Ireland, the Free
Ireland , the Brave
Ireland, that ineffable land of music....
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Today the M.F.A. , Tomorrow the World...
My old college chum Rebecca Cathcart-Monet sworn an oath in the Temple of Apollo in Rochester New Hampshire that in 2010 she'd take me to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
"Forty seven is none too late to sample the ineffable Italian sunshine on the Fenway" she chided by email.
And so on Saturday she took off in her orange reconditioned SPAD VII biplane and executed a perfect three point landing on Atlantic Avenue across from South Station. Swiftly we chained the vintage aircraft to a local bicycle rack certain that it would be taken for a mountain bike if push came to shove, we piled into my Buick Sailmaster and rode the harbor trades all the way to Huntington Avenue.
Rebecca duly announced on the way that we needed to "limber up" with Japanese No Robes, Chinese tea cups and sundry Asian tapestries and that meant a storming assault on the Museum of Fine Arts before the Gardner opened.
I demurred not one whit and only added a fond desire to meditate briefly over the Roman antiquities, I am after all, a parochial school survivor and therefore an inconstant slave of the classics.
Y' know I love the MFA, their film series is the last refuge for the footloose cineaste', the collections are huge and impressive...But some of the presentation decisions are plainly inexplicable.
By that I mean the Albrecht Durer exhibition was carefully executed to place the prints at eye level and with good lighting so that the artists eye for detail was readily apparent even to the unschooled observer The smirk on the punim of the Angel of Death fairly leaps out at the viewer.
On the other hand a whole gallery entitled "European Art" (like something out of a Tim Burton movie) is naught but a collection of Renaissance masters stacked up three high on the stone walls like the overdone Foyer of Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering's "Karinhall" palace.
One can just about appreciate the fleshy buttocks of Rubens' Aphrodite and that is about it, the rest of it goes up and up and fairly disappears into the cloud cover.
Ah but the Roman antiquities section still beguiles, the stylized busts of the Emperor Augustus bespeaks two thousand years of robust political toadyism in the West.
A firm little hand on my elbow and I am dragged across the street to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a venue I didn't know from Adam.
Italian sunshine indeed, Rebecca, did not lie, for at the center of the ISG is her own personal renaissance refuge a courtyard warmed to perpetual spring by cunning sky lights and sublimely decorated with statuary and verdant plants by the late Mrs. Gardner.
This is literally the first time in my life I saw a person just commune with a particular space the way Rebecca did. She just raised her sweet face up to the warming sunshine that fell on us like very gaze of God Almighty and smiled like the Mona Lisa.
She sighed, like she had come home at last.
***
The scale of it all impressed me greatly, nothing out of place, proportions nigh perfect.
There is a line between the excessive and the exquisite, the line is drawn by sheer taste.
Taste can be cultivated, it can evolve, grown and touch all sorts of remote parts of our lives, when you have it, something as beautiful as the Courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is the result, when you don't have it, you end up with say, San Simeon that living monument to gigantism built by William Randolph Heart in California.
"Mrs. Gardner built this for Rebecca" I thought "And all the Rebeccas yet to come".
***
The collection is varied and fairly crammed into the old Gardner Family mansion, almost none of it is tagged or explained in any way. I felt myself fortunate to identify a Canaletto on the basis of the style alone. There is something so quintessentially Brahmin about building a museum that assumes the patron can already draw on a excellent knowledge of art from the git-go.
Failing that just go with Rebecca, she knows her this stuff like a coyote knows cheap nosh.
Nonetheless for all its eccentricities, the ISG is a place to cherish, it is possibly the only museum on the Eastern Seaboard whose idea of sheer kitsch is one of regimental Standards of Napoleon I's dreaded Imperial Guard.
However when the Madonnas with Child grew to a dozen between two museums, the pangs of hunger finally intervened and thus we tacked over the bridge for burgers in the shadow of MIT.
We came, we saw we imbibed.
