Yesterday the rains fell, so we made our way to Sea Turtle Cinemas for a Saturday matinee. The draw was a new Coen brothers film, No Country for Old Men. I didn’t realize until the credits rolled that it was an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name. My bad.
Here’s how Miramax describes the story:
The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones)—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (played by Javier Bardem)—the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
While there’s plenty to say about the film, I’ve been meaning to read All the Pretty Horses for years, so when we got home from the theater, I did some interweb sleuthing on the mysterious man of letters. According to Wikipedia, literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville. That’s some stout company.
The imagery from the film (or book, I would imagine) will linger. But not all of it’s vile. Southwest Texas is rendered beautifully, for instance. In the Coen brother’s expert hands, it’s a romantic and timeless place. Sure, it can also be seen as an inhospitable desert, but human dramas play so well against these stark settings.
In a celebrity-obsessed culture like ours, writers can benefit from the creation of a personality that fits and enhances their writerly identity. Of course, it takes a special talent to pull it off. Many writers are simply too shy and otherwise focussed to enter these waters.
In today’s Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, one writer’s journey from Catholic schoolgirl in suburban Chicago to Minneapolis copywriter to totally nude stripper to blogger, author and screenwriter is on display. Brook Busey-Hunt adopted a sexier non de plume–Diablo Cody–and is now a hot property in Hollywood screenwriting circles. Her screenplay for “Juno,†a film directed by Jason Reitman, is set for release by Fox Searchlight on Wednesday.
To get the full effect of her self-induced persona, see this appearance on Letterman. Dave asks her if her stripping wasn’t a form of prostitution and she replies, “I think everything is prostitution in a way…when you’re exchanging some kind of sexual stimulation for money, I think that is prostitution. I mean that’s a heavy question, Dave. Let’s keep it light here.”
Yemassee—Hundreds of sightseers got an eyeful on this crisp November weekend, as history and architecture buffs from as far away as Virginia and Florida made their way to the rural northwest corner of Beaufort County. The reason for their journey? Auldbrass, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterworks and his only project in the Lowcountry.
Wright started work on Auldbrass in 1939 and continued to improve the project until his death in 1959. The plantation–as all such properties are known in these parts–was commissioned by an industrial engineer from Michigan, C. Leigh Stevens. After Stevens’ passing, his daughter lived on and maintained the property for 20 years, before selling it to a group who used it as a hunting lodge.
Modern day Auldbrass began in 1986 when Joel Silver, the famous (and rich) Hollywood producer came on the scene. Silver hired Eric Lloyd Wright, the legend’s grandson, to help restore the place to its original magnificence. The pair had previously joinded forces to restore Wright’s “Storer House” in Los Angeles.
Thanks to Silver’s generosity, the public is invited to see the property once every two years. The showing is coordinated by Beaufort County Open Land Trust.
Media critic Norman Solomon’s book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death has been made into a movie by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. It’s narrated by Sean Penn.
Guided by Solomon’s meticulous research and tough-minded analysis, the film presents disturbing examples of propaganda and media complicity from the present alongside rare footage of political leaders and leading journalists from the past, including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, dissident Senator Wayne Morse, and news correspondents Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer.
Jim Hightower suggests the book, which came out in 2005, is a must read:
If you want to help prevent another war (Iran? Syria?), read War Made Easy now. This is a stop-the-presses book filled with mind-blowing facts about Washington’s warmongers who keep the Pentagon budget rising. It would be funny if people weren’t dying. War Made Easy exposes the grisly game and offers the information we need to stop it.
Independent documentary film, One Bright Shining Moment, offers a compelling look at the 1972 Democrat Party nomination, which went to the rogue Senator from South Dakota George McGovern.
It’s uncomfortable and sad to realize the issues the nation faced in 1972 are exactly the same issues we face today—total and utter corruption of the executive branch, an unpopular and illegal war and the inept response from the opposition party. Yet, no matter how dark it gets in America, real men and women of conscience continue to fight for change. Activist, author and actor Dick Gregory is one such man. He appears in the film several times and each time he has nothing but truth to share.
We watched Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp last night. It was frightening to see just how serious the radical right is about the ongoing Culture War in this nation.
