|
|
Yesterday, actor Peter Falk passed away. Columbo may not have been the greatest detective show of all time, but it's amazing how Falk's brilliant character study has influenced future TV and film detectives, especially, I think, in British crime drama. And of course, I will always remember and love Peter Falk especially for his role as "Grand-dad" in The Princess Bride, one of the best cult movies of all time. He also starred in several serious films, including Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence by his friend, director John Cassavetes. And he had a great reputation as an actor on the New York stage as well.
The New York Times has this great Elizabeth Taylor timeline.
And when I heard that she was interred already, I thought that might mean that she had stayed faithful to Judaism all these decades after conversion, and so it did. I am glad. And while we're on the subject, there is something kind of grisly about our modern western "Christian" predilection for funerals days and even weeks after the death. The Muslims and the Jews are much more seemly in this respect.
In These Times and the NYT cover the death of Harvey Pekar. I loved this film, American Splendor. My British husband "didn't get it." But that happens a lot with him and not just American stuff either.
I was crushed to read suddenly of the passing of Paul Newman. What a beautiful soul he was. Such a handsome man, a great actor and patron of the arts, a humanitarian and an all-round great example of how to live. I hope they give him a standing ovation in heaven.
Courtesy of the Observer / Guardian. A collection of cinema arts, visual arts documentaries, videos of great classical, jazz and folk performances and dance.
George Carlin died yesterday (Sunday, 22 June). Sadly, he was scheduled to receive a prestigious award. the Mark Twain Award for Comedy, in November. He will be remembered for a number of things, but probably most for "The Seven Things You Can't Say on Television" which led to a landmark obscenity case in the US Supreme Court. The tributes are pouring in already, including this good one in WaPo, about "angry George" and "gentle George".
 As my regular readers know, I have got into the habit of posting obituaries for those whom I admire or at least (in a few cases) am interested in. Sydney Pollack was definitely in the admired category. Greatest mensch? I don't know, but up there, for sure.
 My new m.o. for Wednesday Website of the Week is to start on Friday and work my backwards. So this one is only one day late, a 100% improvement on last week! This week's WWW is not a site exactly but a theme, a film coming out in a little over a week which is a fictional tale of London in a disastrous flood.
In 1984 the Thames estuary southeast of London inaugurated a system of flood defence in the form of the massive Thames Barrier. It is the second largest flood barrier in the world, exceeded in size only by one in the Netherlands called the Oosterscheldekering. The film concerns a tsunami surging up the estuary and breaching the barrier (a scenario that the experts say is extremely unlikely but hey if it makes a good movie . . . )
It is a little uncanny that as this film was being made, floods of a fairly disastrous type were hitting Britain in real life, even if there was no tsunami involved and London was barely affected. Meanwhile, monsoon floods have claimed hundreds of lives in south Asia. And if it's not water, it's fire: I just saw the most appalling footage on the TV news of a towering inferno sweeping through suburban Athens (Greece, not GA) propelled by gale force winds.
I promised another blogger, who was involved somehow in the film documentary, Iraq in Fragments, that I would mention it on my blog; I made this promise months ago so I am a little late. But at the time it was not playing in the UK and now it is.
City Pages has a great article about and interview with Neil Gaiman. I love the headline : Why Neil Gaiman is about to become bigger than Death. If you're a Gaiman fan you will get that. But apparently our boy is not the nerdy comic book writer and story teller he once was (not that he was then, either, but he came off that way). There are a massive raft of movies coming out in the next few years that are either based on his novels or graphic novels or otherwise involve him in the production. One is a live-capture version of Beowulf and one is called Death and is based on the Sandman graphic novels . I am sort of a Neil Gaiman fan. I still have never read Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett and a few of his books I was not able to get into. On the other hand, I did love the Sandman series and also his novel American Gods.
Christopher Hitchens (not all that nice a person himself) is especially vitriolic in his condemnation of Mel Gibson. "Sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred" is in fact how he describes the unfortunate Mr. Gibson, now described in Hoolywood lingo as "toxic". Well, not much wiggle-room in that expression.
Philip K. Dick's paranoid drug war novel A Scanner Darkly has been made into a film by director Richard Linklater. Probably not by coincidence, it stars a sort of who's who of Hollywood drug use and/or recovery graduates: Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder, plus the is-he-is-or-is-he-ain't stoner Keanu Reeves. Reviews are mixed.
Deborama had allowed herself to be pulled into World Cup fever. I taught myself enough about the basics of the Beautiful Game (with some assistance from my ride-to-work guy - thanks, Jan!) to be able to watch all the England games and one pretty terrible defeat of the US team early on. Yes, the England exit was truly heartbreaking. Dear old Sven and sad little Davie Becks, I'm going to miss them from the tabloids (that I never read anyway, but it gets into the Zeitgeist, you know.)
