I follow a lot of skepticism blogs. And when your read a lot of them one of the first words you learn is Paridolia. That is to say what you have when you see shapes in the clouds, faces on Mars or Jesus on toast. If you’re into symbology you can notice all kinds of things not all of them necessarily religious.
This brings me to my point. About a week ago I slammed my shin really badly on… something because I was experimenting with putting a light on my backpack strap while taking my favorite short cut (in daytime) Ravenna Park. It technically worked but it also shone the light right into my eyes so while I could see what was in front of me at a range of twenty feet I couldn’t see anything right in front of me. So I didn’t see how close to the side of the path was until it was too late and I slammed my shin against… Something.
This and a few other things are the reason I’m shopping for a good bike light right now.
My shin was a mess but nowhere as bad as it felt. Anyway I was coming out of the shower today and I happened to look at the scab and I couldn’t help noticing that upside down it looked kind of sort of like Kokopelli!
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much call for ancient southwestern trickster fertility deities showing up in anything in the general tinfoil hat market… Still it makes for an interesting conversation piece.
For this week I did the second of my “forgotten Oscars” selection though in this case, neither of these films are anything that I would call “forgotten” since 1976 was probably the best year for film for a long time before and after and I’m just a little embarrassed that I’ve never seen either of these before.
The first of the two “All The President’s Men” tells the true story of Watergate(give or take a few embellishments) and the newsmen who let us know it. This in mind is very close to being a perfect film, my only real nitpick being where they chose to actually end the film, though the one they chose, Nixon’s second inauguration playing on the television while Woodward and Bernstein work on their next story, works as well as any other.
I’ve always enjoyed procedural dramas be they police or legal… All the President’s Men, I believe is the first time I’ve ever seen a Journalistic procedural. Our two protagonists, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward played brilliantly by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman have to comb through a ton of extraneous data and seemingly endless number of interviews.
This is a smart movie and it assumes you the viewers are intelligent too and expect you to notice the tiny bits of data or hear the slip of the tongue of an obstructive interviewee, and rewards you for paying attention.
Finally, I find it very interesting how our public perceptions of a film are different from the film itself. In this case, I’d always imagined Deep Throat as being someone like the Smoking Man from The X-Files, a mysterious operator who exists only in shadows, completely in control of the situation, who decided to contact our protagonists out of a capricious whim. Here in the film, it is completely obvious that Woodward knows who he is, having contacted him first. While he still is in shadows we see enough of his face to know exactly how much he knows his ass is on the line.
Network is a brutal satire of the state of the media in the seventies. But does it in a way that makes it brutally timeless. It tells the tale of Howard Beale, a fading news anchor, who, after being given his two-week notice, breaks down on national television. The station’s corporate owners, who have been looking for shows to boost their rating, (the other show shown being worked on is a reality show featuring a group of Marxist Terrorists robbing banks) as well as trying to bring the news department under their control see this as rating gold and give him his own show to rant on. They quickly lose control over Beal’s content and as his ratings sag, they finally arrange his assassination (just as if it were another meeting item in the board room.)
This is all packaged in a brilliant script by Paddy Chayefsky and every word of dialogue is amazing! It’s really hard to tell what is best. Certainly, the “I’m as mad as Hell” speech is the one that everyone knows but almost as good, if not better, is Ned Beatty playing the head of the corporation who takes Beal into his office to straighten him out. Framed by a line of lights of a large conference table he gives his “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature” speech, a corporate sermon right up there with “greed is good”
Network takes no prisoners in its picture of corporate greed and corruption other than the completely insane Beale nobody is safe from this (even the Marxists argue about percentages and subclauses in their contracts) What makes it all the more difficult to watch today, is what Network satirized came true and, what’s worse, we take it for granted. As I watched Howard Beale ranting on his program I kept finding myself thinking of Glenn Beck at his most theatrical. The main difference is a guy like Beck can only dream of being Howard Beale.
Well yesterday was a whole lot of fun with the Seahawks making it to the Superbowl again!
As I’ve said many a time that I’m a terrible fan whose idea of “following” my team for most of the season has consisted of refreshing the Google feed during the game and I’m completely guilty of mostly giving up on them after their three game loosing streak. On the plus side it allowed me not to stress out about the Seahawks’ chances, I just found out about the win after all of the drama of the astounding fourth quarter and overtime were done. So I’m really psyched about this.
What’s better is an hour later I found that my other team, the Patriots, made it too! Leading to the Game I wanted last year but didn’t get.
