WHAT ARE WE WATCHING ON TV IN JUNE
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1featherbear
What are you watching or planning to watch on TV (or at the movies) in June 2023? Network, cable, streaming, DVD/Bluray, IMAX, phone -- it's all good.
2JulieLill
Just re-watched Guys and Dolls, the musical released in 1952 with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. I loved the music and it was interesting to see Marlon Brando singing. I am pretty sure this was the only musical that Brando sung in.
3KeithChaffee
Been a long time since I saw it, but I remember the main problem (apart from Brando's "singing") is that Sinatra and Brando had been swapped into the wrong roles. Should have been Sinatra as Sky and Brando as Nathan. Then there are all the songs they cut from the movie, but that's sadly par for the course in such things.
There are rumors every now and then of a new film version, but it never seems to happen. How about Channing Tatum and Ariana DeBose as Sky and Sarah, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lady Gaga as Nathan and Adelaide?
There are rumors every now and then of a new film version, but it never seems to happen. How about Channing Tatum and Ariana DeBose as Sky and Sarah, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lady Gaga as Nathan and Adelaide?
4Maura49
>3 KeithChaffee: I agree with all of your comments. I also felt that Brando and Jean Simmons had no on-screen chemistry and I would love to see a new version that did justice to Frank Loesser's score.
5JulieLill
>3 KeithChaffee: I definitely would love to see a remake of Guys and Dolls.
6rosalita
I recently read the latest book by William Landay (All That Is Mine I Carry With Me), largely because I had so enjoyed one of his earlier books, Defending Jacob. That reminded me that a miniseries version of Defending Jacob was released on Apple TV+ a while back, so I dug it out of my bottomless queue and started watching it last night. Only one episode in, so too soon to say if it will live up to the source book.
7Carol420
>6 rosalita: I read and enjoyed both the Wiliam Landay books, but I had forgotten that Defending Jacob was on DVD. I'll have to look it up. By the way...welcome to the group.
8rosalita
>7 Carol420: Thank you! I'm happy to be here. I can't remember how I came across the group recently but I knew I belonged here as soon as I scrolled through a few of the monthly threads. :-)
9KeithChaffee
Just started rewatching the late 90s SF show Sliders. It's an early version of the multiverse stories that are all the rage right now.
A young physics student (played by Jerry Connell) invents a device that lets him "slide" from one Earth to another. He's accompanied by his best friend/potential love interest (Sabrina Lloyd), his pompous physics professor (John Rhys-Davies), and an aging R&B singer who accidentally got caught up in the first slide (Cleavant Derricks).
Each episode finds the gang on a new version of Earth where they must solve some crisis-of-the-week before the timer on the slide device expires and they jump to a new world. The timer's been broken, so there's no control over the duration or destination of each jump. And they must jump when the timer tells them to, or they'll be stuck in their current world for many years before getting the chance to jump again.
Sliders had a turbulent history. Fox cancelled it after three seasons, and the Sci-Fi Network (now Syfy) picked it up for two more. An accident on set killed an actor. There were lots of cast changes along the way, not all of them on pleasant terms, with Derricks the only cast member to make it through all five seasons. (I wonder if the producers were motivated to keep him because he had an identical twin, making it a lot easier to shoot scenes with the character and his assorted doubles.)
The show definitely shows its age. The special effects are, well, let's be generous and say "reasonably priced;" the stories and dialogue are not to the standards of our "peak TV" era; and after ony a few episodes, it has already become a running joke that an analogue to at least one of our four travelers exists in every universe, and is somehow at the center of an existential crisis. That would have made the actors happy, I imagine; they got to show off their range by playing a new version of their character every few weeks.
And there weren't many on the writing staff with much knowledge or experience in SF, so the plots were either fairly obvious premises -- what if the Soviets had taken over America? what if a plague hit a word with no antibiotics? -- or clearly borrowed from whatever popular movies or books the writers had chanced to stumble across. In at least one case, Rhys-Davies had to point out to the writers that they were stealing directly from a movie scene in which he had starred.
But for all its flaws and clunkiness, I'm finding it a pleasantly cheesy bit of nostalgia. I doubt that I'll last through all five seasons; I don't think I did when the show was new, either.
A young physics student (played by Jerry Connell) invents a device that lets him "slide" from one Earth to another. He's accompanied by his best friend/potential love interest (Sabrina Lloyd), his pompous physics professor (John Rhys-Davies), and an aging R&B singer who accidentally got caught up in the first slide (Cleavant Derricks).
Each episode finds the gang on a new version of Earth where they must solve some crisis-of-the-week before the timer on the slide device expires and they jump to a new world. The timer's been broken, so there's no control over the duration or destination of each jump. And they must jump when the timer tells them to, or they'll be stuck in their current world for many years before getting the chance to jump again.
Sliders had a turbulent history. Fox cancelled it after three seasons, and the Sci-Fi Network (now Syfy) picked it up for two more. An accident on set killed an actor. There were lots of cast changes along the way, not all of them on pleasant terms, with Derricks the only cast member to make it through all five seasons. (I wonder if the producers were motivated to keep him because he had an identical twin, making it a lot easier to shoot scenes with the character and his assorted doubles.)
The show definitely shows its age. The special effects are, well, let's be generous and say "reasonably priced;" the stories and dialogue are not to the standards of our "peak TV" era; and after ony a few episodes, it has already become a running joke that an analogue to at least one of our four travelers exists in every universe, and is somehow at the center of an existential crisis. That would have made the actors happy, I imagine; they got to show off their range by playing a new version of their character every few weeks.
And there weren't many on the writing staff with much knowledge or experience in SF, so the plots were either fairly obvious premises -- what if the Soviets had taken over America? what if a plague hit a word with no antibiotics? -- or clearly borrowed from whatever popular movies or books the writers had chanced to stumble across. In at least one case, Rhys-Davies had to point out to the writers that they were stealing directly from a movie scene in which he had starred.
But for all its flaws and clunkiness, I'm finding it a pleasantly cheesy bit of nostalgia. I doubt that I'll last through all five seasons; I don't think I did when the show was new, either.
10Aussi11
A rewatch on TV The Favorite with Olivia Colman starring as Queene Anne
she was magnificent what a talented lady. Great settings, costumes and casting.
she was magnificent what a talented lady. Great settings, costumes and casting.
11JulieLill
>10 Aussi11: I loved that movie! I like Olivia Colman too!
12featherbear
Via DVD Netflix, Architectures 5. This collection around 2005-2007.
1. The Alhambra Granada, Spain. Literally “red,” the color of the outer walls. Built around 250 years before the end of the Araba era in Spain in 1492 (so 1242?). Contrasting with Christian architecture, it’s non-monumental even though originally a fortification. Western architects criticized it for being non-classical, but romanticism favored it for its “exoticism.” The caliph transformed the fortification into a summer residence, with a Myrtle Court, representative of a lost Eden, dedicated to poetry & beauty, fed by elaborate water conduits from the hills. Carved decorative calligraphy, largely non-figurative geometrical forms (though some figurative painting in one of the recesses). Using architectural design to provide airiness needed in a hot country. Interesting contrast with later examples from Palladio & Zaha Hadid.