Soon enough, she cried "contact" and took off with her matching orange scarf snapping crisply in the wash, I waved as her SPAD VII dwindled into the blue skies and thought "How in Hell's name am I ever gonna top a day like this???"
"Forty seven is none too late to sample the ineffable Italian sunshine on the Fenway" she chided by email.
And so on Saturday she took off in her orange reconditioned SPAD VII biplane and executed a perfect three point landing on Atlantic Avenue across from South Station. Swiftly we chained the vintage aircraft to a local bicycle rack certain that it would be taken for a mountain bike if push came to shove, we piled into my Buick Sailmaster and rode the harbor trades all the way to Huntington Avenue.
Rebecca duly announced on the way that we needed to "limber up" with Japanese No Robes, Chinese tea cups and sundry Asian tapestries and that meant a storming assault on the Museum of Fine Arts before the Gardner opened.
I demurred not one whit and only added a fond desire to meditate briefly over the Roman antiquities, I am after all, a parochial school survivor and therefore an inconstant slave of the classics.
Y' know I love the MFA, their film series is the last refuge for the footloose cineaste', the collections are huge and impressive...But some of the presentation decisions are plainly inexplicable.
By that I mean the Albrecht Durer exhibition was carefully executed to place the prints at eye level and with good lighting so that the artists eye for detail was readily apparent even to the unschooled observer The smirk on the punim of the Angel of Death fairly leaps out at the viewer.
On the other hand a whole gallery entitled "European Art" (like something out of a Tim Burton movie) is naught but a collection of Renaissance masters stacked up three high on the stone walls like the overdone Foyer of Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering's "Karinhall" palace.
One can just about appreciate the fleshy buttocks of Rubens' Aphrodite and that is about it, the rest of it goes up and up and fairly disappears into the cloud cover.
Ah but the Roman antiquities section still beguiles, the stylized busts of the Emperor Augustus bespeaks two thousand years of robust political toadyism in the West.
A firm little hand on my elbow and I am dragged across the street to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a venue I didn't know from Adam.
Italian sunshine indeed, Rebecca, did not lie, for at the center of the ISG is her own personal renaissance refuge a courtyard warmed to perpetual spring by cunning sky lights and sublimely decorated with statuary and verdant plants by the late Mrs. Gardner.
This is literally the first time in my life I saw a person just commune with a particular space the way Rebecca did. She just raised her sweet face up to the warming sunshine that fell on us like very gaze of God Almighty and smiled like the Mona Lisa.
She sighed, like she had come home at last.
***
The scale of it all impressed me greatly, nothing out of place, proportions nigh perfect.
There is a line between the excessive and the exquisite, the line is drawn by sheer taste.
Taste can be cultivated, it can evolve, grown and touch all sorts of remote parts of our lives, when you have it, something as beautiful as the Courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is the result, when you don't have it, you end up with say, San Simeon that living monument to gigantism built by William Randolph Heart in California.
"Mrs. Gardner built this for Rebecca" I thought "And all the Rebeccas yet to come".
***
The collection is varied and fairly crammed into the old Gardner Family mansion, almost none of it is tagged or explained in any way. I felt myself fortunate to identify a Canaletto on the basis of the style alone. There is something so quintessentially Brahmin about building a museum that assumes the patron can already draw on a excellent knowledge of art from the git-go.
Failing that just go with Rebecca, she knows her this stuff like a coyote knows cheap nosh.
Nonetheless for all its eccentricities, the ISG is a place to cherish, it is possibly the only museum on the Eastern Seaboard whose idea of sheer kitsch is one of regimental Standards of Napoleon I's dreaded Imperial Guard.
However when the Madonnas with Child grew to a dozen between two museums, the pangs of hunger finally intervened and thus we tacked over the bridge for burgers in the shadow of MIT.
We came, we saw we imbibed.
Soon enough, she cried "contact" and took off with her matching orange scarf snapping crisply in the wash, I waved as her SPAD VII dwindled into the blue skies and thought "How in Hell's name am I ever gonna top a day like this???"