For the most part my following the Patriots is almost as pathetic as following the Seahawks now back when I lived in New England being a Pats fan was kind of like being like being a Cubs fan and you were lucky if they won six games in the season… Back then I would start rooting for my fall back team, the Redskins, pretty darn quick. (but let’s not talk about them. It’s really easy not to be sentimental about the Redskins these days. ) And frankly the Patriots being a legacy juggernaut for the last ten years still kind of confuses me.
But either way it’s great having my two favorites going he’d to head. The countdown will be so much fun.
(On a side note I find it kind of interesting that this game consists of two teams who squeezed their way into their first Super Bowl only to be punked in more ways than one by the dominant team that year.)
I finally got around to buying my own bicycle pump after putting it off for way too long. Usually waiting until the wheel’s noticeably soft and then making due with a nearby air pump at the gas station.
I’d come to realizing that I would need one of my own for numerous reasons, the biggest one being ever since I started doing my morning bike workouts where I’m constantly trying to cut down seconds I’ve become acutely aware just how much difference a full tire makes and just how fast it looses air… In other words, it’s a good idea to fill it up a little bit more than once a month. The other reason is I may or may not have blown out a tire at least twice on the gas station air pumps and that is rather an expensive habit to get into.
While I’d been slowly comparison shopping for a while the last straw was last afternoon when I was doing some basic maintenance noticed that my back tire was about as soft as I’d allow it to get while still riding it. So I went to my favorite hardware store and found a cheap one for twelve dollars.
Needless to say this morning’s routine proved exactly the difference in the speed of a good tire, I’d been having a crappy week with my workouts most likely due to the soft tire along with a few other things. Today felt like I had added another gear to my bike. What I thought was going to be a mediocre ride (I’d forgot to turn on my alarm so had a late start) had me passing my usual markers by so much I was wondering if my runtime app was working properly, finishing with my second best time of thirty-four minutes and thirty-five seconds!
I’ve always enjoyed the art of theater and I can bore my friends to tears on things like different director’s approach to the same play, watching the same production in different seats, subtitles in an actor’s performance choices and set design.
There are certain things that I enjoy when a lot of these things are translated into film and it is some of these things that led me to my selection for this week’s double feature.
The first film in my selection was Deathtrap starring Christopher Reeve, Michael Caine, and Dyan Cannon. It’s an adaptation of the Ira Levinplay of the same name. This is a very good example of a play adaptation. I’ve complained in the past of play adaptation and “filmed play“. TO be honest I’m not completely sure I’ve thought out the distinction enough to my satisfaction but I think when I say “filmed play” What I mean is when the director is merely recording the actor’s performance and pretty much ignores the possibilities that film provides. I’ve seen a lot of otherwise good films suffer from this.
I’ve noticed there’s a lot of adaptations of smaller productions that avoid a lot of these problems most likely since a movie audience would quickly get bored by the “drawing room” performances that technically have two scenes and one set. Because of this directors are forced to give these films their own personal spin to keep things interesting.
Anyway, Deathtrap is a good example of this making full use of the renovated windmill house to it’s full potential with a few extra scenes in the beginning and end to flesh things out. The whole thing is wonderfully meta with the Caine and Reeve playing two playwrights who are constantly talking about the anatomy of a thriller while pulling off a mostly perfect crime, and then writing about it. The two have very good chemistry and Reeve is amazing playing against type as a beautiful sociopath. (I also think it would serve as a fantastic double feature with Sleuth)
The next film on my list was a wonderful example of films that are fully theatrical. That toss suspension of disbelief and reality out the window and embrace the fakery of a deliberately theatrical set. I can pretty much count the examples of this on two hands (not counting filmed theatrical productions) and I’m always on the lookout for more examples of this.
Dogville, with Nicole Kidman leading a brilliant cast, sets the bar even higher. it tells a bleak Brechtian story of a town and the girl who enters into this community. It’s completely uncompromising in it’s pessimism and I don’t think I’ve felt less sympathetic for the ultimate fate of a cast of characters since I read Tobacco Road in college.
But if you can survive the story Dogville is fascinating to watch. It’s all filmed in a nearly empty soundstage with a bare minimum of sets (the ultimate example being a caged dog being represented by a picture of a dog drawn on the set’s floor) The director, Lars von Trier say that this is to force the viewer to focus on the actors’ performance and it certainly works. Personally It kept me imagining a much darker version of Our Town.