2. The House of Sugimoto in Kyoto; destroyed by fire in 1864, but rebuilt according to the original plans that were saved, in 1868. The Sugimotos were kimono fabric merchants. Facing the street is the business area, then as you go further inside, a reception area & Buddhist altar, then living quarters. Interlocking wood supports without nails hold up the roofs. The wooden supports rest on flat stones, and the floors are elevated above the ground, for cooling. The floor areas are designed based on tatami (rice straw mats) as the basic measurement, where the tatami length is based on what would be the average height of a Japanese lying down. Room separation is by grooves allowing for sliding walls which are detachable; no corridors. The hierarchical design has the rearmost room for the most important member of the family, a room that opens up into a garden for meditation. The family still lives there, though the function of the house seems to be more to retain traditions rather than commerce; one of the rooms has a non-traditional piano for which the script writer does not seem to approve.
3. Reception and Congress Building in Rome, designed by Adalberto Iberra (not sure of the spelling); built between 1937-1953. Originally intended as Project E42, for an international exhibition of fascist power scheduled for 1942, but canceled for obvious reasons. An example of modernism & rationalist principles accommodating comfortably (for the most part) to fascism (Philip Johnson might be a similar model); but also how the design principles of “form follows function” almost immediately clashed with the reactionary needs of an imperial, monumental style (the neo-classical colonnades at the entrance, reached after two flights of stairs to lengthen the period of admiration & awe were not part of the original design, while the actual steel supporting structures are recessed behind the columns at the actual entrance). Attached to the ginormous Reception building is a smaller Congress building, with an open air theater on the roof, with marble seats. This seems to have been the architect’s idea, though I’d agree with the film creator that it seems to resemble a mausoleum. The interiors of both buildings I found awesome (for the Reception) & quite satisfactory (for the Congress), though the Reception building, in particular, does not seem to be very functional, in the absence of a fascist government intent on propagandistic spectacles.
4. The Yoyogi Olympic Gymnasiums. Architect Kenzo Tanji (spelling?), built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. The larger gym was built for the swimming competition; the pool was floored over soon thereafter, and it appears there has been some difficulty providing a function for it in later years. The smaller gym was for basketball (apparently not much a big deal in those days), and is still used for what appear to be high school games. The buildings are striking for their use of suspension bridge design engineering to support the sweeping concave roofs (the Rome buildings are also concave, but use different support systems); cables are the main source of support for the gym roofs. The roofs give the buildings a striking look – the larger resembles a ship, the smaller a flying saucer – that stand out against the rather dowdy looking neighborhood.
5. Villa Barbaro (Villa di Maser). A hillside villa in Venezia designed by Andrea Palladio, built around 1560. Palladio designed about 30 or so of these. Venice was a rich republic that fell upon hard times, and a number of rich merchants moved out to the country to develop cash crops on their estates, so Palladio apparently did a brisk business in the creation & codification of the McMansions of the time. A neo-classical emphasis on symmetry, such as making sure windows on the second floor were situated directly above the windows on the ground floor. Main house, functioning as a reception area on the upper floor, was thrust forward, with work & living areas on either side, but these areas recessed behind loggias, so the owners could walk along the galleries & keep an eye on things inside & outside (the upper floor had a big window to allow the owner to look out on the fields). Wonder if this had any influence on American plantation architecture? Most noteworthy for me was that the upper floor walls were covered with paintings by Paolo Veronese, many of them trompe l’oeil. Would be a treat to just wander around the reception area & checking out the pictures, which arguably contribute a dialog with the neo-classical symmetry of the architect. Recalling the Alhambra section is the villa’s courtyard in the back, with a large pool/fountain sourced from the hillside springs (one of the fountains emits its liquid from the breasts of one of the garden sculptures), and the water then is channeled through conduits to the kitchens & baths, to fountains in the enormous lawn (horses grazing seem tiny) and then out to the truck gardens that seem to stretch to the horizon.
6. Phaeno, Building as Landscape. Architect Zaha Hadid, built between 2000-2005 in Wolfsburg, Germany. It’s an educational science center for families, across the tracks from an Autostatt (not quite sure what this is, but a sort of entertainment center for buying automobiles; Wolfsburg is basically a Volkswagen factory town). Hadid, born in Iraq, was originally a mathematician who later got into architecture & became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, roughly the equivalent of the Nobel for architects. This was her first major building; it looks a bit like a concrete spaceship studded with portholes, held up by curvy concrete supports. The supports are, it turns out, hollow & functional, allowing room for the human support staff & other meetings. The inside of the science center is a wonder of irregular space, abstract models of geographic (i.e. landscape) spaces, full of curves & overhangs, with new discoveries at every turn. Nature made abstract, to the extent that greenery is not permitted in the airy spaces beneath the center between the supports, recalling the non-figurative features of the Alhambra & Hadid's Arabic heritage. The various scientific demonstrations look fascinating, though without German I’m not sure I could follow them.
1. The Alhambra Granada, Spain. Literally “red,” the color of the outer walls. Built around 250 years before the end of the Araba era in Spain in 1492 (so 1242?). Contrasting with Christian architecture, it’s non-monumental even though originally a fortification. Western architects criticized it for being non-classical, but romanticism favored it for its “exoticism.” The caliph transformed the fortification into a summer residence, with a Myrtle Court, representative of a lost Eden, dedicated to poetry & beauty, fed by elaborate water conduits from the hills. Carved decorative calligraphy, largely non-figurative geometrical forms (though some figurative painting in one of the recesses). Using architectural design to provide airiness needed in a hot country. Interesting contrast with later examples from Palladio & Zaha Hadid.
2. The House of Sugimoto in Kyoto; destroyed by fire in 1864, but rebuilt according to the original plans that were saved, in 1868. The Sugimotos were kimono fabric merchants. Facing the street is the business area, then as you go further inside, a reception area & Buddhist altar, then living quarters. Interlocking wood supports without nails hold up the roofs. The wooden supports rest on flat stones, and the floors are elevated above the ground, for cooling. The floor areas are designed based on tatami (rice straw mats) as the basic measurement, where the tatami length is based on what would be the average height of a Japanese lying down. Room separation is by grooves allowing for sliding walls which are detachable; no corridors. The hierarchical design has the rearmost room for the most important member of the family, a room that opens up into a garden for meditation. The family still lives there, though the function of the house seems to be more to retain traditions rather than commerce; one of the rooms has a non-traditional piano for which the script writer does not seem to approve.
3. Reception and Congress Building in Rome, designed by Adalberto Iberra (not sure of the spelling); built between 1937-1953. Originally intended as Project E42, for an international exhibition of fascist power scheduled for 1942, but canceled for obvious reasons. An example of modernism & rationalist principles accommodating comfortably (for the most part) to fascism (Philip Johnson might be a similar model); but also how the design principles of “form follows function” almost immediately clashed with the reactionary needs of an imperial, monumental style (the neo-classical colonnades at the entrance, reached after two flights of stairs to lengthen the period of admiration & awe were not part of the original design, while the actual steel supporting structures are recessed behind the columns at the actual entrance). Attached to the ginormous Reception building is a smaller Congress building, with an open air theater on the roof, with marble seats. This seems to have been the architect’s idea, though I’d agree with the film creator that it seems to resemble a mausoleum. The interiors of both buildings I found awesome (for the Reception) & quite satisfactory (for the Congress), though the Reception building, in particular, does not seem to be very functional, in the absence of a fascist government intent on propagandistic spectacles.
