_gRboL_H-aDJabORbp3yu8k3JnUrPa10AsDtJeuTQFK0qGUoMEQ3x2QVi0kzqTEzWkkPf9ql6jsZNB5tyH_UJ9oBdoElrvCRVYL9ZI9blUWHxzY-ao0YFm2Q0s7SmTMjIg8frs/s320/14.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">“You have my money,” pleads pinhead Johnny. “You have my
watch, you have my ring! What more do
you want?” </span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Paula reacts with viperish amour. “Maybe he’s worth something more than money…”</span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The gang escorts Johnny at gunpoint into the woods. They hold down the squirming geek while Paula
advances in the act of stripping…</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxvTrDsvB0op_omyV29G1F9556IMd4Ytb5pGuSzqRvjpxjnt0W1fjG8COvTIgdm_BuMccpJ5-FiFgl1eLuCZVNKbOxcC2eD7I2W1kmMTkg9A_0XrESc1TcyMk2CCzbVIZvZxuLClJHKQ8/s1600/15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxvTrDsvB0op_omyV29G1F9556IMd4Ytb5pGuSzqRvjpxjnt0W1fjG8COvTIgdm_BuMccpJ5-FiFgl1eLuCZVNKbOxcC2eD7I2W1kmMTkg9A_0XrESc1TcyMk2CCzbVIZvZxuLClJHKQ8/s320/15.jpg" width="282" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The next day’s <i>Daily
Chronicle</i> reports: “MAN ATTACK IN LOVER’S LANE…”</span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Paula holds a “pajama party” at the Parkins home while
Mother and Father, typically, are out.
The girls suck face with creepy beach bum suitjacket prepsters who may
be just as spoiled by <i>terrafamilias</i> as
the girls and equally in revolt of “self restraint, politeness and loyalty.” </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUYBuPT0x8P_kc6y9iHT_N33xE6FBlJBrWsFLKnbVLosAfNsoco2IRCEVwZbsYXEjI8b8v8AAobQan1MKk4UOu0kO6czZio_42f2fblTFxek2yaKe3iqKyadox959KKSooKMTKNguZwH8/s1600/16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUYBuPT0x8P_kc6y9iHT_N33xE6FBlJBrWsFLKnbVLosAfNsoco2IRCEVwZbsYXEjI8b8v8AAobQan1MKk4UOu0kO6czZio_42f2fblTFxek2yaKe3iqKyadox959KKSooKMTKNguZwH8/s320/16.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVNzeJBZOc-4o8DqHFkhH2cp-yDgp-6FtmFywPlaQdZaXQhuucXGPuFVpcn6sZikryJw2nbCDoGrtVhMip23muk1_Aaxz2v3V3HilREYQBSIiKfHyqfONIMNyFUPCpuifnDvTtGeAbVjM/s1600/17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVNzeJBZOc-4o8DqHFkhH2cp-yDgp-6FtmFywPlaQdZaXQhuucXGPuFVpcn6sZikryJw2nbCDoGrtVhMip23muk1_Aaxz2v3V3HilREYQBSIiKfHyqfONIMNyFUPCpuifnDvTtGeAbVjM/s320/17.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">As genre historiatrix <a href="http://chiseler.org/post/21837988804/ladies-they-talk-about">Imogen Smith</a>
notes in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0786463058">In Lonely Places</a></i>
(2011), an examination of the city and suburban sprawl as featured in film
noir, after WWII Americans turned to “wholesome, sanitized domesticity—kids,
kitchens and lawnmowers.” <i>In Lonely Places</i> cites relevant dialogue
from marriage identity potboiler <i>Tension</i>
(1950, John Berry), when worksleeves husband Warren Quimby exalts the L.A. subdivision in which
the couple will soon settle down:</span><br />
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">“It’d be great out here—fresh air, room to entertain. And it’s a great spot for kids.”</span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Wife Claire Quimby retorts: “It’s a miserable spot… thirty
minutes from nowhere.”</span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Produced one year after the tortured innocent recidivism
of <i>Rebel Without A Cause</i> (1955,
Nicholas Ray), <i><a href="http://www.videology.info/blog/events/dave-the-spazz-movie-club-presents-the-violent-years-1956-scrambled-brains-1951-a-rare-bela-lugosied-wood-girlie-reel-1953-5/">The
Violent Years</a></i> is likewise set among the Cold War Los Angeles
middle-class exurbs, and lays blame for amok youth on improper authority
figures. But the premise serves to
indulge the roughie fetishes and nihilist phantasms of hot dog and Night Train
wine-stained topcoat pocket-poolers. Rife
with bullet bras and soundtracked to the watered-down cocktail jazzhorns of Culver
City mood session gobble-pipers, <i>The
Violent Years</i> is not dated, and was also known to screen under the apt
title <i>Girl Gang Terrorists</i>. The gang steals money and shoots policemen
with similar societal abandon as the <a href="http://chiseler.org/post/50918604458/cleo">Black Liberation Army in the
1970s</a>, who murdered cops and robbed Brink’s trucks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7qsv3K-oMb5EC6XkAAOtgmboOqS8WlGxSXeus5z2pFsfE869cLzpM6RGj8qXPcrh0S2GJi8AylRqJN4iCjR5gXAs0g1c2MKPZ3RiSmSZl7-PkP-PwrnKQ899TahyqOrMPYk9PgkjfaQw/s1600/18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7qsv3K-oMb5EC6XkAAOtgmboOqS8WlGxSXeus5z2pFsfE869cLzpM6RGj8qXPcrh0S2GJi8AylRqJN4iCjR5gXAs0g1c2MKPZ3RiSmSZl7-PkP-PwrnKQ899TahyqOrMPYk9PgkjfaQw/s320/18.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">In 1957, <i>Dissent</i>
magazine would publish <a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957">New
York Intellectual essay</a> “The White Negro” by fisticuff wife-knifer Norman
Mailer, whose macho exegesis of the expropriation of oppressed black culture by
mainstream “hipster” whites is muffed-up by the ironic motivations of four
coiffed teenyboppers in 1956 behaving like radical extremists. The exploitation of mixed-race politics are
augured by Ed Wood’s bebop gendertwist <i>negative</i>
<i>exemplum</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj45k9Xn-jD_pU1njz_P2z8PEGLCeiicidIwCjvCkjYTQC0Lsa1vyEAyPi2HUXrMD9bAqVicePc_6ADVxqW1dS7mwMeEBTVgYLhIq0nqNGiiew2KUKJLd5eXZQZwqYumPAca8GtFoIe8Fo/s1600/19.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj45k9Xn-jD_pU1njz_P2z8PEGLCeiicidIwCjvCkjYTQC0Lsa1vyEAyPi2HUXrMD9bAqVicePc_6ADVxqW1dS7mwMeEBTVgYLhIq0nqNGiiew2KUKJLd5eXZQZwqYumPAca8GtFoIe8Fo/s320/19.jpg" width="208" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Rhyme schemes may also abound in this year’s vernal
release <i>Spring Breakers</i> (2013,
Harmony Korine). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVzzhVlJrosX1pVVHETO-ZhG8vZuuG56DlRJDqLYy7seUaSCjxhdD9Hzobm4Mhuqvt9KWP9cp-I443Dx71oleHMno4fjpq_w6-cJ0yMZKiw9xJVVCyRiHlWl5YM4rC-yRokvSIFEybg4/s1600/20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVzzhVlJrosX1pVVHETO-ZhG8vZuuG56DlRJDqLYy7seUaSCjxhdD9Hzobm4Mhuqvt9KWP9cp-I443Dx71oleHMno4fjpq_w6-cJ0yMZKiw9xJVVCyRiHlWl5YM4rC-yRokvSIFEybg4/s320/20.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">In <i>Spring Breakers</i>,
the white girl bikini crew from Michigan
are not punished for the crimes they commit against white meathead tourists and
African-American Fort Lauderdale racket lords.
The girls are daffy for the violent years but return to college safely after
the break. They are not spoiled rich
kids but post-Bailout townies who cellphone their parents expressing wholesome
intentions for the future, before donning Pinkberry masks and arming themselves
with automatic weapons for a midnight assault on the bayside compound of
Archie, the local kingpin who furnishes America’s spring breakers with the drugs
and sex traffic upon which the season subsists…</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizFtzakLWrzr_6kr_hyphenhyphenuj3Dt5s3xo8z0gqR961iGtIyvzYXJ3baZly27g1vekRSdE_ncd2uVwzAdrZZdkMb3Y7xK0w5LwogWIw7UwiBs7tPy01O4ylgFqaVj4Io7w7jezMvkoROxCOIBo/s1600/21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizFtzakLWrzr_6kr_hyphenhyphenuj3Dt5s3xo8z0gqR961iGtIyvzYXJ3baZly27g1vekRSdE_ncd2uVwzAdrZZdkMb3Y7xK0w5LwogWIw7UwiBs7tPy01O4ylgFqaVj4Io7w7jezMvkoROxCOIBo/s320/21.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Paula Parkins is sick of underboss Sheila, who is simply
another figurehead of control. “Whaddya
take me for,” cries Paula, “a stupe?” Sheila makes vague reference to secure connections
with a “well-organized foreign plan,” whose administrators would pay “a whole
lotta dough” for “certain damages reported” at the local high school,
especially if a “few flags get destroyed in the process…” </span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The girls take the job.
They thrash desks, rip maps from the wall, and throw a globe out the
window, a hefty symbolic gesture of the females’ own psychic predicament on
earth.</span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">When the police arrive outside, the gang draws guns and engages
in a shootout as if on the list of J. Edgar Hoover’s Ten Most Wanted. </span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">“Lay into em fast, then we’ll beat it…”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBoqm0WKsd_-cW4r-myOxwkxb1E2tRlmQfdDyOHrBePxVgVZpYVaVjsjCey-6QQt-LeZWX_O36MNfwLpKAMfOFIbmk7UHDKW_K7BAssEV0RibQB1TdccI0P13aV3RBxIBLGKxWM8RR3b4/s1600/22.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBoqm0WKsd_-cW4r-myOxwkxb1E2tRlmQfdDyOHrBePxVgVZpYVaVjsjCey-6QQt-LeZWX_O36MNfwLpKAMfOFIbmk7UHDKW_K7BAssEV0RibQB1TdccI0P13aV3RBxIBLGKxWM8RR3b4/s320/22.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Cops are killed and Phyllis is shotgunned to death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Paula now inhabits a jacket of stark chic leather…</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Paula gutshots Sheila, complains of stomach cramps, and is
apprehended by the police. Doctors at
the city hospital discover that the maryjane murderess is pregnant. She gives birth to a daughter, but faithful to
the archetypes of sweatyhand soap opera, dies in childbirth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Judge Raymond Clara rules that Mother and Father Parkins
are responsible for the sadistic behaviors of Daughter Paula, and are not fit
to raise the newborn orphan. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The State cannot risk more dead cops and globes thrown out
the school window. Judge Clara seizes
upon a popular phrase employed by today’s youth as the mantra of his
argument… “So what?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Juvenile delinquency is rooted in “adult
delinquency.” The audience may accept
that this is true, if only that <i>The
Violent Years</i> opens with the courtroom portrait of George Washington, remembered
in history as a rebel leader and founding Father. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpY6r40wjFoLtivDA62lfiKJxRQeP0E8hhX6eMMQqYT8_kq3rrh_IdxNIEvukhy270szMNA-zxYJ3swaE0Yw4f7KK6-gQMeU1O9ABiPAqv3vAOQAbXn-jRd4F7OvE9BCB-FGB76o9m8bE/s1600/27.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpY6r40wjFoLtivDA62lfiKJxRQeP0E8hhX6eMMQqYT8_kq3rrh_IdxNIEvukhy270szMNA-zxYJ3swaE0Yw4f7KK6-gQMeU1O9ABiPAqv3vAOQAbXn-jRd4F7OvE9BCB-FGB76o9m8bE/s320/27.jpg" width="224" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Judge Clara underpins his legal case as if the American Court is
the American Church, and defers to the holy precedent
of “the Back-to-God Movement,” which should inspire “higher moral values.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Writer Ed Wood, Jr. cream-stuffs the movie with guilty
acts, and must firmly bookend the tale with a moral lesson. The concepts of
anti-communism and love of the Deity are treated as the desk chairs and
textbooks in the marauded high school classroom. Humans are born evil and without the right
family and political order will endure the violent years. As the city doctor explains, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">"These aren't kids, they're morons..."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">One pictures Ed Wood in Liberacesque form over a
hock-bought typewriter, giggling at the
semantics of Judge Clara, and not only because the actor I. Stanford Jolley is
unable to read his lines without looking at the script in front of him as if
legal pages. Ideas peep through the
bottle-blonde bangs of the writer’s mind. </span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Judge Clara tidies up the social and spiritual
implications of “good citizenship” with bloodless Y-chromo supremacism; the
Judge also understands the patriotic pressures of money, and warrants that making
parents financially liable for the damage caused by their children will spur
the scruples of adult delinquents. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Promised a new future, the baby is signed-off as a ward of
the State, a “more responsible agency,” and wails in the shadows of institution
bars… doomed.</span></div>
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McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-12317427866630061862012-11-12T17:42:00.003-08:002012-11-12T17:42:36.194-08:00BOOKS. THEY MAKE GREAT MOVIES.This sign for Roku, which data-streaming device Shine Box regularly uses to view motion picture, is down the block from the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, which 1941 building was built in the shape of an open book.<br />
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<br />McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-71971261999907178022012-08-14T21:04:00.002-07:002012-08-14T21:06:50.228-07:00Jujube ManifestoJared Diamond, the biogeographer and psychologist of evolution, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/what-makes-countries-rich-or-poor/">wrote in <i>The New York Review of Books</i></a> about a new book, <i>Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty</i> by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. <br />
<br />
In his review, Diamond
discusses the different psychic effects of colonized societies.
Countries with rich resources were "extractive economic institutions,"
where European forces could get away with exploitative abuses to "drain
wealth" of the local people, like the diamond trade in Zimbabwe or
former banana republic Guatemala. Otherwise:<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUWM9kEeSx7h41P0ZzOSPKbdCsmtJilPTZ9-lVYRH2StUvr-jHAdX_1eurDlPan7Ksoe7tTyIo0Vo1r0jCUjB-RrkjsWd_qyTyk8tNjdET2K7-kpZLioA5QurxtiWzZBqQkSWZO_7vJow/s1600/godzilla.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUWM9kEeSx7h41P0ZzOSPKbdCsmtJilPTZ9-lVYRH2StUvr-jHAdX_1eurDlPan7Ksoe7tTyIo0Vo1r0jCUjB-RrkjsWd_qyTyk8tNjdET2K7-kpZLioA5QurxtiWzZBqQkSWZO_7vJow/s320/godzilla.jpg" width="320" /></a><b> </b><br />
<b>"... in formerly poor countries with sparse native
populations, such as Costa Rica and Australia, European settlers had to
work themselves and developed institutional incentives rewarding work.
When the former colonies achieved independence, they variously inherited
either the extractive institutions that coerced the masses to produce
wealth for dictators and the elite, or else institutions by which the
government shared power and gave people incentives to pursue. The
extractive institutions retarded economic development, but incentivizing
institutions promoted it."</b><br />
<br />
In <i>Bambi v. Godzilla</i> (2007) a <a href="http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932974?refCatId=1010">book about Hollywood moviemaking</a>, the playwright and <i>belle lettres</i>
punchliner David Mamet applies a similar idea of "extractive" versus
"incentivizing" to the moviegoing audience. Mamet says that people keep
going to bad movies the way that Diamond suggests oppressed populations
fell victim to the pillage of Western mercantilism:<br />
<br />
<b>"The
very vacuousness of these films is reassuring, for they ratify for the
viewer the presence of a repressive mechanism and offer momentary
reprieve from anxiety with this thought: 'Enough money spent can cure
anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of
wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage.
You must be <i>somebody</i>." </b><br />
<br />
This might seem to evidence a habit of "retarded economic development." But instead, the "hour and a half of garbage" becomes the extractivist's incentivizer for moviegoers' to pay $13 to pursue the next <i>Twilight</i> movie, or new Johnny Depp vehicle, in which advanced critics say Depp delivers.<br />
<br />
Our food ration is the $15 pulled from our wages for soda and popcorn. <br />
<br />McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-10048560815723902522012-07-23T21:39:00.002-07:002012-07-23T21:46:23.843-07:00Alps(2011) Giorgos Lanthimos. Cinema Village.<br />
<br />
The Shine Box went to see <i>Alps</i> the weekend that audiences flocked to <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>, which smash opening was blighted by the Aurora mass killing spree. <i>Alps </i>might provide a corollary to the gruesome events.<br />
<br />
In the movie, a group of disparate citizens form a secret group who impersonates dead strangers, in the effort of providing solace to the surviving family members who are not yet ready to accept the loss. The group is not made up of professional actors, but paramedics, gym teachers, and truck drivers. These amateurs reenact key episodes in the life of the deceased, with the participation of the mournful mothers and fathers and boyfriends. It may give a healing feel of eternity. The families pays for the charitable service after an initial four free sessions.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVnWikalrdY6dgFjiCUFL0-GcP1ytl1HYYLHvQ3PKvL_J1fTRXRsHLw1MM_hR8XchPJJDm_Ii7ujqHf6sqpFw9Mkiu5eIIh_5wENmgQrNQBT-2TSqVl-GEtcCyimq0GqNE1bM7AiwKyWc/s1600/Alps1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVnWikalrdY6dgFjiCUFL0-GcP1ytl1HYYLHvQ3PKvL_J1fTRXRsHLw1MM_hR8XchPJJDm_Ii7ujqHf6sqpFw9Mkiu5eIIh_5wENmgQrNQBT-2TSqVl-GEtcCyimq0GqNE1bM7AiwKyWc/s320/Alps1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Monte Rosa dances for father.<i> Alps</i> (2011).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The premise of <i>Alps </i>seems to mimic the news coverage of the events in Colorado. Profiles of the innocents, the grieving reports of family and friends, the assemblage media narrative of biting and bittersweet memory. It is an imperfect reenactment which serves to dramatize the mystery behind the vicious happenstance of life. <br />
<br />
The macabre acting troup calls themselves, “Alps,” after the Swiss mountain range. According to the head of the group, who goes by the codename “Mont Blanc,” the Alps are a symbol of nature too monumental to be replaced, but powerful enough to replace nature.<br />
<br />
Don’t the movies act the same way?McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-12561303072775010662012-07-23T19:37:00.001-07:002012-07-23T19:41:40.331-07:00Colorado and CamdenAmong other civic horror shows, Camden, NJ was once the site of an unprecedented mass murder akin to the shootings in Aurora, CO last weekend.<br />
<br />
In 1949, a gun freak and loser shut-in open fired on a series of innocent people whom he believed were persecuting him. Read about the details <a href="http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/howard_unruh/index.html">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Like the Colorado sicko, the Camden shooter did not off himself at the end of his spree and was taken into custody. He lived into his eighties and died in an insane asylum, though continually insisted he was not an irrational actor.<br />
<br />
This weekend's headline killings involve the pop situationalism of the movies. According to the 2009 <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/new_jersey/64889962.html">obituary of the Camden killer</a>, "he later told police that he had spent the previous evening sitting through three showings of a double feature and had thought that actress Barbara Stanwyck was one of his hated neighbors."<br />
<br />
None of this proves any influence of the movies on madness, but might demonstrate a singular disgusting aberration in the impressionability of the mass mind.McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-84538945049266143992012-07-11T21:23:00.001-07:002012-07-11T21:30:47.834-07:00Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter<span style="font-family: Georgia;">(2012) Timur Bekmambetov, Regal Battery Park.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">A gimmicky concept played for no laughs and
too much CGI action, with in-jokes lost in the algorithmic mess like the one
about Stephen Douglas courting a young Mary Todd before Lincoln would both steal Mary away and <a href="http://www.illinoiscivilwar.org/debates.html">historically debate the
Illinois Senator</a> over sundry issues like the economy of slaves. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Abe Lincoln is a blur of impulse and his
team of freedman, store clerk and good dracula are given little expressive
huddle. Mary Todd Winstead provides an
actorly highlight, as does as the aging makeup for Benjamin Walker as he
transforms into fiftysomething President Lincoln, if only because the makeup is
much much better than that applied to Leonardo DiCaprio in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">J. Edgar</i>, an American historical figure who also hunted rebel vampires.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vHP2z6yV73Vgynn96Iyg8BuZsp8YwKoUrMeJJjeXtHNSGZJhI9F3SzV9kOR53uyxZcQIiLO_nWxl-0NczurFL24eQhp_iwxgtrJOcxnit8OcrKiHpgigHTBJIjl3_UpujDmZBJCmuNk/s1600/Abe-Lincoln-4.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vHP2z6yV73Vgynn96Iyg8BuZsp8YwKoUrMeJJjeXtHNSGZJhI9F3SzV9kOR53uyxZcQIiLO_nWxl-0NczurFL24eQhp_iwxgtrJOcxnit8OcrKiHpgigHTBJIjl3_UpujDmZBJCmuNk/s400/Abe-Lincoln-4.jpg" width="218" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> The movie bleaches out the historiological
premise that seems might be a crux in the book, but focus-grouped out of the
adaptation, that the antebellum South is a vampire haven and the slave trade
exists to provide the undead a source of food. The Civil War is thus fought to
destroy this bloodsucking empire.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">The
premise, like the action sequences, is glossed over without much gloss, other
than a thin matricide-revenge plot we have all seen before. As a
result, it is probable that the movie has alienated many movie audiences,
including Southerners, blacks, history buffs, and teenagers seeking cool
special effects.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Hollywood</span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> has become effectual
at providing movies that are everything but.
