For this week’s Rhapsody is Rhapsody in F Sharp Minor op. 11 n. 2.by Erno Dohnányi.
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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.)
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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!
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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 Levin play 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.
This Week’s Rhapsody is “American Rhapsody” by Meshell Ndegeocello from her album, Comet, Come to Me.
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I’m embarrassed to say I only heard about this just now. And as a cartoonist I can not ignore it. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know much about the magazine Charlie Hebdo beyond the headlines, and frankly any opinion I would have about them right now is irrelevant. At the moment I don’t care whether they were brilliant topical satirists who made us think or just trolls that were getting off on the shock value. This was murder and this was evil.
Anyone who wants to shout persecution when criticized should look at what the real thing looks like.
So let’s give them a moment of silence and please as we think about this assault on the freedom of the press and these dead cartoonists also remember this was an office of 12 people who were murdered by monsters.