4. The Yoyogi Olympic Gymnasiums. Architect Kenzo Tanji (spelling?), built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. The larger gym was built for the swimming competition; the pool was floored over soon thereafter, and it appears there has been some difficulty providing a function for it in later years. The smaller gym was for basketball (apparently not much a big deal in those days), and is still used for what appear to be high school games. The buildings are striking for their use of suspension bridge design engineering to support the sweeping concave roofs (the Rome buildings are also concave, but use different support systems); cables are the main source of support for the gym roofs. The roofs give the buildings a striking look – the larger resembles a ship, the smaller a flying saucer – that stand out against the rather dowdy looking neighborhood.
5. Villa Barbaro (Villa di Maser). A hillside villa in Venezia designed by Andrea Palladio, built around 1560. Palladio designed about 30 or so of these. Venice was a rich republic that fell upon hard times, and a number of rich merchants moved out to the country to develop cash crops on their estates, so Palladio apparently did a brisk business in the creation & codification of the McMansions of the time. A neo-classical emphasis on symmetry, such as making sure windows on the second floor were situated directly above the windows on the ground floor. Main house, functioning as a reception area on the upper floor, was thrust forward, with work & living areas on either side, but these areas recessed behind loggias, so the owners could walk along the galleries & keep an eye on things inside & outside (the upper floor had a big window to allow the owner to look out on the fields). Wonder if this had any influence on American plantation architecture? Most noteworthy for me was that the upper floor walls were covered with paintings by Paolo Veronese, many of them trompe l’oeil. Would be a treat to just wander around the reception area & checking out the pictures, which arguably contribute a dialog with the neo-classical symmetry of the architect. Recalling the Alhambra section is the villa’s courtyard in the back, with a large pool/fountain sourced from the hillside springs (one of the fountains emits its liquid from the breasts of one of the garden sculptures), and the water then is channeled through conduits to the kitchens & baths, to fountains in the enormous lawn (horses grazing seem tiny) and then out to the truck gardens that seem to stretch to the horizon.
6. Phaeno, Building as Landscape. Architect Zaha Hadid, built between 2000-2005 in Wolfsburg, Germany. It’s an educational science center for families, across the tracks from an Autostatt (not quite sure what this is, but a sort of entertainment center for buying automobiles; Wolfsburg is basically a Volkswagen factory town). Hadid, born in Iraq, was originally a mathematician who later got into architecture & became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, roughly the equivalent of the Nobel for architects. This was her first major building; it looks a bit like a concrete spaceship studded with portholes, held up by curvy concrete supports. The supports are, it turns out, hollow & functional, allowing room for the human support staff & other meetings. The inside of the science center is a wonder of irregular space, abstract models of geographic (i.e. landscape) spaces, full of curves & overhangs, with new discoveries at every turn. Nature made abstract, to the extent that greenery is not permitted in the airy spaces beneath the center between the supports, recalling the non-figurative features of the Alhambra & Hadid's Arabic heritage. The various scientific demonstrations look fascinating, though without German I’m not sure I could follow them.
13Aussi11
Watched a feel good movie "Dream Horse" 2021 an Irish true tale starring Toni Collette, the cast rendition of "Delilah" is still with me.
14featherbear
MGM+; should be on Amazon Prime sooner or later. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) 2 h 14 m. Directors: John Francis Daley (remember him from Bones?) & Jonathan Goldstein. The two of them also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio. Entertaining family movie. I’m not familiar with the game, but I suspect the recurring plot points where the adventurers need to come up with a change of plans is game-related, & is a good life lesson. The other recurring plot motif is resurrection; not sure what to make of that. I was relatively unfamiliar with Sophia Lillis as the shape changer Doric, an enjoyable character who can turn into the Abominable Snowperson, a mouse, or a bee just like that. She is teamed with annoying small-time sorcerer Simon, whose repertoire is magic tricks everyone can figure out. The leads are 2 thieves, Edgin (Chris Pine) & Holga (Michelle Rodriguez). Edgin is the planner who needs to keep changing plans, & Holga is the muscle (Rodriguez’s hair & make-up could have been better; she looks like a WNBA enforcer who never gets to be the face of the team; but when Edgin has to choose between her & his late wife, he makes the right decision). They are helped by Xenk (Rege Jean Page), a perfect hero who is too pure to hang with Edgin & Holga for very long. The villain is Hugh Grant as Forge, charmingly crooked but not scary, allied with sorceress Sofina (Daisy Head); scarier than Forge but whose chief weapon is capturing her enemies in gunk. Silly fun all in all.
Showtime. The Fabelmans (2022) 2 h 31 m. Do you ever get knocked out by a movie & sit through the long credit roll at the end while everyone else is filing out, but you don’t leave immediately because you’re still being hit emotionally? That happened to me & I was watching at home. Directed by Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Spielberg & Tony Kushner. The way it captures the happiness of a happy family seen through a young boy’s eyes, and then capturing how the family falls apart, caught, ironically, through the medium of film that will become the boy’s career. Remembering with so much love is special. Michelle Williams as Mitzi Fabelman (the mother) in a great performance. Paul Dano as Burt Fabelman (the father). They are both so likable that when they separate you feel as bad as their kids. Gabriel LaBelle as Sam, the Spielberg surrogate, does justice to a difficult role. Cameos from Judd Hirsh, Seth Rogen, & David Lynch (as John Ford). Chloe East is Monica, Sam’s gentile girlfriend after the family move to California; she’s a funny caricature in her seduction scene, but grows more subtle when they break up at the prom.
Showtime. The Fabelmans (2022) 2 h 31 m. Do you ever get knocked out by a movie & sit through the long credit roll at the end while everyone else is filing out, but you don’t leave immediately because you’re still being hit emotionally? That happened to me & I was watching at home. Directed by Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Spielberg & Tony Kushner. The way it captures the happiness of a happy family seen through a young boy’s eyes, and then capturing how the family falls apart, caught, ironically, through the medium of film that will become the boy’s career. Remembering with so much love is special. Michelle Williams as Mitzi Fabelman (the mother) in a great performance. Paul Dano as Burt Fabelman (the father). They are both so likable that when they separate you feel as bad as their kids. Gabriel LaBelle as Sam, the Spielberg surrogate, does justice to a difficult role. Cameos from Judd Hirsh, Seth Rogen, & David Lynch (as John Ford). Chloe East is Monica, Sam’s gentile girlfriend after the family move to California; she’s a funny caricature in her seduction scene, but grows more subtle when they break up at the prom.
16JulieLill
>15 Aussi11: I want to see that!
17featherbear
Recent streaming/cable premiere via MAX (formerly HBOMax). Avatar: the Way of Water (2022) 3 h 12 m. Director: James Cameron; screenplay: Cameron, Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver.
So then, back on Pandora, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is, at the beginning, chief of the Na'vi (the blue basketball-star-size, cat-like natives of the ground & the aerial islands; Sully is in his Na’vi body throughout) with his wife Neytiri (bow & arrow toting Zoe Saldana); they now have 2 girls & 2 boys (one of the girls is adopted & is the daughter of the Sigourney Weaver avatar; the girl Kiri has some supernatural powers). There’s also a human boy Spider hanging around (some of the original human science researchers stayed behind when the humans were kicked out in the original film).