Looks like a movie, sounds like a movie, but by the time you have eaten
all your popcorn and slurped your soda, doesn’t taste like a movie.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">In the mid-1960s, Allan Katzman, founder of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The East Village
Other</i>, a radical biweekly newspaper, <a href="http://www.trussel.com/lyman/brackman.htm">described mainstream news</a>
as a similar fake:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">“The papers of pseudo events, news leaks
and press releases, offend no one; they take no moral stand. They are just...
neutral. They furnish our boring and repetitive lives with boring and
repetitive 'news.’"</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Substitute “news” for “movies” and the
predicament of the Hollywood multiplex is
answered.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Playwright and moviemaker David Mamet</span><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bambi v. Godzilla</i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, uses
the metaphor of politics to explicate the con game of Hollywood
movies. The government makes “periodic declarations”
which “assuage fully half of the populace absent any correspondence between
that verbiage and the government’s actions or, indeed, between them and the
plausible. The administration, like the
sitcom of old, has discovered that, given an immobilized audience, a
presentation of the form is sufficient entertainment.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Mamet argues that “big and bad films,
summer films, blockbusters have similarly become the laugh track to our
national experiment... we are reassured by their presence rather than their
content or operations.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">As a result, the moviegoer buys a ticket,
and then might as well go home to watch TV.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> </span></div>McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-17003131671049683242012-07-04T13:22:00.001-07:002012-07-07T23:06:18.935-07:00Commando(1985) Mark L. Lester. Tribeca Y, June 22, 2012. <br />
<br />
The Shine Box likes to veer from use of the superlative statement. But <i>Commando </i>may be the best action movie ever made. The acting, writing and directing never flinch. A soundtrack of 80s steel drum and horns, lots of bare muscle Arnold, setpieces of supremely staged ass-kicking, and skanky macho dialogue by highly individuated scumbag psycho bad guys. <br />
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<br />
Shine Box saw the movie at a recent screening in the <a href="http://www.92y.org/Tribeca/Film/Basic-Cable-Classics.aspx">Basic Cable Classics</a> series at Tribeca Y. Director Mark L. Lester appeared after the screening for an interview and Q&A.<br />
<br />
L. Lester said the movie was rushed into release after the shoot and cobbled together in just four days by a crackerjack team of editors. These proved to be perfect working conditions. The final showdown between former black-ops buddies Matrix and Bennett was supposed to take place after a boat chase, but because of the budget, they improv’d the engine room and pipe impalement. “Let off some steam, Bennett.”<br />
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<br />
John Matrix demonstrates the one-man army which the American military has made of him, and is later pulled out of retirement to take care of the blowback. Matrix is from East Germany, where the Family was the State, and rock and roll was subversive. Matrix reads Creem magazine. “Maybe they were right.”<br />
<br />
When Bennett steals his daughter, Jenny, Matrix disregards all loyalty to law and order to get her back. He uses a bulldozer to break into a weapons supply store, beats up cops, and kidnaps a woman, Rae Dawn Chong, who is tough and pretty with spry comic timing.<br />
<br />
The fight scenes are sugared with taunting between the trained killers – “I eat Green Berets for breakfast, and right now I am very hungry...” All scenes in Commando end with a punchline, whether a quip, a maiming of multiple assailants, or Arnold’s hulking bicep as he carries a giant log and chainsaw down the mountain.
“You think I could smell them coming?” asks the wounded soldier. Says Matrix, “I did.”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3MOTkLkCsLP3HjxiW24w61ZvMmYI8vLdgMPc0KMioUaQ_QiFik170NMbQklSSfPtEckMunIq8MGczv8t3RHu6_xSLj8DwpvRW2lL-fMDFFmw9Ykid_DgjNeEDDmhnY1mEjvL5Z3qkm2Q/s1600/commando1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3MOTkLkCsLP3HjxiW24w61ZvMmYI8vLdgMPc0KMioUaQ_QiFik170NMbQklSSfPtEckMunIq8MGczv8t3RHu6_xSLj8DwpvRW2lL-fMDFFmw9Ykid_DgjNeEDDmhnY1mEjvL5Z3qkm2Q/s320/commando1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-75364767433476030262012-06-27T23:18:00.004-07:002012-07-03T14:46:22.091-07:00Terror in A Texas Town<span style="font-family: Georgia;">(1958) Joseph E. Lewis.</span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">A Swedish immigrant defends the Texas territory that is
rightly his from a Long Horn Boss Tweed.
It may seem unlikely territory for a Scandinavian whaler, but America is both welcoming and
prejudiced to everybody. The paradox is clear
at the final showdown, where justice is served by the thrust of a harpoon over
the draw of a sixshooter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">With no gun and no attitude, George Hansen
(Sterling Hayden) is first introduced as a bit of a simp. George's father Sven Hansen has retired from the high
seas to the deserts of Texas,
where he has been murdered and robbed of his land. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Actor Sterling Hayden wrote a late-career
sailor adventure novel called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Voyager</i>
(1976), and the salt and madness of the sea inform the character of young
Hansen, who is the sort of
troubled big man which Sterling Hayden has played in movies with such ironic
brawn, like the the impotent General Jack Ripper in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dr. Strangelove</i> (1968), the bigot NYC cop executed by the mob in a
Bronx pasta joint in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Godfather</i>
(1972), and the whiny tankard-swigging beach house writer Roger Wade in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Long Goodbye </i>(1974).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">In this Texas town, the saloon is empty and without
bluster. The exchange of dialogue is slow and pauses are like winds in the
arroyo. The town sheriff is a flunky and argues that the town is civilized and
upholds the law, yet disregards George Hansen’s proof of probate records and
urges him to get a lawyer to defend his claims.
“You’re not in some foreign country now where a man has no rights at
all…. You’ve got a right to justice.” But justice slings guns in the court room. It is the sort of gringo jingo not so
long ago jabbered by a migrant Texan in the Oval Office. Founding fathers argued likewise at their
both best and worst to manipulate concepts in favor of greed and power. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Yet rancho ward boss Ed McNeil is not so
powerful. He is obese, smarmy, corrupt, rapacious, and disregards the sacred unwritten law of the South against burning a man's barn and killing his livestock. </span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5O9JzAy1SyaBIoNT5Z0oVv_wr209yWWsXd77-eKM5VWNb_Q9k9ZNjcE7zlO6myAv7cun99LM-2Izq4nfMayd54BMSQ2cCjE9TuuDYuk-YspuV23VwEZhOgVsVuMauNJagfUqTqWAMao/s1600/terrortexas2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5O9JzAy1SyaBIoNT5Z0oVv_wr209yWWsXd77-eKM5VWNb_Q9k9ZNjcE7zlO6myAv7cun99LM-2Izq4nfMayd54BMSQ2cCjE9TuuDYuk-YspuV23VwEZhOgVsVuMauNJagfUqTqWAMao/s320/terrortexas2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Like a WPA photo, farmers look on as their property is burned up by badmen. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">His victims are honest farmers who do not want to disobey the law when baited to by the brigandage of McNeil, but who also do not want to give up without a fight. McNeil ties up the idea of justice like the tails of a rat king. He hires an aging gunfighter to do the
dirty work of clearing people off his stolen property. The assassin, who wears all black from hat to
boots, is eager to stay in the game.
Johnny Crale has lost the use of his shooting hand but has since relearned to blast with
accuracy using his left, and can draw on five chandelier candles with exact
precision. But his marksmanship is naught because he is only a killer of unarmed men. Johnny preys on the weak so is drawn to the life of the
freebooter. There is money to be made
for a hopeless cripple with a good trigger finger and cold conscience. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">The true advance of civilization is upon
the frontier, and a new era makes way where the law of the gun loses to the law
of the speculator. New immigrant settlements, “popping up like jackrabbits,” must
be taught eradication. The Swede George
Hansen befriends Mexican sharecropper Jose Mirada, whose family is expecting a third
child and victimized by Boss McNeil. Terror
is played out as the political act of violence against innocent civilians in
the interest of acquiring property. It is no surprise that the script is credited on IMDB as written by blacklisted scribe Dalton Trumbo. The
man in black, a villainous icon of dime westerns, is a terrorist. George Hansen shoulders the brutality of
civil liberties as he does his father’s harpoon, with the whole town in tow
eager for the spectacle of blood.</span></div>
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<br /></div>McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-88085979932425948612012-05-27T19:19:00.003-07:002015-04-01T11:40:32.945-07:00Goodfellas(1990) Martin Scorsese. <br />
<br />
The Shine Box spent some hours Memorial Day weekend working at the <a href="http://museumoftheamericangangster.org/">Museum of the American Gangster</a>, in the East Village, where the collection includes items donated by Henry Hill, whose <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-time-i-hurt-mobster-henry-hill-s-feelings">life story</a> is told in <a href="http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201010/goodfellas-making-of-behind-the-scenes-interview-scorsese-deniro"><i>Goodfellas</i></a>, the greatest movie about the mob.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8aep9OYmgnmYE4QfHz9gLglKRf5t2TyOd-7w27mzu69hcfxzcCHpwtrEqfHvMFKznfwtSY15vX63ltfFQsxAVLl3kyL3GTgktZpF0qcEFeYoVhyqPYFCdHJiBi4YhdOfcoLDRp-sMCuA/s1600/Henry+Hill+sportjacket+and+shirt,+Luhftansa+heist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8aep9OYmgnmYE4QfHz9gLglKRf5t2TyOd-7w27mzu69hcfxzcCHpwtrEqfHvMFKznfwtSY15vX63ltfFQsxAVLl3kyL3GTgktZpF0qcEFeYoVhyqPYFCdHJiBi4YhdOfcoLDRp-sMCuA/s320/Henry+Hill+sportjacket+and+shirt,+Luhftansa+heist.jpg" height="320" width="203" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry Hill, sportjacket & shirt, worn during 1978 Lufthansa heist.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvoOFeqyguPHwAbkICkKTEdKofuMUMkeJfNSR_gytB1vXIjL4DfLiM72D3vTZel9o3HvoGj_mP4FDzSMAj-kaiAnkTPmupVu93DPAvXpDWpCjoccDijE4pN288Hcz4xLBQBnf10GcnBc/s1600/HH+painting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvoOFeqyguPHwAbkICkKTEdKofuMUMkeJfNSR_gytB1vXIjL4DfLiM72D3vTZel9o3HvoGj_mP4FDzSMAj-kaiAnkTPmupVu93DPAvXpDWpCjoccDijE4pN288Hcz4xLBQBnf10GcnBc/s320/HH+painting.jpg" height="242" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry Hill, original painting.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh24Xku8eF1Vb0Y_WjP-vqPJjtV7F9h6zRaRJQbK9q8Yo2FThrBOpXiZlX9FGyKkCBxITcnCIRyihMCc9btfeMNlXllrRIlpOo5PXmlBmI1cwOIQq7_fUN8VKq07M0Gdgl-GznaRBJvHM4/s1600/HH+most+talkative,+yearbook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh24Xku8eF1Vb0Y_WjP-vqPJjtV7F9h6zRaRJQbK9q8Yo2FThrBOpXiZlX9FGyKkCBxITcnCIRyihMCc9btfeMNlXllrRIlpOo5PXmlBmI1cwOIQq7_fUN8VKq07M0Gdgl-GznaRBJvHM4/s320/HH+most+talkative,+yearbook.jpg" height="318" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry Hill senior yearbook, voted "Most Talkative."</td></tr>
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<br />McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00116041027439688031noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-60658022515612107322012-03-11T22:16:00.167-07:002016-06-25T16:59:01.408-07:00AB and BC of NYC<i>Bill Cunningham New York </i>(2010) dir. Richard Press.<i> </i><br />
<i>Kitchen Confidential</i> (2000) by Anthony Bourdain.<br />
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In New York City, it is a tradition to want to eat good and look good. Food and fashion are big business and big myth. Even King Kong wanted to look good and eat good. They chained Kong to a Broadway stage on an empty stomach. It was Kong’s big debut in showbiz and they made him look bad. The great ape broke free and snacked on a few people. Like all visitors to NYC, he sought its tallest building, in Kong’s day the tallest in the world.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>King Kong food truck.</b></td></tr>
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Tourists want to know the places to shop and eat. New Yorkers pride themselves on knowing the best places to do both and none two are the same. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdeT4n4oo-jhuj-gq9napY4-GUgkuzSsFmkwBj-enXxtNocWfHJXqylLIlo1BWB_8mZG11txO_Ue0sdDk8YP7p2icbifd0_7ZAAMnvGFNOrUKs8wUHefYOK6_q5yU9ahPFYSepHVTc2iCs/s1600/Fashion-Obsession-of-New-Yo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdeT4n4oo-jhuj-gq9napY4-GUgkuzSsFmkwBj-enXxtNocWfHJXqylLIlo1BWB_8mZG11txO_Ue0sdDk8YP7p2icbifd0_7ZAAMnvGFNOrUKs8wUHefYOK6_q5yU9ahPFYSepHVTc2iCs/s320/Fashion-Obsession-of-New-Yo.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Midtown storefront (2012).</b></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Old sign on East 23rd St.</b></td></tr>
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Anthony Bourdain, the chef, has become a paragon of NYC food, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/style/bill-on-bill.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">Bill Cunningham</a>, the photographer, an legend of NYC fashion. Bourdain is a media figure who made his bones with <i>Kitchen Confidential</i> (2000), a memoir of Tony’s “Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.” Bill Cunningham, at 82 years old, is self-effacing, picaresque, and the subject of <i>Bill Cunningham New York</i> (2011) a feature documentary that sold-out weekly premiere screenings at Film Forum in Greenwich Village.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKzmrtrfldV0TE20sygI0cMlbYIZWOAJpEWzKG8pZjHxGnh8-IIs9vlAbfSrEcOG2Ir2rgOEQPXnnECUld9Gv0gLsLfpUSzKQENly_KVy4JtzqdEfgI91cIUIYz1Btv_vV9_Dhvf6fScm4/s1600/bourdain+with+cig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKzmrtrfldV0TE20sygI0cMlbYIZWOAJpEWzKG8pZjHxGnh8-IIs9vlAbfSrEcOG2Ir2rgOEQPXnnECUld9Gv0gLsLfpUSzKQENly_KVy4JtzqdEfgI91cIUIYz1Btv_vV9_Dhvf6fScm4/s400/bourdain+with+cig.jpg" width="236" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Tony</b></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgslVrDX__enBKFCn_mmfIoA-it7lJ6DNIxksqu3-hywyG1ltzhSsj0vN8mM6xyoBmHttY90iDrrj2CuYsUvi6QpS4e1tmTtRyiYt-6fEauA1pAvtOUu_3R8vdPsmfc0hZL8Exw3znBEA45/s1600/bill+on+bike.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgslVrDX__enBKFCn_mmfIoA-it7lJ6DNIxksqu3-hywyG1ltzhSsj0vN8mM6xyoBmHttY90iDrrj2CuYsUvi6QpS4e1tmTtRyiYt-6fEauA1pAvtOUu_3R8vdPsmfc0hZL8Exw3znBEA45/s320/bill+on+bike.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Bill</b></td></tr>
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The business of eating in New York City has long garnered a ripsnort and street-glam. In the early decades before the Civil War, the food scene emerging in the buggy-paths of harbor wards splashed squibby headlines. "Restaurants and their owners - and sometimes even their waiters - received the kind of coverage accorded to politicians in other cities" (<i>Appetite City</i>, William Grimes, 2009). Anthony Bourdain, as a blustery and vulgar chain-smoking chronicler of dimebag attitude and torn-jeans work ethic, plugs fitly into the trends. A gourmand executive of high-end restaurants, Tony describes in unsavory terms the culture of chefdom, the wholehearted betrayal, the manic ass-kissing, the self-involved cruelty of staff, douchebag moneymen, and fellow cooks:<br />
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<b>“Generally speaking, American cooks are a lazy, undisciplined and, worst of all, high-maintenance lot, annoyingly opinionated, possessed of egos requiring constant stroking and tune-ups and, as members of a privileged and wealthy population, unused to the kind of ‘disrespect’ a busy chef is inclined to dish out.” </b><br />
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Yet Tony’s restaurant is on Park Avenue, <i>Brasserie Les Halles</i>, which harks to the French roots of New York food and ego, back when all things urbane were Parisian, from the 1920s Village café to the Broadway lobster palace to the bonbon boxes at Guerin’s pastry shop on Lower Broadway a hundred years before World War I. And plenty of junkies in the Depression hustled change from the Fancy Dans outside the franco-fried Knickerbocker Hotel on <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/index.php/forty-deuce/">Forty Deuce</a>. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=474017&t=w" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=474017&t=w" height="320" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Hotel Knickerbocker (NYPL).</b></td></tr>