There are many poignant (or scarring, depending on one’s point of view) moments in the film. One of the most telling is the scene from New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Pastor Ted Haggard appears in the film and we learn, among other things, that he has a standing call every Monday with President Bush. Of course, Haggard has since been embroiled in a high-profile scandal involving homosexual prostitution and methamphetamine use. Oops.
I kept asking myself throughout the screening, “How did the filmmakers get this kind of access?” In the interview presented above, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady say they came to the film with no pre-determined agenda, which is a bit hard to believe given their status as sophisticated New Yorkers. Agenda, or no, the film is near perfect in its revelations.
Do animals merely mate? Or do they also love? This question (and the answer) is at the center of Academy Award wining documentary, March of the Penguins, a moving portrayal that makes the story seem much larger than “a nature film.”
Prior to watching this film, I had never given much thought to the habits of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. Now that I know something of their lives, I’m astounded by what they go through. For instance, after the females lay their egg, the males then guard it non-stop from the frigid cold, while the exhausted females walk for days over the ice to the open ocean to feed. By the time, the mother returns to care for the newborn penguin, the father hasn’t eaten in close to four months.
Emperor Penguins are noble creatures, often human-like in their upright stance, walking and behavior. It was good to learn about them.
If you enjoy wine, Mondovino, a documentary by Jonathan Nossiter, is a must see. The film has a fascinating cast of characters, and its central theme explores the mounting tension between local producers and global behemoths like Napa’s Robert Mondavi and Sons.
Hubert de Montille told The Telegraph, “I am un partisan du terroir. But you have vin terroir all over the world, including the United States – wherever you have people who cherish diversity and individuality in wine. For me, the battle isn’t between Europe and the US. It is industrial wine against the culture of wine, that’s the real conflict. These big companies are so powerful and their ambition is so great that they may not keep a space open for vin terroir, for all wine that has a sense of place, rather than just a sense of marketing.”
Southern France’s Languedoc region is one of the places where this conflict was most recently fought. Mondavi had identified forested land in Aniane as suitable for making world-class wine, but citizens of the town with the aid of their Communist mayor rebuked their advances.
According to Wine Spectator, Mondavi had planned to spend about $8 million developing the vineyard and building a showcase winery, which would eventually produce up to 20,000 cases per year of high-end Syrah.
But the site they chose was on the 2,200-acre undeveloped massif, which is flanked by woods and nearly impenetrable bush (known as garrigue), and topped by 750-foot-high plateaus with sweeping views. Hunters, ecologists and naturalists fought against any development in the area, which they consider an environmental shrine.
“The Color of Paradise” is a fable of a child’s innocence and a complex look at faith and humanity. Visually magnificent and wrenchingly moving, the film tells the story of a boy whose inability to see the world only enhances his ability to feel its powerful forces.
As I watched this stunning film from Iran I had several thoughts. One, be grateful for what you have in life. A work like this really puts Western materialsm in its place. It also made me think how important art is to creating bridges between cultures. This film reveals what a beautiful country Iran is, and what amazing people some of its citizens are.
To make war on a people, they must first be dehumanized. That task becomes much harder to do as the world becomes smaller each day via the sharing of our cultures through art.
“Virginia Madsen’s character (Maya) has a radiant paean to wine: she leans forward in her chair, has a soft light on her face and proceeds to share her passion for wine, how it is expressive of the place from which it came, how the tastes move her, and how it changes over time in the glass and in the bottle. Honestly, any wine marketing budget for TV should just clip this soliloquy since it will intrigue and possibly convert the most stubborn of beer drinkers.” –Dr. Vino
My homeboy, Alexander Payne, has a new movie out. Sideways is his first feature that ventures beyond Omaha for a setting. About Schmidt takes place partly in Denver, while Election and Citizen Ruth are solidly set in eastern Nebraska. Place is still critical to Payne’s cinematic style, however. The place in this new film is wine country. The lead character, Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a wine snob and didactic talk about wine dominates several scenes in the film.
How guys relate to women is the other territory this film explores. And it ain’t pretty. One of the more riveting scenes in the film is when Stephanie (Sandra Oh) savagely beats Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) with her motorcycle helmet for his infidelity and lying, while Miles looks helplessly on.