Pandora is re-invaded by the military-industrial complex of earth. The invaders, when they’re not napalming the planet, plan to use Na’vi bodies loaded with the memories (from computer backups) of the dead soldiers from the original invasion, led by Quaritch (Stephen “you’re not in Kansas anymore” Lang), the bloody-minded original leader who was killed by Sully in the first movie. The proof of concept mission will be to eliminate the instigator/leader of the Na’vi revolt, which Quaritch is happy to do, since his animus toward Sully is, of course, personal. Not incidentally, human boy Spider is the original Quaritch’s son (as in Luke you are my …?!).
Rather than endanger the Na’vi population, Sully takes his family out of the Na’vi floating island headquarters & the family hides out in a village of oceanic islanders, the (I think?) called the Metkayina. Cameron’s islanders are, in contrast to the Na’vi, green, a bit bigger (remember the Na’vi are already bigger than humans), with tails that are more amphibious than the Na’vi panther tails, with Maori style facial tattoos. They have the equivalent of the Na’vi flying reptiles, though the islanders have 2 animal transports, one rather like plesiosaurs, exclusively aquatic, the other a combination crocodile & flying fish that both swim & fly. The islanders have a telepathic (?) connection to gigantic whale-like creatures that visit them in a big pod seasonally, and Sully’s younger son becomes friends with a really big one exiled from the pod.
Eventually Quaritch locates the village & comes hunting with a gigantic whaling ship the size of the Titanic, able to discharge a small fleet of harpoon boats, helicopters, & submarines. The corporation is combining business with genocide on this expedition; it turns out the whalers extract something from one of the whale glands worth $80million as an age extender. Sully’s kids are kidnapped as bait to get Sully; the islanders could probably live without Sully’s problems, but killing the whales pushes them over the edge and a sea battle takes place that eventually results in the supership going down, with Sully & family in a battle royale with the surviving military Na’vi avatars in the middle of a planetary eclipse.
Lots of cutting back and forth hither & thither, now with Sully battling Quaritch, Spider rescuing one daughter, Neytiri with the other daughter, the two brothers & a couple of the islander youth dodging bullets, climaxing with Sully in one thread & Neytiri in another getting trapped in separate compartments quickly filling with ocean (Cameron channeling his Titanic & The Abyss). When Cameron isn’t playing the claustrophobia card, the outdoor marine sequences are state of the art; hard to identify the chief contributors: photography, set design, animation, CGI? Limitation is that the characters are more anthropology types than the more conventional movie character types of Titanic or Abyss, which probably inhibits spectator identification. The fantasy element is not so much the exotic flora, fauna, & natives so much as the concept of the planet as a living organism triumphing over the destructive will to death of high tech exploiters.
The conclusion is a set up for a sequel, since the corporation already has more than a foothold on the planet, with better weapons, and Quaritch has somehow survived, and Sully has finally (!) realized his family can’t run away from the invaders & he doesn’t really have a plan, as he keeps insisting. I’d be interested to see how Pandora fights back next time, since it appears to have exhausted its ocean, sky, and land arsenal. Though the film was financially successful, the writer strike might delay the next one for some time.
So then, back on Pandora, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is, at the beginning, chief of the Na'vi (the blue basketball-star-size, cat-like natives of the ground & the aerial islands; Sully is in his Na’vi body throughout) with his wife Neytiri (bow & arrow toting Zoe Saldana); they now have 2 girls & 2 boys (one of the girls is adopted & is the daughter of the Sigourney Weaver avatar; the girl Kiri has some supernatural powers). There’s also a human boy Spider hanging around (some of the original human science researchers stayed behind when the humans were kicked out in the original film).
Pandora is re-invaded by the military-industrial complex of earth. The invaders, when they’re not napalming the planet, plan to use Na’vi bodies loaded with the memories (from computer backups) of the dead soldiers from the original invasion, led by Quaritch (Stephen “you’re not in Kansas anymore” Lang), the bloody-minded original leader who was killed by Sully in the first movie. The proof of concept mission will be to eliminate the instigator/leader of the Na’vi revolt, which Quaritch is happy to do, since his animus toward Sully is, of course, personal. Not incidentally, human boy Spider is the original Quaritch’s son (as in Luke you are my …?!).
Rather than endanger the Na’vi population, Sully takes his family out of the Na’vi floating island headquarters & the family hides out in a village of oceanic islanders, the (I think?) called the Metkayina. Cameron’s islanders are, in contrast to the Na’vi, green, a bit bigger (remember the Na’vi are already bigger than humans), with tails that are more amphibious than the Na’vi panther tails, with Maori style facial tattoos. They have the equivalent of the Na’vi flying reptiles, though the islanders have 2 animal transports, one rather like plesiosaurs, exclusively aquatic, the other a combination crocodile & flying fish that both swim & fly. The islanders have a telepathic (?) connection to gigantic whale-like creatures that visit them in a big pod seasonally, and Sully’s younger son becomes friends with a really big one exiled from the pod.
Eventually Quaritch locates the village & comes hunting with a gigantic whaling ship the size of the Titanic, able to discharge a small fleet of harpoon boats, helicopters, & submarines. The corporation is combining business with genocide on this expedition; it turns out the whalers extract something from one of the whale glands worth $80million as an age extender. Sully’s kids are kidnapped as bait to get Sully; the islanders could probably live without Sully’s problems, but killing the whales pushes them over the edge and a sea battle takes place that eventually results in the supership going down, with Sully & family in a battle royale with the surviving military Na’vi avatars in the middle of a planetary eclipse.
Lots of cutting back and forth hither & thither, now with Sully battling Quaritch, Spider rescuing one daughter, Neytiri with the other daughter, the two brothers & a couple of the islander youth dodging bullets, climaxing with Sully in one thread & Neytiri in another getting trapped in separate compartments quickly filling with ocean (Cameron channeling his Titanic & The Abyss). When Cameron isn’t playing the claustrophobia card, the outdoor marine sequences are state of the art; hard to identify the chief contributors: photography, set design, animation, CGI? Limitation is that the characters are more anthropology types than the more conventional movie character types of Titanic or Abyss, which probably inhibits spectator identification. The fantasy element is not so much the exotic flora, fauna, & natives so much as the concept of the planet as a living organism triumphing over the destructive will to death of high tech exploiters.
The conclusion is a set up for a sequel, since the corporation already has more than a foothold on the planet, with better weapons, and Quaritch has somehow survived, and Sully has finally (!) realized his family can’t run away from the invaders & he doesn’t really have a plan, as he keeps insisting. I’d be interested to see how Pandora fights back next time, since it appears to have exhausted its ocean, sky, and land arsenal. Though the film was financially successful, the writer strike might delay the next one for some time.
18featherbear
>15 Aussi11: Thanks for the recommend; just caught Tully on Netflix; not for the squeamish if you're a guy. Should have mentioned the screenplay was by Diablo Cody; I would have jumped sooner. Charlize Theron has been racking up some great roles. Midway through the movie when Marlo is introducing her autistic son to his new school & he gets a panic attack from the autoflush in the restroom, I though the theme of the movie was about asking for help; but at the end it was about finding the help within yourself (but nearly killing yourself by doing so?) It's about Marlo coping with her third child & her relationship with "night nanny" Tully (Mackenzie Davis). Not a nanny horror movie, despite the screenplay author of Jennifer's Body; mostly edgy comedy.