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Searchers (1956)
Forty seven is about as good an age to see John Ford's landmark western for the first time, ah reckon.
John Wayne and a defiantly blue eyed Cherokee "half breed" played by Jeffrey Hunter go off the ranch questing to steal back the Duke's niece from some ubiquitous indians.
In fact, Wayne and Hunter spent five desolate years wandering the wastes of Monument Valley searching for a girl that may have gone over to the Indian's side in the interim. Will Wayne stick by his "principles" and kill his niece (for shacking it up with a "Buck"), will Jeffrey Hunter (doomed by fate to be the Man Who Turned Down Star Trek) find love?
Now, under anyone else's direction this would be unmemorable rubbish, but John Ford turns this into a sort of Odyssey on Horseback, the damn film just gallops over it's inherent cliches.
Frankly, "The Searchers" is the movie "Avatar" desperately wants to be, a mass market adventure film with a strong dramtic core and plenty of high ending opportunities for actors to ply their craft.
Too bad James Cameron's computerized super-fantasy is so fatally hobbled by it's own lavish budget and setting. But then, the poor man didn't have access to the wonders of Monument Valley or that human mountain range, John Wayne...
John Wayne and a defiantly blue eyed Cherokee "half breed" played by Jeffrey Hunter go off the ranch questing to steal back the Duke's niece from some ubiquitous indians.
In fact, Wayne and Hunter spent five desolate years wandering the wastes of Monument Valley searching for a girl that may have gone over to the Indian's side in the interim. Will Wayne stick by his "principles" and kill his niece (for shacking it up with a "Buck"), will Jeffrey Hunter (doomed by fate to be the Man Who Turned Down Star Trek) find love?
Now, under anyone else's direction this would be unmemorable rubbish, but John Ford turns this into a sort of Odyssey on Horseback, the damn film just gallops over it's inherent cliches.
Frankly, "The Searchers" is the movie "Avatar" desperately wants to be, a mass market adventure film with a strong dramtic core and plenty of high ending opportunities for actors to ply their craft.
Too bad James Cameron's computerized super-fantasy is so fatally hobbled by it's own lavish budget and setting. But then, the poor man didn't have access to the wonders of Monument Valley or that human mountain range, John Wayne...
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Idle conjuration on a snow-day
Compare this clip from George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) to the typical coverage you get from "Newspanic Seven" or Fox 25 during a snowstorm...And then tell me what you think....
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Mystery Team (2009)
This may well be the "Citizen Kane" no...no...NO the "Magnificent Ambersons" of G-rated kid detectives trapped in a R-Rated world movies.
I can filch no no higher praise for this movie...By all means, sell the house, sell the car and sell your loved ones if you must, but all the same get to the Brattle Theater before Thursdays to see this amazing film. Three kid detectives now dorky high school student continue to patrol the playgrounds catching pie thieves and the like until and eight year old girl asks them with all due sweetness to solve the murder of her parents.
A set up worthy of Chandler IMHO in the hands of three aging "Hardy Boys" wannabees.
Filmed on location in Manchester New Hampshire (where I spent my formative years doing nothing with style), Mystery Team is a gross, tasteless and scatological in extremis, but it is also funny a cheap indie production that blew itself right into Superbad's orbit on the first try.
See it, Mystery Team won't be in town long.
I can filch no no higher praise for this movie...By all means, sell the house, sell the car and sell your loved ones if you must, but all the same get to the Brattle Theater before Thursdays to see this amazing film. Three kid detectives now dorky high school student continue to patrol the playgrounds catching pie thieves and the like until and eight year old girl asks them with all due sweetness to solve the murder of her parents.
A set up worthy of Chandler IMHO in the hands of three aging "Hardy Boys" wannabees.
Filmed on location in Manchester New Hampshire (where I spent my formative years doing nothing with style), Mystery Team is a gross, tasteless and scatological in extremis, but it is also funny a cheap indie production that blew itself right into Superbad's orbit on the first try.