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Bourdain is a successful luxy chef, but writes books about his kitchen grunt work in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJPrucLsrZQ">dirtybird Fear City 1970s and 80s</a>, and hosts a TV show to demonstrate he can bullshoot with beleaguered Hudson Valley fisherman and hitch rides from Romanian pig farmers. Tony has eaten porcupine needles in Vietnam and wild squirrel in Arkansas, but does not serve these dishes at his restaurant.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbO2_dJA-qHYE0opCvAtAemQE5SI3HGkMkI-KJscQ37HojC_GLKXH0z1sGCveDIuIVFdOvH_BkIJRtWGRcDERECplPja8ZH-YMyl-o5MJ0UGUjezhucei5lQn6wTRJa28qODW6XJRXBTDR/s1600/tony+in+staten+island.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbO2_dJA-qHYE0opCvAtAemQE5SI3HGkMkI-KJscQ37HojC_GLKXH0z1sGCveDIuIVFdOvH_BkIJRtWGRcDERECplPja8ZH-YMyl-o5MJ0UGUjezhucei5lQn6wTRJa28qODW6XJRXBTDR/s320/tony+in+staten+island.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Bourdain in Staten Island.</b></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGxq7VeobhCYV2QzO5bfvrGMt1rUYLV5EXgtuhcqAP3OMut0XOhwmrPZUVKnMR05ryIy-QzXV_Ci6oeNekLfoJ_GRae2RjisGW31RGKEw304IQITnCP8Ec7XrJ51h6Q-AiMdfW7EJrKUfF/s1600/tony+in+beirut.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGxq7VeobhCYV2QzO5bfvrGMt1rUYLV5EXgtuhcqAP3OMut0XOhwmrPZUVKnMR05ryIy-QzXV_Ci6oeNekLfoJ_GRae2RjisGW31RGKEw304IQITnCP8Ec7XrJ51h6Q-AiMdfW7EJrKUfF/s320/tony+in+beirut.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Bourdain in Beirut.</b></td></tr>
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Bourdain survives a rite of passage in the kitchen of the Rainbow Room, when young Tony is preparing a crespelle toscanna with mushrooms, tongue, ham, spinach, turkey and bechamel, and chef de garde-manger Luis tries again to shove his fist up Tony’s ass. Tony swivels and jams a meat fork deep in the hand of Luis. This gains Tony respect in the kitchen.<br />
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In assembling new kitchen staff, Tony poaches from restaurants around town, comparing himself to Lee Marvin mining the stockade in <i>The Dirty Dozen</i>. He needs trust, skill and experience, and exploits the rampant desperation and lack of loyalty in the industry. Bourdain’s run on city-wide staff is akin to the sundry cajolings effected by Rockefeller Center to acquire tenants in the 1930s, taking over leases and offering buyouts and sweetheart deals. Rock Center needed to fill its 8 million square feet of office space and exploited the anxiety of the Depression, when Central Park was a shanty town and foxy golddiggers worked the Boom Boom Room. It is the merciless, indulgent, rampaging way to start a business in New York, and it pays off. Tony is hired by Tuscan chef warlord Pino Luongo, and an anonymous caller tips off Pino that watch out, Bourdain is a lowlife scumbag. But Pino knows that important people invite wrath as a sign of character. The rat has done Tony a favor. <br />
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Like any object subject to the mass mind, the industry of eating and of clothes has spawned a culture of desperation, nonsense and snobbery. At the far reaches of fraught times, dances of death occur. They are bright in their electricity and many millions want to see it happen, or pretend to participate, often from the cold nervous surface of the tour bus and television. They go to New York, where to be successful one must often harbor a low regard for those who sign one’s paychecks – like real estate lawyers and art world artists. The city offers money the way the river offered peace to the weekend camper rape-victims in the movie <i>Deliverance</i>. But it is easy to generalize about types of people when home is a population of almost 8.4 million (or 8.1 according to the 2010 Census, which analysts say <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125811666">Brooklyn hipsters are to blame</a>). <br />
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Bill Cunningham is paid to follow the nightlife of tastemakers he would seem to disavow. Bill is a man mortified by elite treatment, and wears a blue janitor’s smock which he buys routinely and cheaply at the hardware store, and his meager workaholic diet favors sausage and egg sandwiches at the Stage Star Deli on West 55th Street. His $5.99 poncho rips and Bill repairs it with duct tape. Bill lives like a spartan civil rights activist from the 1960s, when he gained renowned for shooting pictures of the Central Park “Be-In.” His apartment is one of the last above Carnegie Hall, where the rent control is equal to a sublet in East New York, Brooklyn. Down the hall lives 96 year-old Edith Sherman, the “Duchess of Carnegie Hall.” Bill and the Duchess are from a time when West 57th Street was true New York boho territory. For a 1978 photo book, Bill shot the Duchess in period clothing at sites around town. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT12ou9zCEqyxEV-EU3tzDiGvA8Li-B9P6e0a9v9DzCSegJ7O2hf6gqI5Skb3rEnPuXl0701utXhEZhQYc5ppBZXBQ0-nMRhfcF1r_dEqVT_XXEJYTdqc8dLBLuK_uX9VPjYXsQRf7Y0LC/s1600/Duchess+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT12ou9zCEqyxEV-EU3tzDiGvA8Li-B9P6e0a9v9DzCSegJ7O2hf6gqI5Skb3rEnPuXl0701utXhEZhQYc5ppBZXBQ0-nMRhfcF1r_dEqVT_XXEJYTdqc8dLBLuK_uX9VPjYXsQRf7Y0LC/s320/Duchess+2.jpg" width="217" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The Duchess at Alwyn Court, W. 58th Street & 7th Ave.</b></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo2Oeg1ulPnZLS3_rmLoHdqYLpDmEM0ZBkq0vFdlRKdncXf-BZ9EngBZOgtAYdbYv7JyVd6ni9yAF0GvAln5kDl-l0KRyqu5P26EjnDzpcvZgK21L9Qjh_Jd2zMdIr2NYLqA_tEPZ8rq_B/s1600/Facades,+Bill+and+Duchess.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo2Oeg1ulPnZLS3_rmLoHdqYLpDmEM0ZBkq0vFdlRKdncXf-BZ9EngBZOgtAYdbYv7JyVd6ni9yAF0GvAln5kDl-l0KRyqu5P26EjnDzpcvZgK21L9Qjh_Jd2zMdIr2NYLqA_tEPZ8rq_B/s320/Facades,+Bill+and+Duchess.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Facades </i>(1978), Bill & The Duchess.</b></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6eGQfGsMmnS6oBCIIQKFQV9LvYHOZomkRCbpD9VfDyjzkrTIolpVrKY7C7ggKKcwl-uor9hQMSb43YPvpF7BpKSPyC_N7z31x79x_Fy_RXnqSeg5jhsvfUkknrz4CVbgFyB4nX5WXxDg/s1600/Duchess+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6eGQfGsMmnS6oBCIIQKFQV9LvYHOZomkRCbpD9VfDyjzkrTIolpVrKY7C7ggKKcwl-uor9hQMSb43YPvpF7BpKSPyC_N7z31x79x_Fy_RXnqSeg5jhsvfUkknrz4CVbgFyB4nX5WXxDg/s320/Duchess+1.jpg" width="207" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The Duchess at the Chrysler Building.</b></td></tr>
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Bill sleeps on a cot surrounded by metal file cabinets where his photo negatives are archived, and where he hangs his shirts. “He’s got a tiny little place,” says the Duchess, “it’s nothing.” Carnegie Hall has since evicted its flash residents, and the salon where the Duchess once held court is an office of telemarketers.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFHjlm010i8NV1OZ1-2xCrge6G7SM6InGytoIhVkHYcMBSJ2veT9QsZJ3jXd22dfSmikP4Eu2yBwwmwxrEcSt-q7dWTPidxW7EIbZJ0AKm18PGrrs2CQqBQuqN-t75BkOXp8mLupAPxolN/s1600/IMG_8911.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFHjlm010i8NV1OZ1-2xCrge6G7SM6InGytoIhVkHYcMBSJ2veT9QsZJ3jXd22dfSmikP4Eu2yBwwmwxrEcSt-q7dWTPidxW7EIbZJ0AKm18PGrrs2CQqBQuqN-t75BkOXp8mLupAPxolN/s320/IMG_8911.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Carnegie Hall, 2011.</b></td></tr>
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J. Edgar Hoover might have investigated Bill as a communist. Working at <i>Details </i>magazine Bill insists he never got paid, and he refused to cash checks from Conde Nast. “I don’t touch money.” But Bill is infatuated by the beauty industry of Paris and New York. Two blocks from Carnegie Hall, the <a href="http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20111115/REAL_ESTATE/111119926">highest retail rents in the world</a> are currently paid by the purveyors of raiment and jewels who pay Bill’s rent to take pictures. The irony is <i>c’est la vie</i> on Fifth Avenue, or <i>laissez-faire</i> on Beaver Street. Bill remembers the City of Lights in the 1960s at the Yves St. Laurent show, when it was only one, two, three photographers, and not the carnivorous melee of image-hounds out to snap any celebrity in heels. <br />
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Bill has a New York accent with a twinge of haughty New England Wasp. It is the voice of the 1920s rung by fifty years of life conducted on the streets of New York City, raised Catholic in Massachusetts and spending each Sunday in a midtown church, thinking about ladies’ hats. Bill once ran a column on hatmaking for a West Village mag, but quit after the editors slighted his pictures as campy and jesting rather than Bill’s intention of raw sharp captures of people on the street. Soon the fashion industry took over Soho and needed credibility so invited MTV to shoot the first <i>Real World</i>. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Bill with hats (<a href="http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/bill-cunningham-a-rare-birds-feathers/">NY Times</a>)</b></td></tr>
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Bill is a New York eye, the way the city loves to look at itself. But in typical NYC style, Bill limits his canvas to certain blocks that stand in for the whole world. 57th & Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Soho and Times Square, named for the newspaper that employs Bill and built the 4th tallest building in town as new headquarters. New York has a habit of using small parts of itself as a stunt double for the universe, as if to speak to all, insecure, glorious, hateful, and irresistible. This New York clings to life, soon vanquished in believing that 10 blocks are 10 miles, and needs photos of it, traces of the city that only make a neighborhood by Bill’s camera and bike. Bill enjoys mega cross-sections of traffic, despite the perils of cycling down Broadway. It’s a big city but a small town. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgECrx-wxJ2DYFaLF5Iv_YxZM1leHs4kjOm0IB7vuzr0RoMkW-Isy5rjgk1q1GNid31B30LraYn0Pc5WvRHH79TQR9gzcgb_oOa34I7vD2i8_9gWj5YrvUv8GYTdOPVt0ZMRkoGCqKYTqg-/s1600/bill+and+ray+kelly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgECrx-wxJ2DYFaLF5Iv_YxZM1leHs4kjOm0IB7vuzr0RoMkW-Isy5rjgk1q1GNid31B30LraYn0Pc5WvRHH79TQR9gzcgb_oOa34I7vD2i8_9gWj5YrvUv8GYTdOPVt0ZMRkoGCqKYTqg-/s320/bill+and+ray+kelly.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Bill and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.</b></td></tr>
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Bill cites his colleague, Japanese stylist Rei Kawakubo, as foreseeing that women's fashion of the 1980s was inspired by the look of “the bag lady in New York,” that areas in the city "is close to Medieval Europe." There were plenty of ladies under Mayor Ed Koch scraping cheap livelihood and keeping up new spins on their styles from the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, pushing carts, smoking Pall Malls, and wearing enviably fabulous sunglasses.<br />
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Bill seems to have had slight sex life, possibly celibate, and when asked about the intimate relationships in his life, Bill pauses to let pass the urge to sob. Bill is surrounded by hot people, a venue where sex is a grave stake in the game. Yet Bill is not a man who is unstimulated. He habitually attends church “to repent,” as if he has acted in sin, and will again. Churches are abundant in New York, and allow those who enter to exist in a highly-crafted space of mystical purpose and the music of organ players. The New York crime writer Lawrence Block portrays the city church as a similar haven for Hell’s Kitchen alcoholic ex-cop Matthew Scudder:<br />
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<b>“I like churches. I like to sit in them when I have things to think about…. I sat near the front and watched people go in and out of the confessional. They didn’t look any different coming out than they had going in.”</b> (<i>The Sins of the Father</i>, Block, 1976)<br />
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Anthony Bourdain reminisces of a New York “underbelly,” and relishes not just the food but the hidden spaces of the city. Working the kitchen of the Rainbow Room, Tony tracks a storage closet window nook in the GE Building to smoke weed between shifts and trip the skyline. At the Paramount Hotel, Tony ventures into the basement to find “a truly awe-inspiring sight: the long-forgotten Diamond Horseshoe,” a nightclub run by Broadway impresario Billy Rose. Billy was known as "a fast and true runner of the canyons, at home with brick, steel and the fast buck.” Tony cuts into the juicy beefsteak archaeology of tabloid showbiz, describing “the original rhinestone-aproned stage where Billy Rose’s famously zaftig chorus line once kicked,” and “the whole Old Broadway demimonde of the Winchell era” would “get up to all sorts of glamorous debauchery.”<br />
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In <i>Bill Cunningham New York</i>, author Tom Wolfe admits that New York is unpleasant and only concerned with “status.” Wolfe’s novel <i>The Bonfire of the Vanities</i> (1987) gives a tour from the South Bronx to the Silk Stocking District, though Tom Wolfe cannot be cited as the originator of the all-white three-piece suit. The writer <a href="http://www.williamgaddis.org/tribobitmem/tribnytauchincloss.shtml">William Gaddis</a>, whose epic New York novel <i>The Recognition</i>s is unequaled in narrating the psychic plasm of the city, was known to dandy about in an all-white suit in the 1950s.<br />
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Status or not, Bill loves the clothes of people on the street. Clothes are fashion and fashion is people. The irony, however, is that Bill captures individuality less than he does conformity. His Times column "On the Street" depicts trends, not idiosyncrasies, and can be used an example of how people copy each other in New York rather than individuate. Still, one never knows, and people-watching is never boring. As Theodore Dreiser writes of his experience witnessing the New York morning commute in “the meaner side streets or avenues” in 1925:<b> </b><br />
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<b>“… typewriter girls in almost stage or society costumes entering shabby offices; boys and men made up to look like actors and millionaires turning into the humblest institutions, where they are clerks or managers.… These might be called the machinery of the city… the implements by which things are made to go”</b> (<i>The Color of the City</i>, Dreiser, 1925).<br />
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Tony and Bill are men who make good entertainment of food and fashion in New York, where the public enjoys to devour itself in style. <br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-50848097654865336252011-09-19T23:08:00.000-07:002011-09-26T17:39:09.616-07:00Boardwalk Empire, season 1 (2010)If Atlantic City is an allegory of America after WWI, and Chicago, New York and Philadelphia represent European nations, America emerges a victor in that war - which it did not instigate but was called in to finish. Nucky Thompson, boss of AC, is a Republican at the cusp of the 1920s, when political parties begin to shift. He is a boss in the tradition of city Democrats, but rejects the New Jersey political machine. Nucky settles his scores with New York and Chicago when they suddenly need Jersey's help. Philadelphia is sacrificed.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtHebVAlpBVI-F6gFYJk6VpHu3y3nk1bjeKTDJ-CbMmVuC9z3e2pWHjpyREwCt1n7ETEE4rzvRrwnSdNzQztHWXNRzVymlDuDMbF-U-35xX8zqheheDwmztaUaCn3io5wcjzk-DeRWfjRS/s1600/Philadelphia+prohibition.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtHebVAlpBVI-F6gFYJk6VpHu3y3nk1bjeKTDJ-CbMmVuC9z3e2pWHjpyREwCt1n7ETEE4rzvRrwnSdNzQztHWXNRzVymlDuDMbF-U-35xX8zqheheDwmztaUaCn3io5wcjzk-DeRWfjRS/s320/Philadelphia+prohibition.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">A Consignment recently received from Phila., Pa. 749 cases of beer (18,000) bottles were today destroyed in the District of Columbia (<a href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b42003/">Library of Congress</a>)</span></b></div><br />
America roiled internally after the war, with anarchist bombings, immigrant crackdowns, lynchings of blacks, and the creation of Federal crimefighters like Agent Van Alden. Nucky runs a city in which many plots are hatched against him. J. Edgar Hoover was appointed Director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, and like Arnold Rothstein, knew the prime power of information.<br />
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Nucky's success makes for good drama, as Agent Van Alden's failure makes good drama. Each character follows a schizoid American way. If Nucky is the black market capitalist, a spats-and-suspenders Republican gladhander and murderer, Agent Van Alden is the crew-cut crusader of moral authority, in grinless judgment of good and evil, and is out to save others but unable to save himself. He hates the fleshly pleasures of Atlantic City because they tempt him. Agent Van Alden is resentful of his humanity and demonized by self-consciousness, which turns him into a religious maniac. As American as a mob hit. The revenue agent ends up knocking down whiskey with a seasoned swagger, and drowns Agent Sepso in baptismal waters. With rancor and self-disgust he rails his seed into Paz, and she gets off on it. Agent Van Alden is not a minister of justice or savior of souls. He is a beast of God. He first decides to flee the boardwalk empire, but asks God for a sign that might keep him in Atlantic City. In the final episode, he receives that sign.<br />
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The show documents the panorama of large social gatherings. The Ancient Order of Celts holds an opulent banquet on the eve of St. Patrick's Day. Irishmen in good standing wear sashes and white on white tuxedos. Midget wrestlers dressed as leprechauns dance a jig. Throughout the season, there is a Chicago bar mitzvah; stump speech meetings of the Women's Temperance League; vaudeville acts on midnight stages; and a backwoods river ceremony of black Baptists. These sequences depict visual patterns of the period which communicate the ideas and habits of Irish and Jewish clans; female anti-saloon activists; showgirls and comedians and theatergoers; and oppressed minorities.<br />