19JulieLill
Television's Greatest Hits In Living Color
This is actually a CD which plays 65 TV Themes from the 60's and 70's. Some are very familiar and some I have never heard before but it is very entertaining!
This is actually a CD which plays 65 TV Themes from the 60's and 70's. Some are very familiar and some I have never heard before but it is very entertaining!
20KeithChaffee
A pair of worthwhile new streaming series:
PRIMO is a Freevee sitcom centered on 16-year-old Rafa, who lives with his mom in San Antonio. Her five brothers are also constant presences in his life, offering five very different quasi-paternal role models. There's not really any new ground being broken here, but it's a solidly entertaining family/coming-of-age sitcom, with a likeable lead and a fine ensemble. And kudos to the makeup department for giving the five uncles very distinctive looks, making it much easier to sort them all out quickly.
SOMEWHERE BOY is a British series, now available in the US at Hulu. Danny is a young man coping to life in the outside world after having been never allowed to leave his home. Danny's mother died when he was a small child, and his father lost his grip on reality, telling Danny that he must never leave the house because the "monsters" that got his mother would get him too. Lewis Gribben is excellent as Danny; Lisa McGrillis is also excellent as his aunt, trying her best to help her nephew without knowing how to do so.
PRIMO is a Freevee sitcom centered on 16-year-old Rafa, who lives with his mom in San Antonio. Her five brothers are also constant presences in his life, offering five very different quasi-paternal role models. There's not really any new ground being broken here, but it's a solidly entertaining family/coming-of-age sitcom, with a likeable lead and a fine ensemble. And kudos to the makeup department for giving the five uncles very distinctive looks, making it much easier to sort them all out quickly.
SOMEWHERE BOY is a British series, now available in the US at Hulu. Danny is a young man coping to life in the outside world after having been never allowed to leave his home. Danny's mother died when he was a small child, and his father lost his grip on reality, telling Danny that he must never leave the house because the "monsters" that got his mother would get him too. Lewis Gribben is excellent as Danny; Lisa McGrillis is also excellent as his aunt, trying her best to help her nephew without knowing how to do so.
21featherbear
Taking advantage of Xfinity freebie week for Starz on the last day. Little Women (2019) 2 h 15 m. Director & screenplay, Greta Gerwig. So this would be the 4th LW movie adaptation I’ve seen; this one was on my tbv list for some time. The other 3 already viewed were: the classic George Cukor version (1933) that made Katharine Hepburn a star -- the 1949 with June Allyson & Peter Lawford -- & the 1994 Gillian Armstrong featuring Winona Ryder & Susan Sarandon. I confess to a bit of presentism & would give the Gerwig at least 3 ½ handkerchiefs cause I was tearing up all the time (a positive). Presentism effect was powerful since by now it’s hard to forget what happens, what’s coming: the piano, Amy burning Jo’s “novel,” Beth’s solo act of charity, Meg at the debutante ball, Jo helping Laurie rescue Amy, etc. Gerwig’s version veers from the more traditional predecessors by cutting & pasting time periods for the most part without giving formal signals; the film begins with Jo (Saoirse Ronan; red head like Hepburn & my Platonic Jo for the time being) submitting one of her blood & thunder stories to a publisher for the first time. As the film unfolds, we get flashbacks, then flashbacks within flashbacks. OK, so if you don’t know the basic storyline, watch an earlier version or read (or re-read) the book. Gerwig successfully Plays the Hits with virtuosity as far as I’m concerned. What she does well is acknowledge how different female roles can have equal validity, or that Jo can represent an advanced, positive independence & still suffer acutely from loneliness. Florence Pugh as Amy was a particularly effective foil to Ronan’s Jo. Other than playing with narrative linearity, Gerwig also toys with the autobiographical nature of the novel so that Jo’s marriage to Baehr becomes explicitly a means of satisfying its readers’ romantic fantasies. And she inserts a number of mini-homiletics on the economic status of women that Alcott’s publishers might have found non-commercial, though Aunt March would doubtless approve.
22featherbear
Another DVD-Netflix in the waning days of that subscription service. Cosi fan tutte (2004) 3 h 9 min. I’m not a super opera fan; I would say my favorite Mozart is The Magic Flute, seen so long ago at the New York Metropolitan; and the Ingmar Bergman movie. I’ve listened to Don Giovanni & Marriage of Figaro following along with the librettos. Cosi I’ve listened to but without libretto in hand, & maybe not all the way through, so only a vague idea of the story, so thanks to the DVD I now have a much better idea. The subtitles suggest to me that the libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte is very good, maybe more interesting than the music, though now I want to listen to it again. I got a soundbar when I purchased my TV, but the sound was only OK, with some volume fades due, I believe, to mike placement in the production, which I believe was a TV production. Couldn’t find anything on IMDB, but there are a lot of different productions, so I might have overlooked it. Basically two young couples, a rich & cynical older man, & a maid. I don’t know if Cecila Bartoli was a thing back when this was made, but she would have been perfect for the maid Despina; Da Ponte & Mozart give Despina a lot of good material. Anyways, I jotted down some of the credits: The two sisters: Gloria Scalchi (Dorabella, the older sister), Adriana Damato (Fiordiligi; who looked a bit like Bartoli), Riccardo Novaro (Guglielmo, Fiordiligi’s suitor – initially), Ruben Martinez (Ferrando, Dorabella’s suitor), Rolando Panerai (Don Alfonso, the older man), & Daniela Mazzuccato (Despina; I liked her a lot, my Cecilia Bartoli comments notwithstanding). Paolo Ponziano Ciardi conducted the Orchestsra filharmonia de Roma, and Enrico Castiglione was the stage & TV director. Barebones plot: Don Alfonso insists that women are incapable of being constant in relationships, and bets the 2 idealistic young men that he can demonstrate his thesis with their betrotheds. He sets up a fake military call up for the two men and then has them return in disguise, to court each other’s girls. Alfonso has Despina do the matchmaking, and eventually (solos & duets galore) both women succumb. But at the marriage ceremony with “the Albanians,” Guglielmo & Ferrando reveal themselves in their original roles; with some misgivings, the marriages take place but with the original pairings, with an Enlightenment chorus affirming that “cosi fan tutte,” all women do it (so no need to get all hot & bothered).