See it, Mystery Team won't be in town long.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Fetishes: an informal iconography for straight men
1.) Green slave girls from Orion (Star Trek)
2.) Emily Deschanel
3.) Princess Leia and her Pittsburgh steel yard bikini (Star Wars)
4.) Emma Peel
5.) Uma Thurman's feet (by way of Quentin Tarantino)
6.) The very Late Betty Page
7.) Fembots
8.) Terry Garr
9.) The All American Dominatrix with the fake Teutonic accent
10.) Janeane Garofalo
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Avatar'd (2009)
It is always a bad sign when I have the title of the Mad Magazine parody of a big movie, down cold halfway thru the picture.
Oh don't get me wrong it is an amazing movie, a technical achievement of the first rank. But the script, in which a space marine (Sam Worthington's digital doppelganger) goes native on a planet coveted by a mining corporation only to lead the locals in an attack on their occupiers draws on everything from "Little Big Man" out to "Dances with Wolves"....And doesn't do much else quite frankly.
Spectacular, but unmemorable.
All I can say is, that it ain't no game changer til the script breaks as much new ground as the technology, and that is never gonna happen as long as James Cameron is in the director's chair.
***
No, Avatar is interesting chiefly for it's meta-context, digital avatars in Hollywood of Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver enacting a script about DNA avatars loping around verdant jungles of the planet Pandora.
Can Sigourney Weaver trademark and copyright the 40-ish version of her own sweet self that Cameron ended up using in the picture? Does that mean that a 40-ish avatar of Sigourney Weaver could be still working in Hollywood for the next ten years?
Can the digitize Buster Crabbe's physique and start making new Flash Gordon movies?
Start touching up everyone's time worn faces?
Why stop there?
Why stop anywhere for that fact?
Does the past now have an ending, with this technology in play?
I'm just hoping on the next application someone makes a better movie, I think I've got a long wait though.
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Okay, on the plus side, it is another superlative performance from Robert Downey Junior even if his english accent wavers in and out all thru the movie. He gets the semi-divine curse that is the Holmesian super intellect, quite literally his deductive stills render him remote erratic and yet hopelessly needy.
Jude Law's Doctor Watson is a sort of thwarted man of action, he enables Holmes, puts up with Holmes' bizarre personal habits mostly because the Master Detective brings him the conflict and danger he craves.
Too bad the script is so meshugginah, eee-vil aristocrat plotting the downfall of Great Britain by subverting a bunch doddering old wankers and then massacring parliament. All executed with as much verve and action as any "Lethal Weapon" sequel, and that is the core problem, Holmes is not really an action hero for all his bona fides as a crimefighter. He is a problem solver, when the crisis degenerates into a plot to gas parliament, well that is a job for Batman not Sherlock. Holmes is an intensive character, the action ought to revolve around his thought processes and his interaction with the clues and suspects.
Super-scale settings and sundry explosions and even an ultimate fighting style sequence just don't suit him.
Still I give Director Guy Ritchie credit, he veered off the outright supernatural at the last minute but the whole thing felt less like Conan Doyle and more like Scooby Doo.
Jude Law's Doctor Watson is a sort of thwarted man of action, he enables Holmes, puts up with Holmes' bizarre personal habits mostly because the Master Detective brings him the conflict and danger he craves.
Too bad the script is so meshugginah, eee-vil aristocrat plotting the downfall of Great Britain by subverting a bunch doddering old wankers and then massacring parliament. All executed with as much verve and action as any "Lethal Weapon" sequel, and that is the core problem, Holmes is not really an action hero for all his bona fides as a crimefighter. He is a problem solver, when the crisis degenerates into a plot to gas parliament, well that is a job for Batman not Sherlock. Holmes is an intensive character, the action ought to revolve around his thought processes and his interaction with the clues and suspects.
Super-scale settings and sundry explosions and even an ultimate fighting style sequence just don't suit him.
