Mostly Harmless

I wanted to like this film, but to keep my attention for three hours I need more than standard melodrama. Yi Yi is cute and sad by turn, it's well-acted, and yet there's nothing there. This is fluff, pure and simple, like a weeks' worth of 1970's The Young and the Restless. Why the accolades? Zhang Yimou* (pre-Hero/House of Flying Daggers, that is) could pack more punch into a single scene than Yi Yi generates at epic length.

Skip this one--there's plenty of much shorter pap available, like that show about Flava Flav on MTV. To make matters worse, the DVD transfer is wretched.

*Speaking of Yimou, a long-awaited widescreen DVD transfer of one of his masterworks is finally coming:



Let's hope The Story of QiuJiu is soon to follow!

Random Stills From Favorite Films

[Images all stolen from DVDBeaver]

Yes

I saw 8 1/2 for the first time last January and liked it so much I put it on my Xmas list, got it, and watched it again last night. One of my all-time favorites! Fellini manages to make a film about making a film about his own life as a filmmaker, and the narrative keeps switching back and forth between the film being made, the film actually finished, Fellini's life, his memories, and his fantasies. The transitions are seamless, and the symbols underpinning his fantastic structure are haunting and apt.

The portrait of Fellini as an artist is exquisitely honest--he pulls no punches lampooning his egotism, his childishness, his dishonesty--not to mention his reprehensible use of others as pawns in his Art. And yet 8 1/2 is not a somber film, but is purely delightful. I love the way Mastroianni (as the director Guido) uses a bullhorn and whip to get all his castmembers and friends and family members in line during the final space ship circus scene before dropping the pretense and joining the circle himself. Here Fellini acknowledges his true place as just another person in the chain of Being--too many artists separate themselves from Humanity to observe and critique it, never regaining their place in the fold.

I'll watch this many times--the Criterion transfer is supoib.

Oh Christmas Tree

Scientists are by training and nature conservative and...have
probably underestimated our impact. Fifty years from now--
I hope I'm wrong--I think you may be living in a world where you don't go outside between one and four in the afternoon.

--Ohio State University scientist Lonnie Thompson,
quoted in The Coming Meltdown, Bill McKibbon, NYRB Jan. 12, 2006

We'd not had a Xmas/Yule tree in years. I think the last one was '99, when a couple of friends from Singapore stayed with us in December and we went all-out for their benefit (we even had snow!). Before that tree we'd not done one since '95; that particular blue spruce is now over eight feet tall in our tiny front yard. This year I mentioned to Cha that I was in the mood to have a small live tree, mostly because I wanted to plant it, and she found on clearance a beat-up little pine somewhere, half dead. I planted it today, thinking how ridiculously optimistic it is to do so, with polar bears drowning where there used to be ice floes, and all arctic species expected to die off in my lifetime, along with pandas, apes, all the big cats, and coral reefs.

And yet the museums and the Earth's crust are full of long-extinct species, and we've muddled on somehow. I guess the only difference is that most of us know we're living in an unsustainable manner, but are unwilling to stop the bad behaviors. Folks are digging coal a mile down in WVa so I can burn electric lights on my Xmas tree, goddam it.

Here's hoping that little fir tree gets to be eight foot high too.

de Laude Novae Militae

I'm not sure why Piers Paul Read called his book The Templars; it is more a compact history of The Crusades and the variety of European intrigues and personalities behind them. The Templars play a role of course, but do not feature any more prominently here than Bernard of Clairvaux, the Knights Hospitallers, Richard Lionheart, or Frederick Hohenstaufen. The best segment of the book is Read's magnificent refresher course in the rise of Christianity and Islam from the 1st to the 7th century AD, which takes up the first 70 pages. I've not read a better summary elsewhere, even in H.G. Wells' Outline of History.

But though the subject matter barely matches the book title, I enjoyed it for the most part, though there are typos galore scattered throughout. At times Read also tacks on extended quotes from better books without comment, which I fault in freshman essays, so it should be unforgiveable here. The first couple of chapters are excellent, the middle third is just ok, and the concluding bits about the torture of James de Molay and friends makes for fun Xmas reading:

Occasionally the torturers miscalculated: the feet of Bernard of Vado, a Templar priest from Albi, were so badly burned that his bones fell out

.

The Job

I'm back at "work" today, which sucks. The last four days were a veritable whirlwind, what with the 30 hours sans sleep in a hospital room in Gettysburg, followed quickly by New Year's Eve debauchery--Sunday and Monday are a blur as a result. I know we went to dinner with Julio and Yo! Adrienne last night, and discussed buying a hamlet in Italy, but I don't recall much else.

Here's what I should do today:

Shuffle around some DVD orders for the Dance department. I'm not going to order them, but if I leaf trough and perhaps write notes on them, I'll feel better.

Do Inter-library loan lending searches. Since we had 5 requests today that took all of, hm, three minutes?

Catalog four books. Not gonna do it. Can't really remember how after all those martinis and the two bottles of red Saturday night/Sunday morning.

Oh, I get to work the Service Desk from 3:30 until 10pm. I won't see a patron the entire time either.

Just keep thinking: In two weeks I'm in Mexico.

Netflix

Ghost Dog lives in a rooftop shack with an adjoining pigeon coop. He reads the Hagakure and is devoted to its precepts; unfortunately as retainer to a mob boss who saved his life, Ghost Dog must kill for money. As a professional hit man and urban samurai, he's good at what he does, and maintains his untraceability by only communicating via carrier pigeon. When one hit has an unintended witness, Ghost Dog becomes the hunted, and must resolve a conflict between duties to his Master and to higher moral purposes.

Jim Jarmusch crafts an elegant urban fable using a series of enigmatic juxtapositions: wheezing Italian mob bosses rap Flava Flave riffs, young ghetto girls read Rashomon, a Haitian ice cream vendor and Ghost Dog are best friends who don't speak the same language. All of Ghost Dog's victims watch pertinent cartoons before they get wacked--while prepping to shoot a mob boss from his forested perch, he notes a woodpecker and takes a moment to observe its behavior with aethestic relish. At the same time the mob boss is riding in his limo, watching Woody Woodpecker confront Death on a small TV. My favorite scene shows Italian mob stereotypes, upon hearing Ghost Dog's name, commenting on the strangeness of Native American and hip-hop artists' nicknames. Then the boss says "Get Sammy the Snake and Handsome Frankie." A surprisingly tender and often hilarious film, featuring one of my very favorite actors in a lead role. Check it out--even The RZA soundtrack is great.

Happy New Year

Pierrot Lunaire on the dancefloor

Cha and Lorena
Cha imbibes
Scott under assault
Yours truly