23featherbear
HBO (or MAX). Binged Season 2, Epis 3-7 of Somebody Somewhere. Rewatched episode 2, a sort of turning point in the story arc, where Fred (Murray Hill) introduces his fiancé Susan at the weekly poker game at his house that includes Sam (Bridgett Everett) & her best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller). Sam agrees to sing at the wedding, & Joel agrees to officiate, and this becomes a sort of running anxiety through the season. That no one knew Fred had become engaged seems to grate slightly on Sam, and not being kept in the loop comes to a head for her in the final episodes. The commitment to sing at the wedding leads her to touch base with her beloved high school vocal teacher Darlene Edwards (Barbara E. Robertson), which she does by attending a student lieder recital where a middle aged social studies teacher Brad Schraeder (Tim Bagley) in khaki trousers (wear em myself) does an Italian folk song to the hilarity of Sam & Joel (though their reactions are slightly, subtly different in retrospect). The snacks apres recital include Brad’s family recipe “St. Louis sushi,” ham wrapped around a pickle & cream cheese, on a toothpick, which results in a highpoint of hilarity when both Sam & Joel end up on their phones, and on their respective toilets, trying to mute the explosive sounds of St Louis sushi being evacuated. The range of the series amazes me, where I can be lmao at the end of episode 2, then tearing up at the memorial for Darlene, when her students sing Schubert’s An die Musik, then tearing up some more at Fred’s & Susan’s wedding, where Sam sings, and Joel officiates, both decently (& Trish does a successful catering job), concluding a moving season 2.
Freebie week on Xfinity also gave me a chance to get a taste of the Qwest streaming service, which specializes in music documentaries. I caught 2. There was a 38 min. 1966 doc of the John Coltrane Quartet in concert in France. The other players were members of the classic quartet: Jimmy Garrison on bass, McCoy Tyner on piano & Elvin Jones on drums. I was lucky enough to hear Elvin Jones live during my college years (he was playing with Joe Farrell at the time), and though the film was clearly dated, the percussion was well-recorded, as were the piano & the tenor & soprano saxophones; unfortunately I could barely hear Garrison’s bass. I don’t recall the title of the first song – didn’t ring a bell with me – but Afro-Blue & My Favorite Things were Coltrane standards. Most memorable for me was Tyner’s piano playing on Favorite Things (rather than Coltrane’s soprano; he seems to have held back a little, but Tyner was allowed to stretch). Between Tyner & Buniatishvili in the next paragraph I was playing a lot of “air piano” as I watched.
The second doc was Khatia Buniatishvili performing the Liszt 2nd Piano Concerto with Zubin Mehta & the Israel Philharmonic from 2015. She was astounding. I’ve watched it twice so far. I discovered her recordings on Spotify, and was most impressed by her solo Liszt playing, so I was eager to hear this one & it did not disappoint. The concerto is a one movement virtuoso set piece, without to me any particularly memorable tunes, but full of wonderfully showoff-y finger breaking runs that seem like quintessential rock star Liszt. There’s a YouTube version she does with a French orchestra when she was younger which is good too, but in the later version she plays it like she knows it like the back of her hand & is having a lot of fun. (The Israel Philharmonic version is available on a pricey Sony DVD paired with a Beethoven concerto)
Freebie week on Xfinity also gave me a chance to get a taste of the Qwest streaming service, which specializes in music documentaries. I caught 2. There was a 38 min. 1966 doc of the John Coltrane Quartet in concert in France. The other players were members of the classic quartet: Jimmy Garrison on bass, McCoy Tyner on piano & Elvin Jones on drums. I was lucky enough to hear Elvin Jones live during my college years (he was playing with Joe Farrell at the time), and though the film was clearly dated, the percussion was well-recorded, as were the piano & the tenor & soprano saxophones; unfortunately I could barely hear Garrison’s bass. I don’t recall the title of the first song – didn’t ring a bell with me – but Afro-Blue & My Favorite Things were Coltrane standards. Most memorable for me was Tyner’s piano playing on Favorite Things (rather than Coltrane’s soprano; he seems to have held back a little, but Tyner was allowed to stretch). Between Tyner & Buniatishvili in the next paragraph I was playing a lot of “air piano” as I watched.
The second doc was Khatia Buniatishvili performing the Liszt 2nd Piano Concerto with Zubin Mehta & the Israel Philharmonic from 2015. She was astounding. I’ve watched it twice so far. I discovered her recordings on Spotify, and was most impressed by her solo Liszt playing, so I was eager to hear this one & it did not disappoint. The concerto is a one movement virtuoso set piece, without to me any particularly memorable tunes, but full of wonderfully showoff-y finger breaking runs that seem like quintessential rock star Liszt. There’s a YouTube version she does with a French orchestra when she was younger which is good too, but in the later version she plays it like she knows it like the back of her hand & is having a lot of fun. (The Israel Philharmonic version is available on a pricey Sony DVD paired with a Beethoven concerto)
24Aussi11
So enjoyed the multi award winning movie
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
Francis McDormand led a wonderful cast.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
Francis McDormand led a wonderful cast.
25featherbear
Two incentives for watching more movies in mid to late June: both NBA & NHL finals are over (I was rooting in vain for the underdog Florida teams), and, the Criterion Channel’s list of movies it’s dropping after June 30. Two horror flicks to be sent to the black hole in July:
Basket Case (1982) 1 hr 31 min. Director/writer Frank Henenlotter. A young man “from upstate New York” with a large basket checks into a real tenderloin hotel in the NY 42nd St area. Very low-budget, IMDB claims that most of the technical credits were made up to avoid repeating crew names. Now part of the Museum of Modern Art film archive collection. Really captures the (for me wonderful) sleaziness of the area, the cheap SRO accommodations – far better than re-creations like the admittedly well-researched HBO series The Deuce, where I believe the street was rebuilt on a studio lot (on my list of series to watch life permitting). The young man, Dwayne Bradley (Kevin VanHentenryck) is the better half of a pair of separated conjoined (“Siamese” in those non-woke days) twins; the not so better half is in the basket, alive and … crawling. When the bad brother emerges, one sees where the radiation mutated octopus Stewie from the early Family Guy episode originated. The hotel occupants & the manager could very well have been real life habitants, as well as the guy trying to sell Dwayne all manner of psychic enhancements as the lad trundles the basket down the Deuce. The plot involves the bad brother’s mission of vengeance on the backstreet doctors (one of them turns out to be a veterinarian) who performed the surgical separation. No one is spared, including Dwayne’s first love. Of the amateur (?) actors, I particularly liked Beverly Bonner as Casey, a friendly prostitute who gets Dwayne drunk enough to tell his backstory, though she doesn’t quite believe him. The bad brother, Belial, could use a manicure.
Also on CC’s black hole schedule is a somewhat artier (also ‘80’s) horror flick, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne aka Dr Jekyll et les femmes. Directed & written by Walerian Borowczyk, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, the source of countless films. The version I watched was all in French (with English subtitles) though the location was still late nineteenth-century London. The cast was international, so probably dubbing took place; part of the alienation effect was to have all the English characters speaking in French, like Russian aristocrats. Key scene was a dinner party where the guests discuss Dr Jekyll’s thesis about whether science can discover the “transcendental self;” it later appears Dr J (Udo Meier) has been experimenting on himself. The ostensible reason for the party was to introduce Dr J’s new fiancée, Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro). There is a lengthy sequence where the guests sign in; not sure what that all meant though it would be interesting to learn Borowczyk’s take. The transcendental self Edward Hyde (Gerard Zalcberg) is Dr J’s Other, whom he manifests after wallowing in a chemical bath; Jekyll is only able to restore his uptight self by swallowing an extremely rare drug. Among the wedding gifts are a “Vermeer of Delft” painting of a contemplative 7 months pregnant woman & a bow & poisoned arrow set captured by the colonial empire. Like the Chekhov pistol, the latter is put to use when Hyde goes into one of his rampages (not unlike Belial in Basket Case). The Vermeer was purchased at a criminally low price at an auction; it's destroyed in the mayhem. Patrick McGee, veteran British character actor, has a role as an obnoxious general who claims to be for peace but shoots one of the servants, explaining this as collateral damage or some such; Hyde turns him & his daughter to poison arrow pincushions (though not until the daughter has succumbed to Hyde’s abnormally large penis; both Basket Case & Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne have a lot of sex & gore). In Borowczyk’s cinema universe Hyde does not get his comeuppance; the film ends with a delirious uniting of the transcendental selves of Hyde & Fanny, also transformed into a daemonic creature, in the abandoned coach. Prototype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s creation, the one with Winona Ryder as Mina? Need to refresh my memory on that one.