Still I give Director Guy Ritchie credit, he veered off the outright supernatural at the last minute but the whole thing felt less like Conan Doyle and more like Scooby Doo.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
A serious moment:
I provide a link to the Red Cross for anyone in my tiny readership who might wanna make some contributions for Haitian earthquake relief.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Punchlines....
"Breath stupid! You forgot to breathe again!"
"We ALL put the yeast in!"
"G-U-N-P-O-W-D-E-R....Duhhh TOBACCO!"
"NO...Not that!!! NOT ROLL OUT THE BARREL ANYTHING BUT THAT!"
"And when it disintegrates, it REALLY disintegrates!"
"As God is my witness, I really thought Turkey's could fly."
"It don't add up!"
"No, I'm delivering a bridge, and I've lost me way"
"Tain't a fit night out, for man nor beast!"
And a classic from my misspent youth in Antrim New Hampshire
"Wrecked em'? Damn near killed him!"
"We ALL put the yeast in!"
"G-U-N-P-O-W-D-E-R....Duhhh TOBACCO!"
"NO...Not that!!! NOT ROLL OUT THE BARREL ANYTHING BUT THAT!"
"And when it disintegrates, it REALLY disintegrates!"
"As God is my witness, I really thought Turkey's could fly."
"It don't add up!"
"No, I'm delivering a bridge, and I've lost me way"
"Tain't a fit night out, for man nor beast!"
And a classic from my misspent youth in Antrim New Hampshire
"Wrecked em'? Damn near killed him!"
Sunday, January 10, 2010
My top movies for 2009
This would be a top ten list but due to my dad's illness I just haven't hit the movies as much as I'd a liked this year.
Hell I was lucky to see "Star Trek" at the drive in.
The Hurt Locker (2009) directed by Kathryn Bigelow Lu-uved this flick, best war movie I've seen in a decade. This and "Saving Private Ryan" are the twin pillars that hold up the heavens in my humble opinion.
Yoo Hoo Mrs. Goldberg (2009) directed by Aviva Kempner Wonderful film about the rise of depression actress/writer/producer Gertrude Berg. She broke thru about three glass ceilings and hardly anyone today remembers her.
Afghan Star (2009) directed by Havana Marking All about the behind the scenes action on a Afghan style "American Idol" type show, proof positive that narcissism, greed, vanity, religious dementia and even sometimes a weird stoic courage can e found even in the remotest parts of this breathing Earth.
The World's Greatest Dad (2009) directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite Normally I loathe Robin Williams and the sentimental rubbish he appears in, but here, as a harassed high school english teacher who turns the suicide of his insolent and appalling son (Daryl Sabara) into a literary triumph, Williams finally pays off in spades. I think Williams is a blight on Hollywood but when he is good he is really good....Which only makes me all the angrier with him. Why does it take him ten yeas to find a script this raw and this good, doesn't he know how to say No to dreck like "Patch Adams".
District Nine (2009) directed by Neil Blumkamp Aliens, segregation, social science fiction, the second coming of Rod Serling in the Twenty First Century...What more could anyone ask??
Inglourious Basterds (2009) directed by Quentin Tarantino Mediocre Tarantino trumps nine tenths of the competition every time. The boy is that good. Besides anyone who is willing to completely re-write history just to give his movie a bang up firefight ending is aces high in my books.
The Informant! (2009) directed by Steven Soderbergh - Oscar class performance from Matt Damon as a sociopathic whistleblower at a chemical concern. Likely this film will be overlooked due to the heavy comedy content...Helluva shame.
Zombieland (2009) directed by Ruben Fleischer. Best zombie flick I've seen since "Shaun of the Dead". great performances, especially from Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson, I just wish I'd a seen it at the Drive In.
Me and Orson Welles (2009) directed by Richard Linklater Ah the Sifu has lived to become a film legend all of himself, a Charles Foster Kane of the Theater, Cinema and TV wine commercials. If he had lived, no one would have appreciated the joke better than Welles himself.
As I said it was a tough year, both here and in my personal life, but better times are coming, watch this space for the details.
Hell I was lucky to see "Star Trek" at the drive in.