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Atlantic City itself has a rich pedigree as a venue for mass group conferences in the 20th century. In 1929, at the President Hotel, a meeting was held of “probably the greatest collection of powerful mobsters ever assembled in one spot,” headed by New York mob lord Frank Costello. (ed. Watter, P. & Gillers, S. <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Investigating_the_FBI.html?id=eUpsAAAAIAAJ">Investigating the FBI</a>. A Book of the Committee for Public Justice</i>. NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc. 1973) Numbered among the delegates was Lucky Luciano. As a result of the Atlantic City conference, where “new ideas” challenged “the old order” of mob rule, Luciano instigated a wave of assassinations “in New York and other key cities.” Up to forty murders were carried out on a single day in 1931, “Purge Day of the Greasers.” In 1935, J. Edgar Hoover - who as FBI Director was often criticized for neglecting the existence of the mafia - addressed over 600 members of the International Association of Chiefs of Police at the Hotel Ambassador. Veteran New York Times crime beat reporter <a href="http://www.laurajames.com/clews/2005/05/legends_of_true_2.html">Meyer Berger</a> called it "probably the bluntest talk on crime ever uttered by a public official." Despite the major number of law school graduates working as FBI agents, Hoover cited "shyster lawyers and other legal vermin" and "sob-sister judges" as culprits in the lack of law enforcement. Echoing the link between American power and violent crime portrayed in <i>Boardwalk Empire</i>, Hoover contends that "the bullets of the underworld are today poisoned by verdigris of politics." In 1964, AC hosted the Democratic National Convention, where the <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/mfdp.html">Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party</a> fought for state delegates to represent the disenfranchised political voice of Southern blacks making grave sacrifices for the movement. Atlantic City, as a convention city, shows a history of wiseguys, G-men, and radicals.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvNiGSME1Q2NbrEXlJYr-qB0FbUbhBWTV_0pR47sYk2JiNAIZXDNomwgKqdzqiAZvcTxFh62NMZCP-su4UFp4uChQihSt7XK-K8twRzCyQub1xujQeLqT4i2AIItSIEOFwvuonHxCWxdNR/s1600/Gmen-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvNiGSME1Q2NbrEXlJYr-qB0FbUbhBWTV_0pR47sYk2JiNAIZXDNomwgKqdzqiAZvcTxFh62NMZCP-su4UFp4uChQihSt7XK-K8twRzCyQub1xujQeLqT4i2AIItSIEOFwvuonHxCWxdNR/s320/Gmen-1.jpg" width="230" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRdDtKVE4AaXLxk2Emsmq9ceZu1LEM_2duzkL62zqvN5fB9CpIKUrzb10gfs8wyhVEhDUIltD97NXA6wtW1ada7Rq59GMCOVA4G9FE98Hbv4985L_lxIeIDZSrugN4-o-Iafyi76BSp6kx/s1600/AC-1920s-temperance.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="92" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRdDtKVE4AaXLxk2Emsmq9ceZu1LEM_2duzkL62zqvN5fB9CpIKUrzb10gfs8wyhVEhDUIltD97NXA6wtW1ada7Rq59GMCOVA4G9FE98Hbv4985L_lxIeIDZSrugN4-o-Iafyi76BSp6kx/s400/AC-1920s-temperance.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b> Sixteenth Convention, Anti-Saloon League of America at Atlantic City, N.J., July 6-9, 1915 (<a href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/pan.6a34352/">Library of Congress</a>)</b></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-1658493317890208082011-04-19T23:37:00.000-07:002011-04-28T19:37:26.793-07:00The Treasure of the Sierra Pravda<i>The Treasure of the Sierra Madre</i> (1948) John Huston. DVR.<br />
<i>Kino-Pravda</i> (1924-25) Dziga Vertov. MOMA. <br />
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The writer Fran Lebowitz, in <i>Public Speaking</i> (2010, Martin Scorsese), explains the crux of American consciousness as respectful of money and distrusting of brains. Smart people are ogled with suspicion as the rich are gawked at with envy. A bio-bibliographer might want to know if Fran Lebowitz was a fan of the writer <a href="http://www.btraven.com/english/">B. Traven</a>, who wrote <i>The Treasure of Sierra Madre</i>, which novel portrays the harrowing American drama of mind versus gold in lawless post-revolutionary Mexico. John Huston <a href="http://www.awesomefilm.com/script/treasureofthesierramadre.pdf">adapts the ideas</a> with Humphrey Bogart as the main character, Fred C. Dobbs, a tramp in the Roaring Twenties when the rest of America is flush.<br />
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Dobbs lives on the bum in Mexico but still runs across rich Yankees, whom he begs for change. When he comes across an old man, Howard, talking about gold in the mountains, Dobbs is hooked by the prospect, but is paranoid and threatened by the challenge required to find it, which experience Howard is long a veteran. The search and the dig take brains, and Howard knows how to own the gold without the gold owning him.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv-U2jrYeTPLhrV8Dp0YCcnwRq5NKsK9h55E2zcoCYAJtCeWK-dhkqK4Ibd2rk33kjm1PJ93YhBwm_pH3VlyTLQfHCdr5xdJa_7Wp0p5Q3ueKN5HdBCj_APN-2B-N2trpiVqQ2GmP6k16m/s1600/Treasure-Sierra-A.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv-U2jrYeTPLhrV8Dp0YCcnwRq5NKsK9h55E2zcoCYAJtCeWK-dhkqK4Ibd2rk33kjm1PJ93YhBwm_pH3VlyTLQfHCdr5xdJa_7Wp0p5Q3ueKN5HdBCj_APN-2B-N2trpiVqQ2GmP6k16m/s320/Treasure-Sierra-A.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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</tbody></table>Dobbs fits the archetype of the all-American creep. He is a beggar, a paranoiac, a simp, a reject, and knows no self-reliance. Dobbs mistakes luck as if it is something he earned. He funds the golddigging expedition with money won from a lottery ticket he was violently opposed to purchasing, but a young Robert Blake finally convinces him otherwise. Curtin is reluctant to accept Dobbs' staking him for the dig, and Dobbs indulges a feeling of palsy-walsy generosity. But soon Dobbs is whining and shouting about the other guys trying to screw him out of his own fair shake. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbE2tx9Df80a4g_nr1SHXhGZh9lRtoCZWva1no0jfD7asf9EOiQ3_dTuGEg_RFz4XYriTGh8U4LgAT_Zvs_kz3bqvEWCLtQ6oDUyMdfuufpmxHjKve9ep8de1qJtrdHUvDEEMt1Bf5CSz4/s1600/Treasure-Sierra--Robert-Bla.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbE2tx9Df80a4g_nr1SHXhGZh9lRtoCZWva1no0jfD7asf9EOiQ3_dTuGEg_RFz4XYriTGh8U4LgAT_Zvs_kz3bqvEWCLtQ6oDUyMdfuufpmxHjKve9ep8de1qJtrdHUvDEEMt1Bf5CSz4/s320/Treasure-Sierra--Robert-Bla.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The kid bugs Dobbs with a lottery ticket. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>The old man, Howard, is practical, seasoned, shrewd, humorous and tough. Howard wants gold but can laugh when the plan amounts to naught and nine months worth of hard work is blown away with the desert wind. Otherwise, gold wins, and you destroy yourself from the inside out. Curtin stands between Bogey and Old Man Huston. He is smart but not without greed. When the group votes on killing Cody, Curtin votes to kill, and it is a classic American vote. But Curtin suffers guilt and is given a second chance. <br />
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The events in <i>Sierra Madre</i> take place at the time <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-04-13/film/saluting-the-supreme-soviet-filmmaker-dziga-vertov/">Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov</a> was crafting his <a href="http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/12166"><i>Kino-Pravda nos. 18-22</i></a> (1924-25). These avant-collage shorts screened as propaganda for Leninist Russia, where the Worker is sublimated as the backbone of the revolution and the Peasant will soon learn to operate machines of the future.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwBnNtpZNKMYJZ6NjjciX-4sn9t3bszj4T5GW2mgz-jT0wX8YpchJnWpwC9GTLaNhpDSxRO9-eFNjhXzuW1gqW9TOv_AmciCYOZVQDFTpXBLgNx9PB_rF1nk-Dmc2NrCFyLuNqAMlxGLYq/s1600/Kino-F.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwBnNtpZNKMYJZ6NjjciX-4sn9t3bszj4T5GW2mgz-jT0wX8YpchJnWpwC9GTLaNhpDSxRO9-eFNjhXzuW1gqW9TOv_AmciCYOZVQDFTpXBLgNx9PB_rF1nk-Dmc2NrCFyLuNqAMlxGLYq/s320/Kino-F.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Dziga Vertov's workers and peasants are depicted as if Fred C. Dobbs could number among them.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7FqJ9wnW_gFIKxrBR1Stm5Qc6rlpBUR2kRc84klUdPYfdP3eqp0wOmtHBVStOWtdeBGuz9dYp-qXpy8Il6jraoigfMnb2UJ5oluMmb0A3vKPwUYKmp-_n5DQhBHUurMX1hw1tDZUEkdNS/s1600/Kino-A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7FqJ9wnW_gFIKxrBR1Stm5Qc6rlpBUR2kRc84klUdPYfdP3eqp0wOmtHBVStOWtdeBGuz9dYp-qXpy8Il6jraoigfMnb2UJ5oluMmb0A3vKPwUYKmp-_n5DQhBHUurMX1hw1tDZUEkdNS/s320/Kino-A.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL5_r4d8Wwx3VjKDcKiAfg4cdtKAMDEBp2uoTI6jPOl7Ee8d_S_1Lr4PIokXIjCJ2vCdTr3HjaYh9nWIJnw1uZbnCtt2ZrbSjeeVYOVI4TT7LazgafCcFq6sjlLwUWnShKzMJ4noY-8pko/s1600/Kino-B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL5_r4d8Wwx3VjKDcKiAfg4cdtKAMDEBp2uoTI6jPOl7Ee8d_S_1Lr4PIokXIjCJ2vCdTr3HjaYh9nWIJnw1uZbnCtt2ZrbSjeeVYOVI4TT7LazgafCcFq6sjlLwUWnShKzMJ4noY-8pko/s320/Kino-B.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAhy5b5JBVGifVKg9ah02DQrRo3Xo1uOjeqQ-quuBaAodkLTbLm5pFjM6Il2nj1i8K6xVGZQW3Zh0Xofy5U0ax5oXFqq31QKKCJiLlT_F9lHyFUIp0mdgHUsY9ri_dLfY6upFB9Z-Axte4/s1600/Kino-E.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAhy5b5JBVGifVKg9ah02DQrRo3Xo1uOjeqQ-quuBaAodkLTbLm5pFjM6Il2nj1i8K6xVGZQW3Zh0Xofy5U0ax5oXFqq31QKKCJiLlT_F9lHyFUIp0mdgHUsY9ri_dLfY6upFB9Z-Axte4/s320/Kino-E.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Yet Dobbs is an unskilled laborer, and when he gets hired to man the derrick to "rig a camp" in the jungle, he is too fazed by the illusion of quick money to realize that he is getting conned by the gringo work-boss, who absconds with the workers' pay. Like Russia, Mexico is also in the throes of post-revolution, but the people are not lining up at the Palace to view the body of Emiliano Zapata.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwDGX85XruINxluqbVwKkHWEjYoakqGrtLl_3IpUrMQttxOuR57JiGuMiXkpW9PPBqlh0wRweWd1SCeB8bQZVevMx67t3yh5qH31qxqbFxOC7Pp86nF49p_5yf799SlwewU6zKK4fUmli/s1600/Kino-G.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwDGX85XruINxluqbVwKkHWEjYoakqGrtLl_3IpUrMQttxOuR57JiGuMiXkpW9PPBqlh0wRweWd1SCeB8bQZVevMx67t3yh5qH31qxqbFxOC7Pp86nF49p_5yf799SlwewU6zKK4fUmli/s320/Kino-G.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Like the Cahulawassee River in <i>Deliverance</i> (1972, John Boorman), the Sierra Madre doesn't let you take from it without taking something from you. The mountain conspires to pull Howard away from the gold's curse, saving him, as it likewise sends Curtin to his reckoning, survived, scarred, but hopeful. Dobbs has little use for his brains, which only sabotage him, so the mountain takes Dobbs' mind from him, and the Mexican bandits make off with his head.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNSqs-G3fTBIL1chY-OIG1_2BCw7OPJRoNdNqEDBBh0SX6JXpawiSazS77Ldhb5gYM75ddwLQpGDvHBY50lTMLeTieGDRFLD5N5dOWFZMYqstsKiX9wtUUSvdaLSzhgV8dM1lhXvWKkkiq/s320/Traven-cover.jpg" width="262" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Rebellion of the Hanged</i>, by B. Traven.</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div>The mountain takes note of Howard's respect of It, and saves Howard from suffering as Dobbs is not saved. Howard is consecrated a god by the people of the mountain, after saving a sick child using frontier first-aid. It is a miracle for the Indians. Howard is smart enough to know that when he is ultimately tricked by Nature - a sick deranged paterfamilias - and the exhibition of the absolute folly of human action is brash and ineluctable, all you can do is sanely cackle like a drunk ranch-hand.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2cK3qtQUZ5_Ti7WuFhWMfmZZvqhCycL6hU11pjiIr5UcHMIes6pFmo_z_GvIdtn1CesuuYY23XULjt43ysHVFVp6ZMXNZ-zOYZw9U9_LGBYUto1Zv5TOdIuCqMPsGPIpgWsaFeoXBiWE8/s1600/Treasure+Sierra+B.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2cK3qtQUZ5_Ti7WuFhWMfmZZvqhCycL6hU11pjiIr5UcHMIes6pFmo_z_GvIdtn1CesuuYY23XULjt43ysHVFVp6ZMXNZ-zOYZw9U9_LGBYUto1Zv5TOdIuCqMPsGPIpgWsaFeoXBiWE8/s320/Treasure+Sierra+B.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Howard does a jig and reminds the boys how dumb they are. </td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNSqs-G3fTBIL1chY-OIG1_2BCw7OPJRoNdNqEDBBh0SX6JXpawiSazS77Ldhb5gYM75ddwLQpGDvHBY50lTMLeTieGDRFLD5N5dOWFZMYqstsKiX9wtUUSvdaLSzhgV8dM1lhXvWKkkiq/s1600/Traven-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-74648791553300627702011-04-18T19:30:00.000-07:002011-04-18T23:02:01.101-07:00True Believer(1989) Joseph Ruben. Roku.<br />
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A movie with James Woods as an ex-hippie NYC lawyer who wears a purple scrunchy, and Robert Downey, Jr. as a preppie Ivy League grad straight from a Whit Stillman movie, and directed by the man who made <i>The Stepfather</i>, should have been a classic 80s flick. Still worth a watch tho.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjip3KN0otc6417HWN3DEkbIbO6k3M5rokImWvcpsNoYWT9ajzgcDfhIBZ6fXZAM5nVStCehWdgt1ML2rhs8yzRr42hY2TWbGls3JAFZrWuswJMEZAV_wwSUPVefb0JSoJ4l42yeBQ1HHpZ/s1600/True+Believer++Woods+and+Downey+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjip3KN0otc6417HWN3DEkbIbO6k3M5rokImWvcpsNoYWT9ajzgcDfhIBZ6fXZAM5nVStCehWdgt1ML2rhs8yzRr42hY2TWbGls3JAFZrWuswJMEZAV_wwSUPVefb0JSoJ4l42yeBQ1HHpZ/s320/True+Believer++Woods+and+Downey+copy.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHfKxt1UcSUrty4rCGnPkAuKPNvopvMRwfh3_gOyxV-Ck2TqYAvzhIwNgD1iqOFlkUopdqssKFwcYepuREnHN7DCt9V1oU4uBbYtFNN2v9PpSF2QbQjWlud7o0VadUBQhFN7hZoemioU4J/s1600/True+Believer++weed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHfKxt1UcSUrty4rCGnPkAuKPNvopvMRwfh3_gOyxV-Ck2TqYAvzhIwNgD1iqOFlkUopdqssKFwcYepuREnHN7DCt9V1oU4uBbYtFNN2v9PpSF2QbQjWlud7o0VadUBQhFN7hZoemioU4J/s320/True+Believer++weed.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Woods plays West Village lawyer Eddie Dodd, who repurposes the Civil Rights Movement which made him a counterculture star in the 1960s against the War on Drugs in 1980s gangland New York. Dodd's clients pay with big wads of dirty cash. Robert Downey, Jr., as Roger Baron, wears the tortoise-shell glasses and parted hair of the 1980s yuppie, but Roger is somehow invested in the leftist activism of the 1960s which Baby Boomers long traded in for Wall Street. And these same Boomers can still buy good coke because Eddie Dodd is getting their dealers off and back on the street, in the name of constitutional rights.<br />
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Roger's naive idealism re-conjures Dodd's bewizened idealism, and the two agitate the Justice System to ultimately reveal the corrupt tactics of the Manhattan D.A., Robert Reynard. Reynard exploits the image of a crackdown on crime by manipulating the solving of crimes, and an innocent Korean kid gets a life sentence for a Chinatown hit orchestrated by Reynard to cook the stats and jack his profile.<br />
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<i>True Believer</i> pre-dates the use of <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/crime_prevention/crime_statistics.shtml">Comstat</a> by the NYPD, when <a href="http://www.gothamgazette.com/commentary/91.barrett.shtml">Rudolph Giuliani was mayor</a>, and portrays law enforcement as an abuser of the law, as many criticized Giuliani. Eddie Dodd and Roger Baron are an inspired pair of crusaders, and their nemesis, the D.A. Reynard, played by Kurtwood Smith with the smug villain's smirk of Clarence Boddicker in <i>Robocop</i>, is the right dialectical bad guy for this ugly but roistering moment in New York history.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><object style="height: 100px; width: 570px;"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fRmirnlgifM?version=3"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fRmirnlgifM?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="400" height="270"></object></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-69422907111993902272011-04-04T23:40:00.000-07:002011-04-07T23:47:33.305-07:00The Movie Life of Historical FiguresHave you been reading about the controversial new TV miniseries<i> </i><a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/history-channel-pulls-kennedys-last-69529"><i>The Kennedys</i></a> (2011, Stephen Kronish), and are you a fan of the Greek movie <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFtDzK64-pk"><i>Dogtooth</i> </a>(2010, Giorgos Lanthimos)?<br />
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If the eldest daughter in <i>Dogtooth</i> had been given a contraband video of <i>The Kennedys</i>, instead of <i>Jaws </i>or <i>Rocky</i>, then the eldest daughter might have acted out a scene from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/arts/television/the-kennedys-on-reelzchannel-debut-and-debate.html"><i>The Kennedys</i></a> more accurately than depicted in the movie itself, based on real life, of which the eldest daughter in <i>Dogtooth</i> has no knowledge of, but is painfully desperate for.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgel8ZJS62oOTRowBd9drECwCY_U5WfYOHzp-rFyxLAAhX3wv4P3P5B0Po0c99QSELG94B684U_4wI4TDMyv2qDlnPuqj2juSceNj6zKhvT44bxcZL83bUe77dkT2BAA-Mfo95fdTD7PD5l/s1600/dogtooth+vid.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgel8ZJS62oOTRowBd9drECwCY_U5WfYOHzp-rFyxLAAhX3wv4P3P5B0Po0c99QSELG94B684U_4wI4TDMyv2qDlnPuqj2juSceNj6zKhvT44bxcZL83bUe77dkT2BAA-Mfo95fdTD7PD5l/s320/dogtooth+vid.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Father discovers the movie.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRuiATBIdipH_iKqPkQefurlX982yVtxGimJdeWdAoLS1NmlRHTEiNz4XSc9NuT2IfwG8GMs7p6bu7goeNgBBlZgA1r-NCcX41-BRnkGWxOwhO9lWQELAKF011xRDm4iBf3G9j8IEdVJPQ/s1600/dogtooth+barking.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRuiATBIdipH_iKqPkQefurlX982yVtxGimJdeWdAoLS1NmlRHTEiNz4XSc9NuT2IfwG8GMs7p6bu7goeNgBBlZgA1r-NCcX41-BRnkGWxOwhO9lWQELAKF011xRDm4iBf3G9j8IEdVJPQ/s320/dogtooth+barking.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The family plays a game.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgErobFfHDIZSGqRZShx9PKDeZD_O03Ss5wJ4IyF6XuiPILA6WmPrvhSsL1mnlAM7VM9P6xUb1hNuf_mJ6GGw8IlbGt09DG7eFPjN_hX9m5G081xvSI96JJr64E218f7OVz8bl4ALXMagku/s1600/JFK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgErobFfHDIZSGqRZShx9PKDeZD_O03Ss5wJ4IyF6XuiPILA6WmPrvhSsL1mnlAM7VM9P6xUb1hNuf_mJ6GGw8IlbGt09DG7eFPjN_hX9m5G081xvSI96JJr64E218f7OVz8bl4ALXMagku/s320/JFK.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">JFK collage, <i>Presidential Portraits</i>, by The Shine Box.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2KMNMExZ2auBAPbxvgZG1y79FcHuJczggHG00lCHO_nf-dlKmcw9Pzw8KOGci3gkEtVFxdp8Gs2g2mbwWjWSOiGxuTrw-z-SN14Gtmqc2xIw7zhJ-ec9SQIy_ilZky4gHFX_g-OWj5fwK/s1600/TomWilkinsonBIOpage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2KMNMExZ2auBAPbxvgZG1y79FcHuJczggHG00lCHO_nf-dlKmcw9Pzw8KOGci3gkEtVFxdp8Gs2g2mbwWjWSOiGxuTrw-z-SN14Gtmqc2xIw7zhJ-ec9SQIy_ilZky4gHFX_g-OWj5fwK/s320/TomWilkinsonBIOpage.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tom Wilkinson as Joe Kennedy.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAfizPQ0JMDzQ7ryQSu4iirgbRKr0OaMpe7OBBmtbSokJylwwElOi8fnmHZsDP9zo828xcaOSzemeLZ-Fj8jhqOHHbfMzp48bqMnRpPtiTlQKibogwrVjDF7o8rnzGlzmc6e-_t-CWWZ5A/s1600/TomWilkinson+as+Franklin.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAfizPQ0JMDzQ7ryQSu4iirgbRKr0OaMpe7OBBmtbSokJylwwElOi8fnmHZsDP9zo828xcaOSzemeLZ-Fj8jhqOHHbfMzp48bqMnRpPtiTlQKibogwrVjDF7o8rnzGlzmc6e-_t-CWWZ5A/s320/TomWilkinson+as+Franklin.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tom Wilkinson as Ben Franklin.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