Forgot to mention that the Borowczyk also reminded me of Clockwork Orange in its pop Nietzschean theme, though I'm not sure about the influence timeline. Also forgot to mention Hyde (I'm assuming it is Hyde) nearly beats a child to death in the opening sequence. Not sure how this relates to the film as a whole.
Basket Case (1982) 1 hr 31 min. Director/writer Frank Henenlotter. A young man “from upstate New York” with a large basket checks into a real tenderloin hotel in the NY 42nd St area. Very low-budget, IMDB claims that most of the technical credits were made up to avoid repeating crew names. Now part of the Museum of Modern Art film archive collection. Really captures the (for me wonderful) sleaziness of the area, the cheap SRO accommodations – far better than re-creations like the admittedly well-researched HBO series The Deuce, where I believe the street was rebuilt on a studio lot (on my list of series to watch life permitting). The young man, Dwayne Bradley (Kevin VanHentenryck) is the better half of a pair of separated conjoined (“Siamese” in those non-woke days) twins; the not so better half is in the basket, alive and … crawling. When the bad brother emerges, one sees where the radiation mutated octopus Stewie from the early Family Guy episode originated. The hotel occupants & the manager could very well have been real life habitants, as well as the guy trying to sell Dwayne all manner of psychic enhancements as the lad trundles the basket down the Deuce. The plot involves the bad brother’s mission of vengeance on the backstreet doctors (one of them turns out to be a veterinarian) who performed the surgical separation. No one is spared, including Dwayne’s first love. Of the amateur (?) actors, I particularly liked Beverly Bonner as Casey, a friendly prostitute who gets Dwayne drunk enough to tell his backstory, though she doesn’t quite believe him. The bad brother, Belial, could use a manicure.
Also on CC’s black hole schedule is a somewhat artier (also ‘80’s) horror flick, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne aka Dr Jekyll et les femmes. Directed & written by Walerian Borowczyk, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, the source of countless films. The version I watched was all in French (with English subtitles) though the location was still late nineteenth-century London. The cast was international, so probably dubbing took place; part of the alienation effect was to have all the English characters speaking in French, like Russian aristocrats. Key scene was a dinner party where the guests discuss Dr Jekyll’s thesis about whether science can discover the “transcendental self;” it later appears Dr J (Udo Meier) has been experimenting on himself. The ostensible reason for the party was to introduce Dr J’s new fiancée, Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro). There is a lengthy sequence where the guests sign in; not sure what that all meant though it would be interesting to learn Borowczyk’s take. The transcendental self Edward Hyde (Gerard Zalcberg) is Dr J’s Other, whom he manifests after wallowing in a chemical bath; Jekyll is only able to restore his uptight self by swallowing an extremely rare drug. Among the wedding gifts are a “Vermeer of Delft” painting of a contemplative 7 months pregnant woman & a bow & poisoned arrow set captured by the colonial empire. Like the Chekhov pistol, the latter is put to use when Hyde goes into one of his rampages (not unlike Belial in Basket Case). The Vermeer was purchased at a criminally low price at an auction; it's destroyed in the mayhem. Patrick McGee, veteran British character actor, has a role as an obnoxious general who claims to be for peace but shoots one of the servants, explaining this as collateral damage or some such; Hyde turns him & his daughter to poison arrow pincushions (though not until the daughter has succumbed to Hyde’s abnormally large penis; both Basket Case & Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne have a lot of sex & gore). In Borowczyk’s cinema universe Hyde does not get his comeuppance; the film ends with a delirious uniting of the transcendental selves of Hyde & Fanny, also transformed into a daemonic creature, in the abandoned coach. Prototype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s creation, the one with Winona Ryder as Mina? Need to refresh my memory on that one.
Forgot to mention that the Borowczyk also reminded me of Clockwork Orange in its pop Nietzschean theme, though I'm not sure about the influence timeline. Also forgot to mention Hyde (I'm assuming it is Hyde) nearly beats a child to death in the opening sequence. Not sure how this relates to the film as a whole.
26featherbear
Continuing on my limited tour of items on the monthly Criterion Channel chopping block, two films from the Korean vengeance trilogy I watched over the course of the past week. Park Chan-woo is best known for Old Boy (2003), which I need to re-watch, but lesser known are: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) & (Sympathy for) Lady Vengeance (2005). Both of these films are also available via MUBI & both are also on blu-ray. Both are excellently constructed, as might be expected from the creator of the celebrated historical film The Handmaiden (2016); maybe his best, available w/commercials on freevee.
… Mr Vengeance (aka Boksuneun naui geot) is a sardonic revenge film. Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) is a green haired puckish looking fellow whose sister is dying from kidney failure. Both are poor; she dropped out of college to support him in art school before becoming ill; & he then dropped out of school to support her, then was laid off from his job. He has a girlfriend, Bae Doona (Yeong Mi-cha) who is an ultra left wing anarchist who comes up with idea to kidnap the toddler daughter of the owner of the electronics corporation that laid him off. Ryu only takes up this idea after learning his blood type doesn’t allow him to donate one of his kidneys to his sister & she is put on a waiting list for a possible donor. In despair, he makes a deal with illegal organ traffickers, who promise to get a matching kidney in exchange for his life savings & one of his kidneys. He agrees, has the operation, & wakes up naked & alone, sans money, as well as both his kidney & the promised organ. He then learns a matching kidney has turned up but he can’t pay for the operation having lost his life savings. Well then, plan B. All goes well, the child doesn’t even realize she’s been kidnapped, the father comes up with the money. But Ryu’s sister, horrified by what he’s done, commits suicide. The child is accidentally drowned while Ryu* buries his sister by a river (not clear what role a mentally disabled character plays in the homicide; almost as if he turns up as a one man Greek chorus). Then, in the second half, the father (Song Kang-ho) seeks revenge (plot point: his career path was as an electrical engineer). Some brilliant editing & screen framing in this one, reminiscent of Hitchcock.
*A key element I forgot to mention is that Ryu is deaf & dumb, which accounts for why he doesn't respond to the child's calls for help.