The Hurt Locker (2009) directed by Kathryn Bigelow Lu-uved this flick, best war movie I've seen in a decade. This and "Saving Private Ryan" are the twin pillars that hold up the heavens in my humble opinion.
Yoo Hoo Mrs. Goldberg (2009) directed by Aviva Kempner Wonderful film about the rise of depression actress/writer/producer Gertrude Berg. She broke thru about three glass ceilings and hardly anyone today remembers her.
Afghan Star (2009) directed by Havana Marking All about the behind the scenes action on a Afghan style "American Idol" type show, proof positive that narcissism, greed, vanity, religious dementia and even sometimes a weird stoic courage can e found even in the remotest parts of this breathing Earth.
The World's Greatest Dad (2009) directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite Normally I loathe Robin Williams and the sentimental rubbish he appears in, but here, as a harassed high school english teacher who turns the suicide of his insolent and appalling son (Daryl Sabara) into a literary triumph, Williams finally pays off in spades. I think Williams is a blight on Hollywood but when he is good he is really good....Which only makes me all the angrier with him. Why does it take him ten yeas to find a script this raw and this good, doesn't he know how to say No to dreck like "Patch Adams".
District Nine (2009) directed by Neil Blumkamp Aliens, segregation, social science fiction, the second coming of Rod Serling in the Twenty First Century...What more could anyone ask??
Inglourious Basterds (2009) directed by Quentin Tarantino Mediocre Tarantino trumps nine tenths of the competition every time. The boy is that good. Besides anyone who is willing to completely re-write history just to give his movie a bang up firefight ending is aces high in my books.
The Informant! (2009) directed by Steven Soderbergh - Oscar class performance from Matt Damon as a sociopathic whistleblower at a chemical concern. Likely this film will be overlooked due to the heavy comedy content...Helluva shame.
Zombieland (2009) directed by Ruben Fleischer. Best zombie flick I've seen since "Shaun of the Dead". great performances, especially from Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson, I just wish I'd a seen it at the Drive In.
Me and Orson Welles (2009) directed by Richard Linklater Ah the Sifu has lived to become a film legend all of himself, a Charles Foster Kane of the Theater, Cinema and TV wine commercials. If he had lived, no one would have appreciated the joke better than Welles himself.
As I said it was a tough year, both here and in my personal life, but better times are coming, watch this space for the details.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Sh*t my mother says:
"Drive around the block and see if the roads are icy, if they are icy, I won't go visit your father at the VA hospital. If they aren't icy then you can drive me up there and drop me off".
Friday, January 01, 2010
Idle notion....
Angelina Jolie looks like Wednesday Adams idea of a Barbie Doll.
With those perpetually crazy eyes, that nose seemingly designed by I.M. Pei or a plastic surgeon of the brutalist school and her bloated too wide mouth, she might just fit in as a limb-hacker in the next round of torture porn movies.
Oh and she is in a new spy thriller called "Salt", the preview looks terrible.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Panic Buying:
( A snow storm list found in a parking lot this evening here in Romantic Arlington)
Three Typewriter Ribbons (black preferably)
Four Betamax Videotapes (blank)
One man hole cover ( cast iron, IMPORTANT)
One Quart, "Rupert's Old Fashioned Adding Machine Oil"
One copy of "A Freemason's Guide of the Non-Migratory Birds of the Northeastern United States, Volume One"
Dippity-Do
Little Debbies
1 Reserve Hang Glider
Three Cork Life Preservers (If they only have styrofoam then forget it)
Three pair My-Tee Fine, Polar Sandals.
Board Certified Mexican Bull Taser with optional padded & reinforced horn cozies.
Three Parasols (Polar Fleece, Pink, IMPORTANT)
Three boxes of Pineapple Flavored Ka-Boom
1 quart of "Olde Middlesex County Bust-Head" (Black Label)
Little Debbies
I tin bucket of "Hobo Joe's Gin" (note Joe is strictly a cash operation)
1/2 gallon of Ocean Spray Missile Juice
Six Fresh plasma fed Gourds (NO imports)
1 quart Clairol brand elite vodka (red label, use the coupon )
Grutenbourg's Classic Steel Cut just-add-sand Instant Microwave Bread
Don't forget the Little Debbies.