So, I am really just checking in, because it has been so long since I last blogged. The changeable weather was getting me down, things are not great at work or at home, and now the weather has decided to settle and it's settled on - hot and hazy, with high pollen count. Great. I plan to spend much of the next month in a tepid bath.
I have seen a few good movies recently - The Squid and the Whale is highly recommended, as is Breakfast on Pluto and Transamerica, which I saw within 24 hours of each other this weekend. And I also just finished reading Freakonomics, which is as good as everyone says it is.
Historian Martin Kemp rejoices for history-lovers in the fact that the film everyone is reviewing, dissing or discussing (The da Vinci Code, of course) is so preposterous, un-hip and boring that it can't do much damage after all. It's a similar theme I have heard from others, including a Catholic who says her church has nothing to fear from such a silly attack. So, dear readers, if you have seen it, please comment. Even if you haven't - go on, you probably have an opinion. I am probably going to see it at some point, even though I found the books so childlishly and poorly written that I could barely make it to page 2. (And I didn't try to go any further. But I already know the story, having read Holy Blood Holy Grail years ago.) I was also moved to note, when I saw a short TV feature about Rosslyn Chapel and its over-running by da Vinci code groupie tourists in recent months, that I was very glad to have been a Templar-chaser back when it was a more solitary past-time, and to have had the opportunity to visit Rosslyn in relative peace.
I am not sure what this trailer is trying to say, except that it concerns a film called An Inconvenient Truth. I am not sure what the "41,974 people" thing is or why it is in "selected theatres" or if it will later be in general release or if anyone is trying to found a movement around it. But anyway, there it is. An inconvenient truth indeed.
I had high hopes of this City Pages review of Scorsese's No Direction Home, based on the title and the "hook" (Scorsese takes 200 minutes to preserve the mystery of Dylan). But I was disappointed, very disappointed. Biggest problem with it? The reviewer confesses that he is too young "to have ever trusted the dude in the first place" and then continues, thinking himself very hip and clever: The combative mid-'60s press conferences, the autobiographical fabrications, the mumbled cryptoquips, the endless string of overrated best-album-since-Blood on the Tracks-es--all were part of the legacy passed on to us post-Boomers. Excuse me, but do give it a rest. "Us Boomers" have heard this particular whinge quite enough, thanks. But then, having framed this as another us-vs-them generational pissing contest, he allows several howlers to creep in. He notes that "Like A Rolling Stone", in a week when it was no. 2 in the Top-10, "nestled not incongruously between the Beatles' Help and the Beach Boys' California Girls" in a screen-shot in the film. Damn, when in the 1980s or 1990s or this decade did you have three top songs of that calibre? Isn't it just too obvious that post-Boomers are suffering from the most massive case of Bloomian anxiety of influence imagineable? Isn't it all just too darned Oedipal? And then, and then, the twerp has the gall to cast aspersions on Scorsese's choice of a sound-track to the 1950s. Hey, dude, you have just told us that you were not around then, and Scorsese most definitely was, and he is a cultural giant while you are a lowly insect toiling away as a stringer for a local weekly! Where the heck do you get off telling Scorsese he got it wrong? Truly, I wish someone would write a good review of No Direction Home. Someone who "gets" Dylan, who was alive in the 60s, who respects but doesn't worship Scorsese and who doesn't have an axe to grind. Damn, that could be me. Too bad I'm so lazy.
I see that David le Carre's last-but-one book, "The Constant Gardener", is to be made into a film. This is a great idea - not only is this one of le Carre's most moving and passionate books, with a message that is rarely seen in literature or non-fiction, but it is told in a very cinematic way. I can hardly wait to see it.
This post will be cross-posted at Deborama's Books and if I can get my lazy donkey in gear, I may even re-read and review it.
I was also very taken with le Carre's last book, Absolute Friends, but somehow I doubt that will ever be made into a movie. Not in this decade anyway.
***Update*** 7 August
I did try to cross-post this at Deborama's Book Reviews and Store, but we are having problems over there and I ended up deleting the post. For some reason, my template no longer displays as it did. Look and see, it's all messed up. I tried debugging it with my limited HTML/CSS skills but failed. Also, Amazon associates has changed the links they give you from simple text and/or book-cover graphics to some horrible, busy, scripted box, which really does not work with my book blog's format very well. The two latest posts use what they provide, and I don't like the look of it at all. I can edit it down to something useable, as I did with this post, but yecch. If anyone wants to volunteer to help me debug my book review template, or wants to offer a shortcut to getting simple links from Amazon, I would be very grateful.
|
|