The creators of <i>Dogtooth </i>made it past the hedges, all the way to the grand factory of real-life, the Academy Awards:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><object style="height: 258px; width: 450px;"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rX5SscFLleU?version=3"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rX5SscFLleU?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="450" height="258"></object></div><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCH6kFEGJ7eFCKyeq39kpRn3U5SFt27GKo6qnFhSdYI92_VXyREfexplvuuN_CRPkFUyGKrFdGtug6EZ7S0DmbG81u9AQ4gi1XYiwOxKxDgv7OA1Ikg1DiWsV8hzkdw61SPc0yczaaPJjM/s1600/Stallone+Oscar.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCH6kFEGJ7eFCKyeq39kpRn3U5SFt27GKo6qnFhSdYI92_VXyREfexplvuuN_CRPkFUyGKrFdGtug6EZ7S0DmbG81u9AQ4gi1XYiwOxKxDgv7OA1Ikg1DiWsV8hzkdw61SPc0yczaaPJjM/s320/Stallone+Oscar.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Rocky </i>wins the Oscar.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>In <i>Black Swan</i>, Natalie Portman merely trained to imitate a dancer. In <i>Dogtooth</i>, Aggeliki Papoulia bares herself open to the possession of sick hysteric forces:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><object style="height: 258px; width: 450px;"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KLOy4_tzXHY?version=3"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KLOy4_tzXHY?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="450" height="258"></object></div><br />
When it comes to the life of historical figures, British witticist Alan Bennett captured it right in his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDp4ghN_rVQ">approach to T.E. Lawrence</a>:<br />
<br />
"T.E. Lawrence,<br />
The man and the myth.<br />
Which is man and which is myth?<br />
Is this fact or is it lies?<br />
What is truth and what is fable?<br />
Where is Ruth, and where is Mabel?"<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuTuYn3SR1GT7fPZdJ4DEtgHQmxV6fAI7rcz6zjlCsGCP65QFlPxEBz_K4Rkvfm47We4TFKF6GS8eNFYCXpBXORw0147PGcbDIN9b6UUOx8-CoNAqiDhUtb-6289AjRi2YH5Z8-Hqf8G0z/s1600/TE+A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuTuYn3SR1GT7fPZdJ4DEtgHQmxV6fAI7rcz6zjlCsGCP65QFlPxEBz_K4Rkvfm47We4TFKF6GS8eNFYCXpBXORw0147PGcbDIN9b6UUOx8-CoNAqiDhUtb-6289AjRi2YH5Z8-Hqf8G0z/s320/TE+A.jpg" width="204" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">T.E. Lawrence.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyD2AUHkXeLJFTSaVbAam-2yTM4_ivh3z08wVQCvgHCUl1TWx8wKpnH6HUj1g9e1cTjVGxdRBGjLKUcFdeNAsfAavatNx9og2JC6tQ6K-HPjQp0vIx_NZxTY2pQsvApWo1FZdrqZntYN8w/s1600/TE+B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyD2AUHkXeLJFTSaVbAam-2yTM4_ivh3z08wVQCvgHCUl1TWx8wKpnH6HUj1g9e1cTjVGxdRBGjLKUcFdeNAsfAavatNx9og2JC6tQ6K-HPjQp0vIx_NZxTY2pQsvApWo1FZdrqZntYN8w/s320/TE+B.jpg" width="214" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Movie Poster (1962).</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ghM1ONhzOy_9vMViGaTT9qoLQMMM0PH_ltMRLF_Zdt_xHqpN63xBTbz1skaijc2-Dy8G0YfxnmPIf5xHg7IuUP5DpV6xyIynPSQZ31ejJOY1AcuySCSGvkRV3WrrqSrGDlnK-EP-wlDw/s1600/TE+Fiennes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ghM1ONhzOy_9vMViGaTT9qoLQMMM0PH_ltMRLF_Zdt_xHqpN63xBTbz1skaijc2-Dy8G0YfxnmPIf5xHg7IuUP5DpV6xyIynPSQZ31ejJOY1AcuySCSGvkRV3WrrqSrGDlnK-EP-wlDw/s200/TE+Fiennes.jpg" width="163" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ralph Fiennes as T.E. Lawrence (1992)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-52588718042090082312011-03-23T22:12:00.000-07:002011-03-28T17:55:01.431-07:00The Men's Action Bailout Movie<i>The Mechanic</i> (2011) Simon West. Kip's Bay multiplex, 2nd Ave & 31st (free passes).<br />
<i>Unknown</i> (2011) Jaume Collet-Serra. Loew's 68th Street (free passes).<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"><i>The Mechanic </i>requires the viewer to conjure a theory out of left field in order to justify having spent 2 hours watching it.<i> </i>See <i>The Mechanic</i> as the average weekend moviegoer's metaphor for the circumstances which <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/series/house_advantage_series/index.html">plunged America into the mortgage crisis</a>.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_EBIwDEorAlresTHItUpaDfzOFIXHPcj7WlNYcWqTYMQJ_SAmNBswJBKGRhW2caIs28jZ_SFJ9I_YHXtcHgF8UkL1XYDzl42SP920Z4U2vSeJjjVDQBkI9h8BmiBEVVnFAvF-h5sDh8I7/s1600/Statham+Mechanic+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_EBIwDEorAlresTHItUpaDfzOFIXHPcj7WlNYcWqTYMQJ_SAmNBswJBKGRhW2caIs28jZ_SFJ9I_YHXtcHgF8UkL1XYDzl42SP920Z4U2vSeJjjVDQBkI9h8BmiBEVVnFAvF-h5sDh8I7/s320/Statham+Mechanic+1.jpg" width="320" /></a>As an object lesson in how America failed up to the Bailout, <i>The Mechanic</i> succeeds. "The Mechanic" (Jason Statham) is a hit-man who lives in the Louisiana bayou, a setting that evokes government failure, exploitation of the poor, and capitalist scheming.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">He is paid to kill people, hired out by a mysterious organization of hedge-fundy yuppies, as if Timothy Geithner secretly headed <a href="http://www.ustraining.com/new/index.asp">Xe Services LLC</a>, formerly Blackwater.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3fSmRCZ7dtegArp4ZP9K9a2A_p-fdstMigS4O6Gpg5nuzeNTFCMT2RPS98FQTOGGO_ZkTlqyLeQtR1ShpFTVPJPiO5E-_pEHMoWQTazu0PTd0tTF4SGPY4qwg1xjhFs7jHXbvC5uOHC3y/s1600/Mechanic-3--geithner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3fSmRCZ7dtegArp4ZP9K9a2A_p-fdstMigS4O6Gpg5nuzeNTFCMT2RPS98FQTOGGO_ZkTlqyLeQtR1ShpFTVPJPiO5E-_pEHMoWQTazu0PTd0tTF4SGPY4qwg1xjhFs7jHXbvC5uOHC3y/s1600/Mechanic-3--geithner.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3fSmRCZ7dtegArp4ZP9K9a2A_p-fdstMigS4O6Gpg5nuzeNTFCMT2RPS98FQTOGGO_ZkTlqyLeQtR1ShpFTVPJPiO5E-_pEHMoWQTazu0PTd0tTF4SGPY4qwg1xjhFs7jHXbvC5uOHC3y/s1600/Mechanic-3--geithner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3fSmRCZ7dtegArp4ZP9K9a2A_p-fdstMigS4O6Gpg5nuzeNTFCMT2RPS98FQTOGGO_ZkTlqyLeQtR1ShpFTVPJPiO5E-_pEHMoWQTazu0PTd0tTF4SGPY4qwg1xjhFs7jHXbvC5uOHC3y/s200/Mechanic-3--geithner.jpg" width="160" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uiH6e0Z0faM7oF4O4dsIYiY1aEIftDjE4rO6WA4NUZhzCd99EWfJlbX9eEih7mCjImBw-FonPpah_bOez7zzov69_VwbzDZi3od36-HSmz04S9jbbuGDAk3XgY1le5lhHWMQeUhTO1BW/s1600/Mechanic-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uiH6e0Z0faM7oF4O4dsIYiY1aEIftDjE4rO6WA4NUZhzCd99EWfJlbX9eEih7mCjImBw-FonPpah_bOez7zzov69_VwbzDZi3od36-HSmz04S9jbbuGDAk3XgY1le5lhHWMQeUhTO1BW/s200/Mechanic-2.jpg" width="133" /></a><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">The Mechanic is good at his job, and his liaison in the organization is McKenna, played by Donald Suthlerland. McKenna is a mentor, and pretty much The Mechanic's only friend. But soon the lad-mag boss of the organization advises The Mechanic that McKenna has betrayed them, killed his own men, and made off with a bunch of money. The Mechanic is given the contract to kill McKenna, and he takes it, murdering his father-figure at the behest of prep school rejects.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio4xVCX6QTa5LrjIHgm2QCQg-F68I5Stqy4jk2BaDrOrGn8i4gTZkNTsXH4bgMC9KM-QHSF0UfaYfEMZaK8XYFXByiGicFNvhcr57L6aX1WmDOmR5D5KBh6i1JPuq4jApMBKml7_B5r_hw/s1600/Sutherland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio4xVCX6QTa5LrjIHgm2QCQg-F68I5Stqy4jk2BaDrOrGn8i4gTZkNTsXH4bgMC9KM-QHSF0UfaYfEMZaK8XYFXByiGicFNvhcr57L6aX1WmDOmR5D5KBh6i1JPuq4jApMBKml7_B5r_hw/s200/Sutherland.jpg" width="200" /></a>In this instance, the behavior of The Mechanic mimics the minions of the banking industry, which was quick to sell out all good faith in low and middle income home-owners who <a href="http://www.criminallawlibraryblog.com/subprime_crisis_timeline.pdf">suffered by subprime mortgages</a>. The Mechanic prides himself on his stoic work ethic, but his quasi-patricide of Donald Sutherland reveals that he is just a blind and greedy cog in a larger, ugly wheel. AIG portrayed a similar immature vacuum of principles.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Turns out that McKenna has a wayward son, Steve (Ben Foster), who fancies himself a badass and wants The Mechanic to teach him the tricks of the hit-man trade. The kid doesn't know The Mechanic killed his dad, believing it was a random carjacker. The Mechanic takes Steve under his dank wing out of guilt, and though the kid is out to avenge his father's murder, The Mechanic persistently instructs his protege that revenge is wrong.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9ssE8Ul2SPjXMzV-3_UCy2b2slhOxlRQYxc6DNZBaI1eGq16GomLgnQo171PFwC8cDFw4tw15LiYkkeTtu8aBVZdbcXvPwGJLVwe5qY1ctLa3r0UqaoqzPc78smew4uUnzQUh9nxHBX8J/s1600/glenn+beck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9ssE8Ul2SPjXMzV-3_UCy2b2slhOxlRQYxc6DNZBaI1eGq16GomLgnQo171PFwC8cDFw4tw15LiYkkeTtu8aBVZdbcXvPwGJLVwe5qY1ctLa3r0UqaoqzPc78smew4uUnzQUh9nxHBX8J/s320/glenn+beck.jpg" width="320" /></a>The most vicious and coldblooded of the new pair's assignments is the execution of an obese New Age evangelist, whose crimes against humanity add up to an intravenous drug addiction and sexual interest in young women of legal age. Not a hint that he stoops to the odious demagoguery of a Glenn Beck, or even Dr. Phil. He is just a valueless wastoid, and is dispatched by <i>The Mechanic</i> and the kid in a brutal, near-botched asphyxiation.<br />
<br />
In this episode, The Mechanic carries out a Tea-Baggy vigilante moralism, by slaying the lazy preacher who posed no mortal threat to society as would have a Balkan coke lord or psycho pimp, or such character gladly executed in good stock action movies. Jason Statham is criminally mis-engineered as The Mechanic, given no opportunity for the sort of set-piece fight scenes in which the Englishman excels with charm and ass-kicking. Instead, he is a jaded identity who prevails in sadism, and the audience must be that, too, if they like him.<br />
<br />
Minorities and alternative lifestyles are victimized in The Mechanic's scheme. The innocent black boatkeeper is offed, and young Steve's inaugural hit is a rival assassin, a gargantuan gay who the kid incredulously murders with his bare hands. <br />
<br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhckUYoZNCWoZw5NA-NIwxFqkU4AcfGZon_kgb10A4jyY10hw1YFr7wlLpjpvBGhscWEs9t9OFdcFoISzcUWlJwHGEeQfCqQi-5enEA8t5hbfKIGbX4b_6qfeFFJX-10IF4lE55GNgqZ18X/s1600/Mans+Magazine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhckUYoZNCWoZw5NA-NIwxFqkU4AcfGZon_kgb10A4jyY10hw1YFr7wlLpjpvBGhscWEs9t9OFdcFoISzcUWlJwHGEeQfCqQi-5enEA8t5hbfKIGbX4b_6qfeFFJX-10IF4lE55GNgqZ18X/s320/Mans+Magazine.jpg" width="249" /></a></div>Soon it is revealed that The Mechanic was set up by the yupsters. They concocted the story about Donald Sutherland's doublecross in order to cover up their own transgressions (naturally The Shine Box saw this twist coming light years beforehand ahem). Only when The Mechanic is the last to notice he has been screwed over by his employers does he begin to heed his conscience, and do what he taught the kid not to. He seeks revenge.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">The world of <i>The Mechanic</i> is a world of varying degrees of evil. It was normal for The Mechanic to be a contract killer, as it was for a time to profit off toxic loans - but when The Mechanic finds himself a victim too, then it is suddenly not OK. His avenging is akin to the finance industry turning <a href="http://www.recovery.gov/Accountability/Pages/Accountability.aspx">to Uncle Sam for rescue</a>, when all along the government was the very agent the industry most revoked while they sent <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Rick-McGregor-TWU-Local-225-Vice-President-Candidate-2-crapper.mp3">the economy down the crapper</a>. Ultimately, the kid discovers that The Mechanic whacked his dad, and the audience is given no reason not to take sides with the kid's vengeance against The Mechanic's vengeance. But The Mechanic is shown to slyly evade assassination while the kid gets blown up. </div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85OCXGrEzmu0QAq_Sg729INnw9njvPJ3JGovbeQw4MCrq0ztZ_QEQXQQaCGh4oTk2X3Bs2tbyEssN5DTnJUUosRVnPY0NPPQrfGukBIyPBagP2bwWNZ0Iaxqe8cF7Iqgb2j1LNxlHcMCY/s1600/Bruno+Ganz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85OCXGrEzmu0QAq_Sg729INnw9njvPJ3JGovbeQw4MCrq0ztZ_QEQXQQaCGh4oTk2X3Bs2tbyEssN5DTnJUUosRVnPY0NPPQrfGukBIyPBagP2bwWNZ0Iaxqe8cF7Iqgb2j1LNxlHcMCY/s320/Bruno+Ganz.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It must be, that studio executives believe they are creating a new paradigm of protagonist - an anti-hero with whom the audience is not asked to empathize and side with, but is coerced to, as if waterboarded. The new Liam Neeson actioner, <i>Unknown</i>, depicts a likewise scenario. Neeson plays a man who forgets his identity, and who must gain it back while dodging assassins. Turns out his old identity was of the icy type exhibited by those very assassins, and he is a better man to have forgotten it. The denouement of recognition, remorse, atonement or exoneration is skipped. You know how it is, when you wake up and you are actually a secret assassin and January Jones is not really your wife but out to sabotage the genetically modified corn industry? At the movie's end, it remains unknown why the audience still sits there, besides the thankful presence of the veteran actor Bruno Ganz as a washed-up former East German spymaster. <i> </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>The Mechanic</i> and <i>Unknown </i>present characters who mercilessly follow a higher order (like religious people or real estate agents), and who then suddenly "see" through it, awakened to its deception, and are then motivated to do battle against it as if some kind of crusader, when really they are throwing adolescent tantrums against what they have already chosen as if they had not. The moment of illumination is one of neoconservative braggadocio, and has no room for the sticky dramatics of supplication or humility. The same might be said when they adapt George W. Bush's memoir to the silver screen for an early February release date. </div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"><i>The Mechanic</i> is a narratological figure of the selfishness, greed and ignorance which caused the country to economically collapse. Joe-Duke Godard himself could not have produced a more self-aware and veritable exemplum.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVhKhoatx09IXT2GSY5zBq5NkajAdFAaXAqov3CUftARYNsxBTaDQp1Dv7o-XozoJLPUwBGGNIRjV-DxgnXg3YDsFx7gbPeQ4-VcgwL7d9fHij1FiVyw_eclSv2_Z-rkwVFPcySIuJLb8a/s1600/godard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVhKhoatx09IXT2GSY5zBq5NkajAdFAaXAqov3CUftARYNsxBTaDQp1Dv7o-XozoJLPUwBGGNIRjV-DxgnXg3YDsFx7gbPeQ4-VcgwL7d9fHij1FiVyw_eclSv2_Z-rkwVFPcySIuJLb8a/s320/godard.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0brP3FfDfDRjtof4_jA2J-W2OCyL9SHkp8F5IhCY8x7Q6sZu6YAHXoXjFi6V_dzQdNvKDQbnSh6VPyx_k00mzqxX1QRYix8vm3MbNEGJiwuTQgp4sCMzGFVM8d46N_CeMfMQQluuB37W-/s1600/godard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-45595204920190165162011-01-31T22:40:00.000-08:002011-04-08T01:47:40.670-07:00It's Been Real - Movies in 2010 <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdnLwM_hAMNF_-KoM6cdBGUIc4ZNDidkbz8wnvbuuMsVZxpmaKwzTVwzv4JvzGAo75xjqkA77rM5k4ndaCL5fF1k4DpB_C2luQwtClRd1psHCRj3wP5x3-IFmKQvQ2fkJmhznfyuWUdiq6/s1600/based+on+true+events.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="27" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdnLwM_hAMNF_-KoM6cdBGUIc4ZNDidkbz8wnvbuuMsVZxpmaKwzTVwzv4JvzGAo75xjqkA77rM5k4ndaCL5fF1k4DpB_C2luQwtClRd1psHCRj3wP5x3-IFmKQvQ2fkJmhznfyuWUdiq6/s400/based+on+true+events.jpg" width="475" /></a><br />
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Movies today are the novels of the 1920s. Like books after World War I, people now turn to movies for a sign of the times. Music has been flattened by a <a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_angrynerd_geekculture/">rabid imitation of the past</a>; the publishing world operates no differently than the TV industry; and the Art world has been made undead by the zombies of Fashion. Movies, combining the virtues and vices of all these arts, are high-profile, moneymaking, and yield the greatest opportunity for the consciousness of artists and viewers, like <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran06_index.html">mirror neurons</a>, to commune. Our central nervous system is sublimated by the new experience of a portrayed moving world.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit8oJyZxnuerYHhCk-gtr5NC8AWqmWebhbP1X7eGZq3n89lkZHfbWlqX8BexmJdGs6AgjuelYHfvA0Ceip2aaSFeHjUapSaUaiBN8PDfLLQ2d40OTTafICBVPvb_f1rSVoKZap_9atTHiY/s1600/When+the+Clouds+Roll+By.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit8oJyZxnuerYHhCk-gtr5NC8AWqmWebhbP1X7eGZq3n89lkZHfbWlqX8BexmJdGs6AgjuelYHfvA0Ceip2aaSFeHjUapSaUaiBN8PDfLLQ2d40OTTafICBVPvb_f1rSVoKZap_9atTHiY/s400/When+the+Clouds+Roll+By.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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One takes for granted that Hollywood makes a profit by investing in the work of some figures whom it is not an abuse of meaning to call "artists." The publishing industry did the same with writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser, and in 1921, Edith Wharton's <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/index.php/the-age-of-innocence-1920-edith-wharton/"><i>The Age of Innocence</i></a> was the <a href="http://www.caderbooks.com/best20.html">#4 best-seller</a> in America (and though this year North America's 4th highest grossing movie was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_in_film"><i>Twilight: Eclipse</i></a>, it did not win a Pulitzer).<br />