Please hurry they are predicting over four inches of snow between Wednesday and Sunday.
Just can't seem to work up any enthusiasm to see
"Avatar" anytime soon. I must be the only SF fan in the USA so inclined, but then when the genre started making people big bucks I found my interest waning.
Then again, James Cameron is the most unoriginal film-maker on the planet, the whole plotline to "Avatar" reminds me of Ben Bova's old sci fi novel "The Winds of Altair".
Sunday, December 27, 2009
"Me and Orson Welles" (2009)
This is a title that could apply very well to yours truly, if it is one topic on which I count myself a perfectly pathetic cultist it is Orson Welles,
I wanted to like the film very much as it recounts a seminal moment in the Welles' legend, his 1937 modern dress version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and indeed Christian McKay wisely opts to inhabit the Wellesian style rather than try to impersonate the great director in the fashion of Maurice LaMarche.
But a subplot involving Orson's entirely fictional teenaged protege played by Zac Efron and his short lived affair with Welles' long suffering secretary (Claire Danes) veers uncomfortably close to Cougartown if not statutory rape.
The last third of the film though is a wonderment as opening night of Caesar is recreated for the screen right down to the blackshirt uniforms, Caesar's assassination down to the death of Cinna the Poet at the hands of a fascist lynch mob, you suddenly get a sense of just how powerful Orson Welles' ideas really were when it came to enacting Shakespeare for the modern audience.
I'm sure there is more to Zac Efron than being a pin up boy, he did hold his own against Christian McKay and that is something (against Welles even in his dotage though, Efron would have been reduced to a red smear on the soundstage floor)...But his lovely dovey interludes with Claire Danes (herself a former Juliet no less) were superfluous filler at best if not cringe inducing to watch.
Alas though, Welles the director, the great teacher of film-makers has become a legend whose life has become outright film fodder, I'm not sure this is the sort of immortality he was shooting for when he set out to top "Citizen Kane."
Three stars, Liked the cast, loved the topic, had some issues with the script.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Christmas Eve....
Finished up my wrapping, poured myself a drink and settling down to watch my favorite holiday movie....WATERLOO!
Because nothing sez Holiday Cheer quite like watching the flower of Napoleon's Grand Armee go toe to toe with Wellington's Beefeaters for the whole shebang, domination of Europe and the rights appertaining thereof!
And Rod Steiger, a yuletide tradition in one package, the man is GIANT! Made Huge by a twenty yer diet of scenery swallowed whole!
Merry Christmas to All!
Vive L' Emperor!
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
My High School Memories are packing up and moving to Savin Hill...
Yes indeed, North Cambridge Catholic on Norris Street in North Cambridge (obviously) is moving to Boston to get closer to it's core constituency.
I can already hear the anguished yelps and cries from both active and torpid alumnae, hell I could easily draw up a list and it'd be pretty accurate too.
Well this has been an inevitable thing, NCC stopped being a cozy little neighborhood HS back in 1976 when the first wave of kids desperate to escape busing in Boston came staggering in from Dorchester, Hyde Park and Southie.
And NCC has progressively draw from distant parks of Boston ever since then with a rising enrollment at a time when Catholic High Schools were being padlocked all over the Archdiocese. All Cristo Rey has done, is made NCC financially independent of the Diocese, put her in the black and made a virtue of the inexorable.
Me?
I'm fine with it, better alive in Savin Hill than a bunch of condos in North Cambridge, besides it isn't where you are, it is who you are...But believe me other people are gonna be incensed in extremis.
I can already hear the anguished yelps and cries from both active and torpid alumnae, hell I could easily draw up a list and it'd be pretty accurate too.