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We want our peers to recognize in us what they first might have recognized at the movies. Songs we haven't heard in so long become much cooler in the theater set to some cool scene. And our own social setting may even excel by setting forth the yea or nay of a movie as the means to articulate something about ourselves which we otherwise do not know how to.<br />
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No year of movies is without a resplendence of those "based on a true story," where events alleged to have happened are given the fictional treatment. The audience wants what once occurred in the real world told in the language of moviemaking. As the credits roll and the people leave the theater, one often hears enlightened viewers telling each other while brushing popcorn from their collar, "Hey Eddie, that really happened you know!"<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgBotYg7Fgm3JdlplOqR7q9QwteoI0rUet7nrtMlnZ3uTcrlV1Gy-DGNY_nPgr2nKE4bBJl-jaitGxpjqcFN0_AQ8zZq6RgGPk4L8KEuoOjr0cJ1B1N7523LylwAGM2-AwprCg1XBXTyol/s1600/The+Fighter+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="127" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgBotYg7Fgm3JdlplOqR7q9QwteoI0rUet7nrtMlnZ3uTcrlV1Gy-DGNY_nPgr2nKE4bBJl-jaitGxpjqcFN0_AQ8zZq6RgGPk4L8KEuoOjr0cJ1B1N7523LylwAGM2-AwprCg1XBXTyol/s320/The+Fighter+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>But if the movie is "inspired by true events," like <a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2011/01/social-network.html"><i>The Social Network</i></a> (nominated for Best Adapted Script) or<i> <a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2011/01/fighter.html">The Fighter</a></i> (for Best Original) the movie may not have to reproduce those events with fanatic literal exactitude to effect what is true. The faith in drama lies otherwise. <i>Social Network</i> takes Facebook as its premise, and Facebook is a technological device which lets people make their own reality of themselves. <i>The Fighter</i>, as director David O. Russell has <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41d0QvlksXY&feature=related">explained in interviews</a>, is a "movie-within-a-<a href="http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/high_on_crack_street_lost_lives_in_lowell/">movie</a>." As <a href="http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20446271,00.html">a critic quipped</a> about <i>I Love You Phillip Morris</i> (2010, Glenn Ficarra & John Requa) "... a tale too bizarre to qualify as believable fiction. No problem: It's a true story — a freak opportunity."<br />
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The subject of what is a true story became headline news in the hubbub over the secret cyber-dump site <a href="http://213.251.145.96/support.html">WikiLeaks</a>. Julian Assange, looking like he just walked out of <a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2010/12/inception-inspection.html">Inception</a>, postures himself a purveyor of “<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/dont-shoot-messenger-for-revealing-uncomfortable-truths/story-fn775xjq-1225967241332">scientific journalism</a>," which "allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true?” Filmmakers do not have to be the extractors of classified government documents to get a true story, but only blurb that their movie is based on one.<br />
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We crave the bias of how we see things, which is why we can’t wait for Oscar time. The Oscars like <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/business/media/11futures.html?ref=technology">best impersonations</a>. Jerry O'Connell's character, in <i>Piranha 3-D</i> (2010, Alexandre Aja) clearly imitates real-life creep <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAO5YNfYPTY">Joe Francis</a>, and the pleasure one gains by watching fanged fish chow his prick and balls off is based on what would be a real event. A movie made in 3-D promotes its intention of recreating the real experience of space, but most 3-D movies are sci-fi fantasies that, as transom-jockey <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-12-29/news/michael-musto-s-year-in-review/">Michael Musto notes</a>, offer "mind-blowing altered states for arrested children of all ages." In <i>Pirana 3-D</i>, the moral times are gauged like a Late Medieval tapestry where Nature has lured all the douchebags to one place, and then eats them. Then the good people start getting chowed too. New meaning is given to the idea of being one of the <a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2010/12/expendables.html">The Expendables</a> (2010, Sylvester Stallone).<br />
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Most theater-goers, like the characters in <i>Soc Network</i>, are "<a href="http://www.ml.cmu.edu/">wired-in</a>." The psychic derangement of popular memory is where the comparison between <i>The Social Network </i>and <i>Hot Tub Time Machine </i>makes sense.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZTnUZZ4xjVMynqGhItCpqdJb83T0Y6v_XSoZ5j8GFs2CycRTUFMxN9InHtLHNhBfFkpPBuHZMCxGAFNpV9RF44JsnsouKC06XO0EcI0ORES5RWOam8mHiHeGQAcd11bHleovlomT0So-/s1600/The+Social+Network+Hot+Tub+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZTnUZZ4xjVMynqGhItCpqdJb83T0Y6v_XSoZ5j8GFs2CycRTUFMxN9InHtLHNhBfFkpPBuHZMCxGAFNpV9RF44JsnsouKC06XO0EcI0ORES5RWOam8mHiHeGQAcd11bHleovlomT0So-/s400/The+Social+Network+Hot+Tub+copy.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
In <i>Hot Tub Time Machine</i> (2010, Steve Pink) the character Lou Dorchen (Rob Corddry) undergoes the harrows of time travel and revisits his dejected teenage years, when Lou still had the prospect of the future to assure him – as in the present, Lou has no future. 1986! K-Vall! Lou relives the same humiliations at the hands of Chaz, a Commie-hating ski lodge prepster who one day will no doubt craft policy for Paul Wolfowitz, and is subjected again to the betrayal by his best friends, who are still deadbeats.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghWVz9_QixRBDWy78JoWclxMz8Qn4YVFD-OdIC5q0SlM19TvH8AFynXZH7Vdec83yuKpp4W48o-3ad6TGjMsrnkTgG7CpIw1KNcN7SkxKsR9U_MuP_ij7W0-Q2__uU4hK3afPq8KMpOXjq/s1600/Hot+Tub+Time+Machine++Chaz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghWVz9_QixRBDWy78JoWclxMz8Qn4YVFD-OdIC5q0SlM19TvH8AFynXZH7Vdec83yuKpp4W48o-3ad6TGjMsrnkTgG7CpIw1KNcN7SkxKsR9U_MuP_ij7W0-Q2__uU4hK3afPq8KMpOXjq/s400/Hot+Tub+Time+Machine++Chaz.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Lou breaks it down for the guys in a grand whiskey-swigging tirade, that one supports a bud no matter how much of a loser, even if it brings everybody else down. Friends are not beholden to save each other by good sense, but sheer dude companionship. Lou opts to stay in '86, and not go back to his depressing 40s. He defies physics and embarks on the journey out of his mind, while his buddies head back in the Hot Tub to a new future. In some concurrent fourth dimension Lou invents Lougle, the smash Internet search engine, and becomes a happy zillionaire.<br />
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In <i>The Social Network</i>, the Hot Tub is "the Facebook," a new technology of global communal consciousness that comes about by way of a similar betrayal of friendship. Director David Fincher goes back in time to the early 21st century, so early that Autocorrect does not recognize the word "FaceBook" when Zuckerberg keypecks it on his blog. But in the final scene, Zuck refreshes his Facebook page as if he would gladly jump into the Hot Tub Time Machine to make things different with his girlfriend in the first scene. Sean Parker abuses the claim to friendship so important to Lou – Parker screws Eduardo the same way Lou feels his pals screwed him - and Napster Boy ends up in jail as a sex criminal. Lou’s future son, fat nerd Jacob, believes he is witnessing a sex crime when he barges in on Lou boning snow bunny Kelly, Jacob's mom, at the moment of conception....<br />
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<b>"I made it a point to try to visualize the things I was saying as though they had really happened.... and for me they were happening as I talked; it was hard to realize that they had not taken place in the actual world... they became part of a world, the believed world, the world of recorded events, of history."</b> -<i> Deliverance</i>, James Dickey (1970).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSXOhOBmLVzppZYy09uScZvhbkU3MPuAxyX-Fh_h3Wcomgw8lOI9vacv01L7E-6zYKnKezGjbjOxfrW6TTrTw7RoGBMPjhCJS4SvgqTnV_8Rs-2jjm7sXCWBST2iwtUq_ShzLxQPt4-iRk/s1600/Casanova+D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSXOhOBmLVzppZYy09uScZvhbkU3MPuAxyX-Fh_h3Wcomgw8lOI9vacv01L7E-6zYKnKezGjbjOxfrW6TTrTw7RoGBMPjhCJS4SvgqTnV_8Rs-2jjm7sXCWBST2iwtUq_ShzLxQPt4-iRk/s320/Casanova+D.jpg" width="280" /></a></div>If a movie is based on real events, better opportunity to justify taking interpretive liberties with the material. Film is the pingback of reality, and one brings one experience to it, as both judge and spectator. In <a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2011/01/fellinis-casanova.html"><i>Fellini's Casanova</i></a> (1977, Federico Fellini), screened this year at Anthology Film Archives' <a href="http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/35904">Anti-Biopic series</a>, Casanova's infamous <i><a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/">Memoirs</a></i> are used as a source text, but Fellini does not base his movie on a true story - it is a true story, made with trashbag sea-storms and starring a louche Donald Sutherland. <br />
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<b>"Philosophy must not forget that it has always spoken its part in the most burlesque and melodramatic settings."</b><br />
-"Gangland & Philosophy,"Attila Kotanyi (1960). <br />
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2010 marked the 20th anniversary of the <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/index.php/goodfellas-turns-20/">greatest mob movie ever made</a>, <i>Goodfellas</i> (1990, Martin Scorsese), which is the definitive, orgiastic "book-on-film," and follows the pattern of time, date, place, costume, music, while never failing to exploit all of it. Truth and art merge like the garlic sliced so thin it liquifies in the pan. The mob is the ideal subject for movies "based on a true story," because wiseguys love to exaggerate fucked-up stories about themselves.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijKTZsO_inK9ck5OuSxFeXLOM17nr4MXqU6MPP2tyjJoisTeSsjCCnERbBD8HdEc2qVqmudLI2u3vg0uj01m4OXwL4n6WtCb3LlpxAOdmRKUj48537g-mpVlN4iFkaCNX7MsR-uW2wkx1T/s1600/Goodfellas+A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="108" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijKTZsO_inK9ck5OuSxFeXLOM17nr4MXqU6MPP2tyjJoisTeSsjCCnERbBD8HdEc2qVqmudLI2u3vg0uj01m4OXwL4n6WtCb3LlpxAOdmRKUj48537g-mpVlN4iFkaCNX7MsR-uW2wkx1T/s320/Goodfellas+A.jpg" width="320" /></a></div> <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr3jXaFn1BqQqcCyi-6oWQ9z5QT_a3CxIxT9p6_8NbbTI88lWdxBHWFiDI9YiXNHvqQeOKy_GASLiwsvg5-dF8k-lkttC0QKx1fZMe5PsrrXIUV5CZppG1H1O_5J2d-CPHgjPE5CNObBwr/s1600/Scorsese+B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr3jXaFn1BqQqcCyi-6oWQ9z5QT_a3CxIxT9p6_8NbbTI88lWdxBHWFiDI9YiXNHvqQeOKy_GASLiwsvg5-dF8k-lkttC0QKx1fZMe5PsrrXIUV5CZppG1H1O_5J2d-CPHgjPE5CNObBwr/s200/Scorsese+B.jpg" width="141" /></a>Marty Scorsese had a productive year, commencing 2010 with <i>Shutter Island</i>, where he depicts the harrows of imagination cured only by a doctor's lance through the brain. Marty helmed the series opener of <i>Boardwalk Empire</i>, based on the 1920s Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson, after the "real-life" Nucky Johnson - as if Mark Zuckerberg were called Mark Eisenberg to deflect the criticism of historical inaccuracy. Marty also directed <i>Public Speaking</i>, an HBO doc about Fran Lebowitz, and about the style of New York personality that is going the way of smoking in bars, Howard Johnson's, and rent control. Fran is a fast and vast talker, and the stories of her life in the city, a New York that is bygone, are augmented by Scorsese with inter-cut footage of James Baldwin debating William F. Buckley and clips from <i>Taxi Driver</i>, directed by Martin Scorsese. Like in <i>Goodfellas</i>, Fran blows alot of peoples' heads off.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh5lAcSe_28AnvyG6vJ1DlyRCqMI3FXoPhCiV31vYUXSvKhw4izZOOHNq8BAdv1DC7PA1mwgttvpBEPlm2Sec-zfS99mjq32-L2DblByWxfWHXUiMccie4d9c1jcERwh9JSqYRjy98hLdH/s1600/Scorsese+A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh5lAcSe_28AnvyG6vJ1DlyRCqMI3FXoPhCiV31vYUXSvKhw4izZOOHNq8BAdv1DC7PA1mwgttvpBEPlm2Sec-zfS99mjq32-L2DblByWxfWHXUiMccie4d9c1jcERwh9JSqYRjy98hLdH/s320/Scorsese+A.jpg" width="320" /></a>Scorsese enters 2010 again as the "montage supervisor" for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_on_Tour"><i>Elvis on Tour</i></a> (1972, R. Abel, P. Adidge), remastered for DVD. Elvis is shown premiering "Burning Love," so new that he apologizes to the crowd for having to read the lyrics off a sheet of paper. <i>Elvis on Tour</i> is a tour of Elvis, and Scorsese's touch is felt in the seamless collage of the Elvis imprint on the shutterfly dreams of the pop world. Three hours before a show, Elvis hangs out backstage in his messianic costume and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBPR6qv7-wE&feature=related">breaks down gospel tunes</a> with the Jordanaires, baring the gonzo <a href="http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/38918">moral South</a> in him.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZy0tmH-g1ZFtVCksSOmMDE-YNFu95ckgRJXxJn8meZ2HWXVshOphFsh82V5JGPmSpAQynXk8LOrYbS3d_tu_cG9oNasxNXYdNsJIhtQxeC0us-VMBXjr21yfPTcFXN-grR87BPNUJJrWx/s1600/Timothy+Carey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZy0tmH-g1ZFtVCksSOmMDE-YNFu95ckgRJXxJn8meZ2HWXVshOphFsh82V5JGPmSpAQynXk8LOrYbS3d_tu_cG9oNasxNXYdNsJIhtQxeC0us-VMBXjr21yfPTcFXN-grR87BPNUJJrWx/s1600/Timothy+Carey.jpg" /></a></div>The same brotherly lighting strikes Timothy Carey in <a href="http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=96292"><i>The World's Greatest Sinner</i></a> (1962, Timothy Carey), which screened at Anthology Film Archives last fall. Carey plays a Southern California inland suburb insurance salesman who decides to quit the business and become a God. He performs mondo Christian stage shows in the middle-class suburbs of Hollywood. Timothy Carey is a whipcrack ham-sandwich of an actor, and Anthology's 2010 retrospective also featured <i>Cinema Justice</i> (1972), a ten-minute scenario repurposed in between takes from some other movie (<i>Tarzana </i>by Steve Da Jarnatt), where Timothy Carey plays Timothy Carey, ranting in a crappy office, bantering and banging around like Zeus, an articulate hurl of the loud and strange human way, being himself. <i>Cinema Justice</i> must be off the factbook - IMDB has even missed its archival existence.<br />
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Movie audiences don't seem to miss the archival existence of actor Joaquin Phoenix, who appeared as a joshing version of Joaquin Phoenix in <i>I'm Still Here</i> (2010, Casey Affleck), which bombed. If an appearance on David Letterman becomes your epochal geisty plot point, then you are still there, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0F3kY3uxU">not here</a>. There is no shortage of true stories to inspire the hermeneutics of fame and personality in America, and <i>I'm Still Here</i> has<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjua-knBsB7MsHr0Cm-4MviWZ8aoPpgijlqPvjpxFokc-fV2yLuv3FD1aomgQFuh1Cy9OgqJJhjLszMnew3QxxjeAs-14vs2L7fbQQwRs1R7oJ-wlmDOBNDyRoNgqEls3oxnY_CB1wFTBzM/s1600/I%2527m+Still+Here+1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjua-knBsB7MsHr0Cm-4MviWZ8aoPpgijlqPvjpxFokc-fV2yLuv3FD1aomgQFuh1Cy9OgqJJhjLszMnew3QxxjeAs-14vs2L7fbQQwRs1R7oJ-wlmDOBNDyRoNgqEls3oxnY_CB1wFTBzM/s200/I%2527m+Still+Here+1.jpg" width="200" /></a> its vernacular right, the app of <a href="http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/as-if.html">the "As If."</a> And sometimes it is even that to have no point is the point - true nihilism is often entertaining (hence the <a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2009/07/crank-movies.html"><i>Crank</i> movies</a>). But Joaq's roleplaying alienates the character, the actor, and the moviewatcher, who might still be here and not turned the movie off yet because of a couple of <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Joaq-rapping-1.mp3">hilarious rapping scenes</a> in the first twenty minutes. Joaq consults Ejo (Edward James Olmos), who intones Lt. Castillo, advising that "life's a journey that goes round and round and the end is closest to the beginning." Ejo's <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/im-still-here-2010,48334/">fauxhemian windbaggery</a> might be what post-humanist Douglas Rushkoff calls a "spontaneous, emergent reality." <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/foreman05/foreman05_index.html">Rushkoff describes</a> "the multiple dimensions" with which humans "can contend with having more than one perspective at a time." The title of the movie nods off to Todd Haynes' <i>I'm Not There</i>, a similar syzygy of one character's consciousness, but though Joaq toured prisons playing music with Skeeter Jennings, he was never in The Traveling Wilburys. Like Henry James says in his short story <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/authorofbeltraff00jameiala">"The Great Good Place"</a> (1900), "Every one was a little some one else."<br />
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Perhaps the most mindbending of films based on real events in 2010 was a TV commercial, <i>Call of Duty: Black Ops </i>(2010, Rupert Sanders). In November, Activision <a href="http://adage.com/article?article_id=146906">released ads</a> for its new One-Man Army video game. Anyone who has turned on a TV since Thanksgiving has seen this commercial. Celebrities and no-name office workers are shown in civilian wear engaged in combat on a Third-World battlefield, blowing away terrorists and making bad-ass faces. Sports hot shot <a href="http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/6022594/ns/bryant_sexual_assault_lawsuit/">Kobe Bryant</a> and slack-jawed late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel make no secret of the tasteless puppetry which Technopolis has made of them. Why make war movies when you can hire Hollywood screenwriters to craft scenarios for hyperdimensional video games, free of real guns or real shattered spines? Cued by the Rolling Stones soundtrack, it must be mad sick to do battle like this. And if there is a soldier in all of us, there is also a <a href="http://thegrumpysociologist.blogspot.com/2010/11/permissible-violence-kobe-bryant-jimmy.html">comfort zone junky</a>.<br />
<br />
As part of the New York Film Festival's "Views From the Avant-Garde" at Walter Reade, screened<i> <a href="http://www.rodeofilmco.com/2010/future-so-bright-2/">Future So Bright</a></i> (2010, Matt McCormick, <a href="http://www.clui.org/new/index.html">Center For Land Use Interpretation</a>), a short film which, as it evolves, becomes increasingly likely to have been tagged "based on a true story." Told in three parts, the movie presents vivid tableaux of petrified American frontier settlements that give way to the numinous hulking shells of industrial expansion which in turn make way for the candycolored 1950s middle-class businesses of leisure. An object history of the West that trails the barns of immigrant pioneers, factories of the War Boom work force, and roadside family resort-o-ramas that cropped up on new Federal highways, silent and panascopic.<br />
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Over the summer, <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/">Film Forum</a> devoted a series to the avatar of interactive moviegoing, William Castle. Castle’s original theater gimmicks, like "Emergo" and "psychedelorama," were reproduced under the direction of repertory film programmer Bert Goldman. Before the opening credits of <i><a href="http://mccarthy.qwriting.org/tag/the-tingler/">The Tingle</a>r</i>, starring Vincent Price, Castle appears in an introductory preamble to warn the audience about Fear. Castle is worried that, for some moviegoers, it might get too real. "The Tingler is in the theater!”<br />
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....<i> Black Swan</i> (2010, Darren Aronofsky) gave the <i>Twilight </i>fandom a quaint correlative of teenagey psychosis, where Mila Kunis goes down on Ms. Portman as Brad Pitt never did Ed Norton in <i>Fight Club</i> (1999, David Fincher) .... and <a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2011/01/wiley-cyrus.html">Cyrus</a> (2010, The Duplass Brothers) had his own version of his own true story... <i>The Runaways</i> put <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB4DFzlcI80">Dakota Fanning on stage</a> at the high school talent show as Cherie Currie, making transcendent reality to Bowie's "Lady Grinning Soul".... <i>The Ghost Writer</i> (2010, Roman Polanski) depicted a CIA conspiracy borne of reading books... There was no good things about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7_VwoZKPRM"><i>All Good Things</i></a> (2010, Andrew Jarecki), which turned ripe New York history into rancid soap opera... and <i>The Other Guys </i>(2010, Adam McKay) made pretty good comedy of the signs and signifiers of the <a href="http://www.barrypopik.com/">Big Apple</a>....<br />
<br />
<u><b>A Friv List:</b></u><i> </i><br />
<i>The Fighter</i><br />
<i>The Social Network</i><br />
<i>Cyrus 3-D</i><br />
<i>Hot Tub Time Machine</i><br />
<i>True Grit </i><br />
<i>Public Speaking </i><br />
<i>The Ghost Writer<br />
Winter's Bone</i><br />
<i><a href="http://mccarthyshinebox.blogspot.com/2010/10/greenberg.html">Greenberg</a> Zone</i><br />
<i>Future So Bright </i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-68534299273437964092011-01-30T22:30:00.000-08:002011-02-02T23:42:13.194-08:00The Fighter(2010) David O. Russell. BAM.<br />
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Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) is followed around by a documentary camera crew which Dicky believes is out to capture his pending comeback as a pro welterweight boxer. It has been fifteen some-odd years since Dicky's big spotlight moment knocking out Sugar Ray Leonard in 1977. Dicky hits the crack pipe and schpiels for the camera about the past big times, but gets distracted, “Yeah what was I saying?” and while Dicky figures it out, the doc filmmaker reminds the people in the room that this movie is about the effects of drug addiction, not a comeback story.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglSwdREU_QBjs8E1yIh5KAGnq57hcxY9qkBBCHWmC3h2KqSZaU84j-z08np19Mc6LWAaI2KGOjJBWH3RsZiZzr_TyOKFduQb0061fbN7Desi4MxwHmMDy1QcGK1CWeUy2MNMVlV5ekwsJl/s1600/The+Fighter+sisters+with+David+O.+Rusell.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br />
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Viewership is continuously indulged by showing one thing as another. As <a href="http://www.thefightermovie.com/cast-mark-wahlberg.html"><i>The Fighter</i></a> opens, <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=5944464">Mickey Ward</a> is raking the pavement of downtown Lowell, Massachusetts. Dicky’s jabs enter the frame like piston works, huffing and quick. The movie camera then turns to the documentary camera - the brothers are being filmed being filmed. "How You Like Me Now?" by The Heavy kicks in (which, like <i>The Fighter</i>, samples the past), and from the opening bell David O. Russell has the audience up against the ropes.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglSwdREU_QBjs8E1yIh5KAGnq57hcxY9qkBBCHWmC3h2KqSZaU84j-z08np19Mc6LWAaI2KGOjJBWH3RsZiZzr_TyOKFduQb0061fbN7Desi4MxwHmMDy1QcGK1CWeUy2MNMVlV5ekwsJl/s1600/The+Fighter+sisters+with+David+O.+Rusell.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglSwdREU_QBjs8E1yIh5KAGnq57hcxY9qkBBCHWmC3h2KqSZaU84j-z08np19Mc6LWAaI2KGOjJBWH3RsZiZzr_TyOKFduQb0061fbN7Desi4MxwHmMDy1QcGK1CWeUy2MNMVlV5ekwsJl/s320/The+Fighter+sisters+with+David+O.+Rusell.jpg" width="320" /></a> On <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41d0QvlksXY&feature=related">Charlie Rose</a>, O. Russell drew attention to the “movie-within-a-movie” aspect of the story, as a play on both the audience and the characters. O. Russell likes to throw his cast into the maelstrom, as when <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/12/the-fighter-sisters-ward-eklund-lowell-mass-movie.html">the sisters</a> follow Ma Ward (Melissa Leo) in a mad predatoress frenzy to the house of their arch enemy, Mickey’s wife, Charlene (Amy Adams), who is foxy but no MTV girl. Charlene's salty spitfire draws deep from the bruised brawn of Lowell, Mass, the "birthplace of the Industrial Revolution." This history of the city - a booming 19th century textile superpower now neglected and afflicted - is summarized in the introduction to the movie-within-a-movie, which screens at the prison, and a gloating Dicky sits next to a stocky granite-browed psycho who looks like he used to hang out at Tool's Tattoos in <i>The Expendables</i>. <br />
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The crux of the movie is the <a href="http://www.ranker.com/list/micky-_the-fighter_-ward_s-bloodiest-real-life-battles/ned_brown">Sanchez v. Ward</a> fight, a sequence told by a series of removed perceptions. Dicky is on the prison pay-phone and relayed the action from Ma Alice Ward back in Lowell, who watches the fight broadcast from Las Vegason on TV. Dicky updates the fellow prisoners who crowd in clusters behind the jail bars, eager for any hint of entertainment. These inmates are the movie audience, getting off on the degrees of reality filtered through a chain of voices, at a distance locked in time and space from the actual events, but raucously intimate. Film quill-cruncher J. Hoberman <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-12-08/film/the-fighter-feels-rigged/">indicates that</a><b>, "</b>Dicky may have been the subject of an HBO<i> America Undercover</i> doc (<a href="http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/high_on_crack_street_lost_lives_in_lowell/"><i>High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell</i></a>), but... the whole family is living a reality show—their domestic drama played out in full view of friends and neighbors<b>.”</b><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwSOYeregBggCcl9wxDd_Ng5xMANAkdLmqXdA5ZW7hDGTqDcf7y-sBesSqKFxm9Yjux9wWssBu6pUkc-y20hApt4pvMxY7tI0I7s8tkscn09UTaax9-EyJ0FQQqXdLw-L5ndjK0AMZ638k/s1600/The+Fighter+Mickey+%2526+Mickey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwSOYeregBggCcl9wxDd_Ng5xMANAkdLmqXdA5ZW7hDGTqDcf7y-sBesSqKFxm9Yjux9wWssBu6pUkc-y20hApt4pvMxY7tI0I7s8tkscn09UTaax9-EyJ0FQQqXdLw-L5ndjK0AMZ638k/s320/The+Fighter+Mickey+%2526+Mickey.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The family has a habit of singing pop songs to each other when words would seem to degrade the bout of issues at hand. Ma Alice Ward finds Dicky ashamedly jumping out the 2nd floor window, and as she ushers him into the car, the pariah calms her with a faulty acapella version of The Bee Gees "<a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/010-I-Started-A-Joke.mp3">I Started A Joke</a>," and after Ma joins in the chorus no more dialogue is needed. As Dicky and Mickey emerge from the locker room into the arena for the climactic Neary v. Ward fight, they mumble the words to "Here I Go Again," the 80s classic by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3MXiTeH_Pg">Whitesnake</a>. The <a href="http://www.what-song.com/movie/title.php?Title=Fighter,%20The">pugnacious soundtrack</a> jumps between decades the same way the movie veers between <a href="http://www.boxingscene.com/-fighter-terrific-movie-despite-inaccuracies--34028">between truth and fiction</a>, from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt5MWCwFhCI">The Breeders</a> to <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Traffic-Rock-N-Roll-Stew.mp3">Traffic</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-32917106755454340712011-01-27T22:39:00.000-08:002011-02-05T14:04:58.084-08:00The Social Network2010, David Fincher. BAM. <br />
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<b>"He's wired in." </b><br />
<br />
At Harvard University, where buildings on campus stand 100 years older than America, new ideas are propelled into the world - usually by students who never graduate, like William S. Burroughs, or Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is not an artist, nor is he a countercultural icon, but he is an alienated social misfit. He is hyper-intelligent in that he doesn't think before he speaks, though often his speech is bright and smartass - unless he is talking to girls. Like Erica, his girlfriend, tells him in the beginning, he isn't a nerd, but an asshole. And Zuck's face shrinks up like a squeezed lemon when the negative consequences of his actions confront him.<br />
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<i>Soc Net</i> begins with a conversation, and ends with the doubleclick, the refresh, of continuing that conversation. "Facebook" is borne of an old boys club. At the dance for Jewish students, the only females are sexy Asians. Eduardo says the idea is that they wanna get laid, but Zuckerberg amends that it's "to get a girlfriend." Eduardo ends up dating the groupie who blows him in the bathroom and then who later lights his apartment on fire, jealous because his relationship status is "single." Much of the drama finds a source in the searing vindictiveness of post-teen males against females, and the females' willingness to be objectified as a way of empowerment. Hotties show up by the busload at frat parties and striptease to Trent Reznor music. Zuckerberg exploits this with his "Who's Hotter?" app, but all the girls are mortified when their reality is reduced to an algorithm of which they have no control.<br />
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The Winklevi are traditional Harvard men. They don't sue to settle a score, but prefer an allegiance to Harvard Law, like some blueblooded pointdexter out of 1920s comedy. But when the Winklevi bring their case to the College president, Larry Summers, they find a seasoned powerbroker with little regard for the dictates and traditions of justice. Summers had demonstrated a similar callous braggadocio as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton in his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Post-Harvard_career">involvement with deregulation of derivatives contracts</a>. As a result of the mortgage crisis, Wall Street turned to the U.S. government as do the Winklevi to Harvard Pres. Larry Summers.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiksjwJyFvRbxmGaNsvTp84v-9cjIBw5WAhOZsAk_4-uBmwpdZ7W4HGDV0_nlMtXQEGLP8yzuXG_AiPPywAiLRtAhgyhAtJYZ79AGjl06VW4rhkznweaz4SkgQksUAzqcBzdWvBoZ3Ac3o2/s1600/The+Social+Network+billboard+punk+prophet+billionaire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiksjwJyFvRbxmGaNsvTp84v-9cjIBw5WAhOZsAk_4-uBmwpdZ7W4HGDV0_nlMtXQEGLP8yzuXG_AiPPywAiLRtAhgyhAtJYZ79AGjl06VW4rhkznweaz4SkgQksUAzqcBzdWvBoZ3Ac3o2/s320/The+Social+Network+billboard+punk+prophet+billionaire.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The <a href="http://dailybillboard.blogspot.com/2010/09/bonus-week-social-network-movie.html">ads for the movie</a> portray Zuckerberg as an activist and rebel distinct among the masses. But of course the movie is premised on his theft of others' ideas and money, as well as his <a href="http://www.educause.edu/Resources/ECARStudyofUndergraduateStuden/217333">awkwardness</a> with chicks. Zuck dresses like a dirtbag - ubiquitous blue Adidas flipflops and Gap hooded sweatshirt, jammy bottoms which may or may not be jizz-stained. Zuckerberg is a quick mind but not exactly innovative or problem-solving. His one sole invention is the program that allows dudes to vote Who's Hotter when presented with two random pics of campus co-eds. The cast is presented as characters based on real people, equally removed from as they are woven up in the reality of one's own Facebook page. On the red carpet at the 2010 Golden Globes, Jesse Eisenberg explained that he has never met Mark Zuckerberg, but only played the character MZ as written by Aaron Sorkin, the scriptwriter. Joe Pesci might have said the same thing about Tommy DeSimone in <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/index.php/goodfellas-turns-20/"><i>Goodfellas</i></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-65602238055673055682011-01-11T22:28:00.000-08:002011-01-11T22:28:07.757-08:00Suvival of the Dead(2010) George A. Romero. Village East Cinemas.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ksrsloCer6C__CPqP2apFWVqmtnrk9fI-vHr8ySAJU_kHwy6rNbev1jocNnDOWqPSNfpefyf9CKazOeRnSPFzdZk8uLKqK-5G4U_fI6hSvl-Qixg-P0M9Esm9xtEhDwSGKEwbLw8IaT-/s1600/Survival+of+the+Dead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="219" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ksrsloCer6C__CPqP2apFWVqmtnrk9fI-vHr8ySAJU_kHwy6rNbev1jocNnDOWqPSNfpefyf9CKazOeRnSPFzdZk8uLKqK-5G4U_fI6hSvl-Qixg-P0M9Esm9xtEhDwSGKEwbLw8IaT-/s320/Survival+of+the+Dead.jpg" /></a></div>A zombie tale out of an old book of dollar-bin local folklore, with two rival families living on the fantastical Plum Island off the shores of Delaware, the least exotic sounding place on the East Coast. The families inexplicably speak with Irish brogues, wearing rustic raiment, mercenary and bushwacking, like shark-hunter cowboys. The families are armed with heavy-duty gunnery, until the two patriarchs, Patrick O'Flynn and Seamus Muldoon, as zombies, duel at high moon. Based on a true island...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-7826521178588232492011-01-11T22:07:00.000-08:002011-01-26T10:41:44.152-08:00Fellini’s Casanova(1976) Federico Fellini. Anthology Film Archives - Anti-Biopic series. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOy6bXiSCspo5RL3RvCsOX4MnpEUQ-GUgBEUofw3BnRdddgBCCr7sggCXJ95JS_pUHIVmnWa-zIymvpCQdZ7ieqQuGhOEG3L8BAR5T5V6Vg-jpUdiztckySEj1P-u1FnZS0xSaU3xG1HLU/s1600/Casanova+C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOy6bXiSCspo5RL3RvCsOX4MnpEUQ-GUgBEUofw3BnRdddgBCCr7sggCXJ95JS_pUHIVmnWa-zIymvpCQdZ7ieqQuGhOEG3L8BAR5T5V6Vg-jpUdiztckySEj1P-u1FnZS0xSaU3xG1HLU/s320/Casanova+C.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>A picaresque dreamscapade through the debauched Scientific Revolution of Western Europe, beginning with a Venetian masquerade at the nighttime canal in which floats the gargantuan black head of Casanova. Our hero has affairs with humpbacks and aged Parisennes and a giantess in London. As Casanova's journey deepens, the society is found to have devolved. At a party in Germany, Casanova holds in his hand rare seeds which he himself has cultivated, they have a special regenerative property. But the Nordics are drunk and rampant, and a dim bully Fritz blows the seeds out of Casanova's hand.... Before lambasting his Italian dirtbag opponent in the public cum contest, Casanova explains that the true libertine is not just a sex maniac, but a scholar, an inventor, with knowledge of the movement of bodily fluids. It is all lost on the ginzo party-goers.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcbojEv_wBL4-YyBfipXphTofm7NnXYAdoGJ7iE1ehP_XyKDZYJYqrnsRverlj_IRpG1_shjP05PXVxxnrBY04qpPmUjGYfXe0hyV_5c94CBAUWnydogcSJo5-MiNjx6rVGBHF3dl0VY4z/s1600/Casanova+B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcbojEv_wBL4-YyBfipXphTofm7NnXYAdoGJ7iE1ehP_XyKDZYJYqrnsRverlj_IRpG1_shjP05PXVxxnrBY04qpPmUjGYfXe0hyV_5c94CBAUWnydogcSJo5-MiNjx6rVGBHF3dl0VY4z/s320/Casanova+B.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Casanova is ever more defiant of his own inventor's consequence, and as he ages his memory becomes one of popular legend as his living reality is the bad joke of an old man no one listens to, begging for supper in the village tavern. Casanova has made the rounds of his time and place with the vast enlightened passion for technic imagination as Jefferson assembling his bookshelf, and indeed Casanova ends up the sexless librarian to Count Waldstein. Fellini is quoted in regards to the director's choice of Donald Sutherland, "a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator.” <br />