Well this has been an inevitable thing, NCC stopped being a cozy little neighborhood HS back in 1976 when the first wave of kids desperate to escape busing in Boston came staggering in from Dorchester, Hyde Park and Southie.
And NCC has progressively draw from distant parks of Boston ever since then with a rising enrollment at a time when Catholic High Schools were being padlocked all over the Archdiocese. All Cristo Rey has done, is made NCC financially independent of the Diocese, put her in the black and made a virtue of the inexorable.
Me?
I'm fine with it, better alive in Savin Hill than a bunch of condos in North Cambridge, besides it isn't where you are, it is who you are...But believe me other people are gonna be incensed in extremis.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Every winter I re-learn the same painful lesson
that at the least hint of snow, the MBTA's Red Line quickly descends into a witless fiasco.
Case in point tonight where a "disabled train at Alewife" compelled the use of shuttle buses between Harvard, Porter, Davis and Alewife with the usual patently "cross Cambridge crawl" thrown in for good measure.
Hell I threw in the towel in Harvard Square, grabbed a cab with some guy from a financial advisory firm and hacked it to Alewife.
To think I once tooled around Andropov's Moscow on the subway with nary a worry about getting to my destination on time.
Alas the Red Line is concerned you can count on exactly nothing after a snow storm.
Granted this was a derailment and thank God no one was hurt. Nonetheless similar scenes of absolute maddening paralysis have been going every winter for over five years now.
has anyone reeled to their feet in the State House in outrage and high dudgeon?
No, them folks is all on Christmas break, God help us.
The MBTA is underfunded, understaffed, outmoded and outgunned, period end of story.
Fixing what is wrong goes beyond spending more money or hiring better people or busting the unions or crushing the kulaks. No, It starts with a change in ethos and by that I mean that the interests of those that commute by highway can never supercede the interests of those that commute by bus or rail. We spent untold billions on the fabled Big Dig lets make fixing the MBTA at least as big and as lasting a priority.
Any politician that gets that and has a positive program to move this ball forward has my vote.
1.) Equality of interests
2.) Restoring the MBTA to the level of efficiency associated with the Moscow Metro circa 1983....Cuz right now, the Red Line would be an embarrassment even to the communists.
Case in point tonight where a "disabled train at Alewife" compelled the use of shuttle buses between Harvard, Porter, Davis and Alewife with the usual patently "cross Cambridge crawl" thrown in for good measure.
Hell I threw in the towel in Harvard Square, grabbed a cab with some guy from a financial advisory firm and hacked it to Alewife.
To think I once tooled around Andropov's Moscow on the subway with nary a worry about getting to my destination on time.
Alas the Red Line is concerned you can count on exactly nothing after a snow storm.
Granted this was a derailment and thank God no one was hurt. Nonetheless similar scenes of absolute maddening paralysis have been going every winter for over five years now.
has anyone reeled to their feet in the State House in outrage and high dudgeon?
No, them folks is all on Christmas break, God help us.
The MBTA is underfunded, understaffed, outmoded and outgunned, period end of story.
Fixing what is wrong goes beyond spending more money or hiring better people or busting the unions or crushing the kulaks. No, It starts with a change in ethos and by that I mean that the interests of those that commute by highway can never supercede the interests of those that commute by bus or rail. We spent untold billions on the fabled Big Dig lets make fixing the MBTA at least as big and as lasting a priority.
Any politician that gets that and has a positive program to move this ball forward has my vote.
1.) Equality of interests
2.) Restoring the MBTA to the level of efficiency associated with the Moscow Metro circa 1983....Cuz right now, the Red Line would be an embarrassment even to the communists.
A moment of silence please...
Arnold Stang is dead....
And look at that list of credits, I mean he goes all the way back to "Captain Video and his Video Rangers" on TV.
Who knew he was a local?
I always pegged that accent of his as High Brooklyn fer sherr.
Arnold Stanf might be one of the few character actors who stole every single scene he was ever in TV or Movies or Community Theater for that fact.
Not bad for a kid from Chelsea whose voice never quite changed....
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