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To verify the faithfulness of the movie to recorded events, take a dip into <a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/">Casanova's Memoirs</a>....<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzHfrxtGu_tzTQJ71XiAS5OYZlRUP0JLRAgVsIWhLbuGTD_GT7EIQXM88AMXO9srX-T9VlffvA0ZCWUiuIra_JzeSptaa8J-x3vTrFMvThGMjxeHKqgurFkZjLuLrdWnLUXK5tA3A4VQlo/s1600/Casanova+A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzHfrxtGu_tzTQJ71XiAS5OYZlRUP0JLRAgVsIWhLbuGTD_GT7EIQXM88AMXO9srX-T9VlffvA0ZCWUiuIra_JzeSptaa8J-x3vTrFMvThGMjxeHKqgurFkZjLuLrdWnLUXK5tA3A4VQlo/s320/Casanova+A.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-36228000959643118052011-01-04T19:01:00.000-08:002015-07-13T19:13:35.777-07:00Wiley Cyrus<a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/cyrus-and-john.jpg"><img align="right" alt="Cyrus & John" border="0" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1273" src="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/cyrus-and-john.jpg" height="213" title="Cyrus & John" width="320" /></a>(2010) Jay & Mark Duplass. Brooklyn Academy of Music.<br />
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The plight of Cyrus, the movie character, demonstrates a way of being which at the hinge of the first decade of the 2000s afflicts a mass community of males and females twenty years or so younger than the generation of John C. Reilly's character, John. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&hp" target="_blank">Cyrus' type</a> is boastful of independence and demands that their voice be recognized. Obsessed with the collective curating of memory and appalled by the changing force of life, Cyrus and his peers are but barnacled to childhood and the head-movie of fantasy kiddy times, comporting the first experience of melancholy as if they were the first human league ever to know it. The time and place of John's own nostalgiac happy-place is revealed when he interrupts a conversation with a flirty attractive woman to go belt out a <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/t-You-Want-Me-Baby.mp3" target="_blank">mid-1980s Human League song</a> in front of the whole party. The manipulated migration of frantic adolescence into stunted young adulthood, whiny and staunchly in defiance of self-reflection other than a false honesty to the identity of the past, is the plight of Cyrus.<br />
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The boy is a musician, but can only compose while eyeballing photoshopped pics of nature, as if performing for the audience of himself. Cyrus must complicate the creative process to give the illusion of complexity, as well as make demands of his willing mother, who is Cyrus’ bosomy production assistant. Cyrus is all set-up with his “seven pieces” of studio equipment - he is tethered to technology as a posture of making a mark on the world, of which he really has no clue. He has no problem finding an apartment on Craigs List, but has a big problem living in it.<br />
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<a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Cyrus-music.jpeg"><img align="center" alt="Cyrus composing music" border="0" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1273" src="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Cyrus-music.jpeg" height="259" title="Cyrus composing music" width="425" /></a><br />
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Cyrus cons order out of his life using his relationship with his mom, which is the most meaningful and truthful relationship in his life. Cyrus masquerades as a responsible being but is an emotional troglodyte. His edgy jokes backfire when John speaks to him as an adult in admitting that he did indeed sleep with Molly, after Cyrus makes a smug "don't fuck my mom" quip. Cyrus believes he is so smarter and wittier than everyone else, he doesn't need life experience, an unknowing victim of the soaked-out data stream. It makes sense that his CD is called "A Study of One and Two," since Cyrus has a hard time dealing with the world of others. It could be the tagline for the movie. Cyrus does not agree with John that it sounds like Steve Miller.<br />
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<i>Cyrus </i>opens by depicting the desperate circumstances of John, who, in his encounter with Cyrus, is not weak or hopeless or without a jaggedly winning struggle. After sabotaging John and Molly's relationship, Cyrus can only manipulate it back together, smart enough to know that they can’t resist each other. He is good at playing upon the weaknesses of others, in that it is Cyrus' own dense weaknesses which motivate him. When John calls Cyrus "an asshole," it is in the most grave and unself-conscious terms. As revealed by <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-03-16/columns/what-s-up-with-jeremy-renner-s-sexuality/2" target="_blank">Village Voice squib-scrivener Michael Musto</a> in regards to Twitter, if Cyrus had a million followers, he himself would follow zero.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-13282971689757470562011-01-01T19:02:00.000-08:002011-01-04T22:20:50.840-08:00Tony Manero(2008) Pablo Larrain. DVD <br />
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American cultural artifacts may prove to evolve into objects of salvation when exported to emerging countries run by dictators.<br />
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Raul, 52 years old, is a jobless bum with thin jowls like unwashed bathroom walls. Raul lives with a woman, her mother and daughter, and their young styly activist gaypanion, Goyo. All three women vent themselves sexually upon Raul, though as a sexual being Raul is without potency.<br />
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Raul is violently obsessed with the 1977 disco movie <i>Saturday Night Fever</i>, which is playing at the local movie house. Raul can't dance, but he and his small dance troupe are going to put on a Saturday Night Fever show for the town locals, equally oppressed, and in order to do it right, Raul kills an old lady and sells her TV, and murders the junkyard keeper who upped the price of the glass bricks which Raul desires to use to illuminate the dance floor. But Raul, enthralled by the potential of the glass bricks, installs them in his bedroom and lights them up. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24IGoz4SVf78Dkd5eqF2epfkgLt2FJkMgd1ouVsRxRNIIawtdVPn60tN8yhOw9FRQ5rbwH3j8B0MC0ZlzzzV7DmPkghC28bipw5Y-NeA_H5cmfUOWDJLKR9w_r8mVcOrWr9b_nFMM9fka/s1600/Tony+Manero.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24IGoz4SVf78Dkd5eqF2epfkgLt2FJkMgd1ouVsRxRNIIawtdVPn60tN8yhOw9FRQ5rbwH3j8B0MC0ZlzzzV7DmPkghC28bipw5Y-NeA_H5cmfUOWDJLKR9w_r8mVcOrWr9b_nFMM9fka/s320/Tony+Manero.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
It is 1978 in a small city in Chile. Soldiers patrol the streets in jeeps. When <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinochet">Augusto Pinochet's</a> goons come asking questions at the house of Raul's troupe, it is not because a movie projectionist was inexplicably murdered by Raul, his head bashed in during a screening of <i>Grease</i>, but because Goyo has been handing out subversive pamphlets against the regime.<br />
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Each week, a local TV game-show program hosts a Pop Icon lookalike contest. The slick, hackneyed, airbrushed Hispanoid emcee is as complicit in the fascism as any torturer. One week the lookalike is Chuck Norris, the American chop-socky bandana fatigues maverick. A bunch of hopeless South American Chuck Norris lookalikes show up to kick showbiz ass. Another week the lookalike is Julio Iglesias. Where Chuck Norris is a blonde-bearded Wonder Bread patriot, Tony Manero is ethnic, dark, exotic, akin to the mixed Euro immigrant roots of Chileans (in a way that Julio Iglesias is not).<br />
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Brooklyn in 1977 was a rough place, but the death squads worked against, not for, the government. Raul is no subversive, rebel, ideologue nor dancer. He is a malignant third-world zero man. The U.S. may have exported <i>La Fever</i>, but it also exported the diplomatic training of political killing machines.<br />
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"Tony Manero," a working-class disco American icon, is a disconnected hero for Raul. Raul is a purveyor of violence for his own selfish ends and he doesn't care about any of the people close to him. While the troupe is victimized by the death squad goons, Raul hides, then flees to the Tony Manero game-show contest. But first he destroys Goyo's opportunity in the contest by taking a malnourished crap on Goyo's fancy white suit. <br />
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Like in <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/index.php/observe-and-report-2009-jody-hill/"><i>Observe & Report</i></a> (2009), Raul sublimates an utter fantasy of himself through violence, as a victim of raging times recycling rage. One hopes that Raul will win the contest, so that all the bloodshed at least will have had a sicko vindication. But Raul gets second place, and sits behind the winner and his pretty young wife, with their prize electric blender, on the public bus, with the eyes of a starved, crippled assassin.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-21514575477027236892010-12-26T15:18:00.000-08:002011-01-04T15:49:28.785-08:00Inception(2010) Christoper Nolan. Kip's Bay, 2nd Avenue.<br />
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<a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Inceptiontimessq1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1273" title="Inception Poster in Times Square" src="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Inceptiontimessq1.jpg" border="0" alt="Inception Poster in Times Square" width="325" height="413" align="right" /></a>When the mind of the unsuspecting sleeper is invaded by the Extractor whose intention is to steal information from the sleeper's memory, the subconscious of the sleeper assumes the humanoid form of a mass mindless population ultra-sensitized to the threat of unknown interlopers, and who mimics the lack of individuation which characterizes any group dynamic, true, huge and dumb.<br />
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In the opening scene of <em>Inception</em>, which unravels as a dream within a dream, it first appears that the "real" events occur at the ramshackle flat in a city aflame with insurrection. A mob of street thugs and vigilante citizens, vaguely Third-World, riot in the streets and draw near the location of Cobb and Arthur as if to storm the mad General's palace. The city and the mob make the patterns by which <em>Inception</em> presents the way dreams sabotage the way of dreams. Personology is made the enemy.<br />
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Fight scenes take place in zero nerve-gravity, and time is known to expand in relative degree to the steepings of the brain. Arthur masters the stairwell of Paradox, in his slim waistcoat and slicked hair like a London toff in the 1890s. Cobb warns that an idea is a virus, a nefarious, belligerent and furtive being. The biologics of the new serums used to induce the inception are thankfully left unexplicated, and where the story is thin on technology it is thick on the trenchworks of the mind.<br />
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The dream world of Cobb and his wife Mal is a sober and shallow vista, as if to suggest they were in<a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/corbu-bldg.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1273" title="Unidade de Habitação, Marselha, França" src="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/corbu-bldg.jpg" border="0" alt="Unidade de Habitação, Marselha, França" width="150" height="101" align="right" /></a> fact shallow people, who lacked the imagination to construct together an otherworldly sleepscape other than Le Corbusier modular luxury project housing. Their metropolis is the kind that destroys its history to replace it with big bright boxes. This is the architecture of the anti-hero.<br />
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In <a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Leavitt-Inception.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1273" title="Arthur, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Inception" src="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Leavitt-Inception.jpg" border="0" alt="Arthur, Joseph Gordon-Levitt Inception" width="360" height="240" align="left" /></a>the same way, Cobb thinks he is saving his mind by infiltrating it, incepting himself. Is Cobb a master intellectual con man, as Michael Caine hallows him? Or a corporate lackey misfit? He is a humorless man and so his situation suffers by it, causing a stunted, resistable personality. A character with no faith in his own imagination, and who steals life for it, demonstrates the disturbed, penultimate comfort zone Americans love so much. Paris, France folds up like an Escher poster on the wall of a Communications major's dorm room.<br />
<a href="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Chandigarh-Corbu.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1273" title="Modulor Man, Chandigarh, India, Le Corbusier" src="http://www.mograbs.com/mograbs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Chandigarh-Corbu.jpg" border="0" alt="Modulor Man, Chandigarh, India, Le Corbusier" width="325" height="364" align="right" /></a><br />
The Inceptors, like director Christopher Nolan, hinge the heist upon a histrionic convention. The mega-rich heir Robert Fisher has a daddy complex that ends up forsaking the supreme talents of the actor Pete Postlethwaite, and though it forms the crux of the whole founding concept, it is as dramatically weightless as the van taking forty-five minutes to hit the river. But Cobb is not an artist. He is a thief.<br />
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<em>Inception</em> depicts the nightmarish breakdown of a 21st century <em>GQ </em>mag nihilist who claims he just wants to see his kids again. But the family values culminate as a macabre morality. What kind of demented father will he be, even if the spinning top spins <em>ad infinitum</em>? Cobb believes in the vulnerability of the life of the mind, and he tricks the dreamer from their own surreal life by marking phenomena as hack familiarities: elevators, cocktail lounges, a locked safe, a snowy mountain, a train. These are the visual rhymes of movies as played out in the work ethic of a shady securities trader. Cobb is the Joker without the legerdemain, or the honest sticktoitiveness of anarchy.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3885035134700449587.post-29743126227485105982010-12-14T20:18:00.000-08:002010-12-20T13:53:14.342-08:00The Expendables(2010) Sylvester Stallone. Regal Union Square Stadium.<br />
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As "The Expendables" are reminiscent signifiers of aging 1980s action-movie actors, so too the dude audience recognizes itself as having aged and that it too is expendable. There is the nostalgia of Stallone in his 60s for the Stallone of Rambo, and the dude audience, now adults, is nostalgic for the adventuresome, gore-bucked fantasy life of boyhood. <a href="http://www.cannonfilms.com/films2.html">These sorts of action movies</a>, exemplified by <a href="http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/cannon.html#changes">Cannon Films</a>, prepared a kid for a world of drug-induced 1980s nihilism, bizarre characters, disturbed uses of the fuck word, and the moral code of killing bad guys.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG6fR1Szq24qC6QGJiWogTQQYgObedytMVU9U7CBF-LZBVT6pdI5zyesZWefTr95MO9TukjRh3WYaPfQVeJlK1sEUejdUHnRmM_oDK9JkXK4CFvIguySt94C9xY0cDaLUs0oQfGjqb256T/s1600/The+Exp+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG6fR1Szq24qC6QGJiWogTQQYgObedytMVU9U7CBF-LZBVT6pdI5zyesZWefTr95MO9TukjRh3WYaPfQVeJlK1sEUejdUHnRmM_oDK9JkXK4CFvIguySt94C9xY0cDaLUs0oQfGjqb256T/s320/The+Exp+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
The Expendables hang out at Tool's Tattooes, run by Tool (Mickey Rourke), where they park their motorcycles and talk about the old days, sometimes spouting limericks and having knife-throwing contests. As men of violence, The Expendables are a ragtag dragoon of ex-soldiers hired for dirty missions, and except for getting older, they are much more expendable as men of emotion. Barney Ross (<a href="http://www.askmen.com/sports/bodybuilding_100/149_fitness_tip.html">Stallone</a>) can still fly a plane with brute grace while Lee Christmas (<a href="http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/mens-health/fitness/workouts/article/-/5926430/jason-stathams-full-7-day-workout/">Jason Statham</a>) mans the machine gun outside the nose.<br />
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But Toll Road (Randy Couture) is having issues at his shrink. Lee Christmas returns from a Somalian pirate mission to an unfaithful girlfriend. Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) wields a cannon he nicknames "girlfriend." Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) has gone killcrazy and turned against the Expendables, a victim of the post-traumatic stress of a 20th century mercenary in the 21st.<br />
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The Expendables are offered a mission leftover from the Reagan-era involving CIA-financed South American juntas. Arnold Schwarzeneggar crosses the fourth-wall of Hollywood action star self-consciousness by simply playing himself, The Governator, who, besides running the state of California, happens to also secretly lead a crackerjack militia on global suicide adventures. Arnold's gang is the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77RLfpnMyKc&feature=related">Gary's Bar to The Expendables' <i>Cheers</i></a>. But, as Barney mocks, Arnie "wants to be President," so Schwarzeneggar passes up the mission, and The Expendables are stuck with the job. Bruce Willis gets to ask Stallone and Schwarzeneggar, "You guys gonna start sucking each other's dicks?"<br />
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The centerpiece of the movie is not an action scene, but a monologue by Tool, the camera close-up his jacksawed face, telling a Bosnia war story about his failure to save what was left of his soul.<br />
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One can easily forget, that along with Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles (and sure Billy Bob Thorton) Stallone is the only Best Actor nominee (1976) to also be nominated for Best Screenplay. He's a writer's guy.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2