Lady Vengeance (aka Chinjeolhan geumjassi) is quite different in tone; something of a Korean John Ford movie, like The Searchers or Liberty Valance. The film opens with the release of Geum-ja Lee (Lee Yeong-ae) from a long stint in prison for the murder of a kidnapped child. Her public remorse has made her a media celebrity & perhaps shortened her term. However, she has spent the years plotting revenge, because it turns out it was her then boyfriend “Mr Baek” (Choi Min-Sik) who actually did the murder, and who persuaded her to take the blame because of her spotless record & to save his career (he was and continued to be a schoolteacher). The first half focuses on how her fellow inmates help her track him down (with flashbacks from prison life including her murder of one of them). But when he finally gets in her hands, she discovers the murdered child was one of many. In the second half, Geum-ja coordinates the revenge of the children’s parents. Although this is somewhat reminiscent of Murder on the Orient Express & its numerous movie adaptations, Park focuses on the collective act of vengeance with an almost ritualistic solemnity that does not seem particularly triumphant. Disturbing, which is why I was reminded of the ambiguous nature of revenge in the Ford films.
… Mr Vengeance (aka Boksuneun naui geot) is a sardonic revenge film. Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) is a green haired puckish looking fellow whose sister is dying from kidney failure. Both are poor; she dropped out of college to support him in art school before becoming ill; & he then dropped out of school to support her, then was laid off from his job. He has a girlfriend, Bae Doona (Yeong Mi-cha) who is an ultra left wing anarchist who comes up with idea to kidnap the toddler daughter of the owner of the electronics corporation that laid him off. Ryu only takes up this idea after learning his blood type doesn’t allow him to donate one of his kidneys to his sister & she is put on a waiting list for a possible donor. In despair, he makes a deal with illegal organ traffickers, who promise to get a matching kidney in exchange for his life savings & one of his kidneys. He agrees, has the operation, & wakes up naked & alone, sans money, as well as both his kidney & the promised organ. He then learns a matching kidney has turned up but he can’t pay for the operation having lost his life savings. Well then, plan B. All goes well, the child doesn’t even realize she’s been kidnapped, the father comes up with the money. But Ryu’s sister, horrified by what he’s done, commits suicide. The child is accidentally drowned while Ryu* buries his sister by a river (not clear what role a mentally disabled character plays in the homicide; almost as if he turns up as a one man Greek chorus). Then, in the second half, the father (Song Kang-ho) seeks revenge (plot point: his career path was as an electrical engineer). Some brilliant editing & screen framing in this one, reminiscent of Hitchcock.
*A key element I forgot to mention is that Ryu is deaf & dumb, which accounts for why he doesn't respond to the child's calls for help.
Lady Vengeance (aka Chinjeolhan geumjassi) is quite different in tone; something of a Korean John Ford movie, like The Searchers or Liberty Valance. The film opens with the release of Geum-ja Lee (Lee Yeong-ae) from a long stint in prison for the murder of a kidnapped child. Her public remorse has made her a media celebrity & perhaps shortened her term. However, she has spent the years plotting revenge, because it turns out it was her then boyfriend “Mr Baek” (Choi Min-Sik) who actually did the murder, and who persuaded her to take the blame because of her spotless record & to save his career (he was and continued to be a schoolteacher). The first half focuses on how her fellow inmates help her track him down (with flashbacks from prison life including her murder of one of them). But when he finally gets in her hands, she discovers the murdered child was one of many. In the second half, Geum-ja coordinates the revenge of the children’s parents. Although this is somewhat reminiscent of Murder on the Orient Express & its numerous movie adaptations, Park focuses on the collective act of vengeance with an almost ritualistic solemnity that does not seem particularly triumphant. Disturbing, which is why I was reminded of the ambiguous nature of revenge in the Ford films.
27JulieLill
The Automat
Just watched the documentary called The Automat. What a wonderful look at the old-time food Automats where you could get some food and hang out with your friends. Mel Brooks and several stars, including Collin Powell and Ruth Bader Ginsberg who talk about their experiences there. We had one where we lived and though I probably only went there a couple of times as a child, it still sticks in my memory!
Just watched the documentary called The Automat. What a wonderful look at the old-time food Automats where you could get some food and hang out with your friends. Mel Brooks and several stars, including Collin Powell and Ruth Bader Ginsberg who talk about their experiences there. We had one where we lived and though I probably only went there a couple of times as a child, it still sticks in my memory!
28featherbear
>27 JulieLill: Visited one time my last year in college in NY; sorry these aren't around anymore. What I miss the most from those bygone days were the used bookstores off Union Square & affordable art house reruns in Times Square theaters.
29JulieLill
Act of Violence (1948)
"An embittered, vengeful POW stalks his former commanding officer who betrayed his men's planned escape attempt from a Nazi prison camp." Synopsis from IMDB
Director: Fred Zinnemann | Stars: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor
What a powerful film! If you like Film Noir you will probably like this!
"An embittered, vengeful POW stalks his former commanding officer who betrayed his men's planned escape attempt from a Nazi prison camp." Synopsis from IMDB
Director: Fred Zinnemann | Stars: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor
What a powerful film! If you like Film Noir you will probably like this!
30featherbear
One of the films I’ve started a couple of times but never finished has been the David Lynch version of Dune (1984) 2 h 17m. Most recently it was in one of the Criterion Channel’s collections but cycled off before I got to finish it. But then I was revisiting Netflix after something of a hiatus & happily it turned up, & I watched the whole thing. It was something of a disappointment. I recall vaguely that it had production/financial problems, but ultimately it may have been the source material that I found off-putting, since the whole story is intended to culminate in a sort of Mussolini-Muhammed figure triumphing over his enemies, and in addition, you have a complicated story to tell in very limited time. Some of the Lynchian touches are there, such as the blimpish villain Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan) (face covered with boils threatening to take over his body; literally floats around like a blimp) or the chief navigator, body totally transformed by the narcotic “spice,” or the heavily eyebrowed “mentats,” Thufir Hawat (Freddie Jones) & Piter de Vries (Brad Dourif). Lynch’s fascination with the physical grotesque seems to run through all of his work (Elephant Man, Eraserhead), though I can’t come with an effective meaning.
The more general fascination with the story, one that has generated numerous adaptations, is purportedly the combination of its being a prototype of Game of Thrones late medieval/renaissance intrigue coupled to an environmental theme. Thousands of years into the future a scattered galactic empire is held together by the use of the spice narcotic that allows “navigators” to transport ships, cargo, & passengers across light years of space. The essential element is only available on a desert, sand dune covered planet, Arrakis aka Dune, where it is mined. Environmental note: water is extremely scarce, chief danger is enormous sandworms, there is an unknown population of desert dwelling humanoids called fremen, with luminous blue eyes – as a sidenote I believe the spice is sandworm poo, but I could be misremembering the book. The galactic emperor assigns the lucrative mining rights, formerly held by the Harkonnen family, to the Atreides family, but the Harkonnens generate a hostile takeover shortly after the Atreides move in. The Harkonnens kill the family head, Duke Leo Atreides (Wolfgang U-Boat Petersen; human political future history only seems capable of reverting to feudalism) & exile to the shifting sands of Arrakis his son Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) & his mother, the duke’s consort Lady Jessica (Francisca Annis). Exile to the desert is equivalent of submarining someone to Titanic depths, where the Harkonnen expect the last of the Atreides will die of heat, thirst, or become sandworm poo. But the Atreides have a couple aces up their sleeves. Lady Jessica is a member of a witch sorority the galactic emperor uses as support staff, and through her Paul has inherited witch powers. The most formidable power seems to be The Voice. Paul uses The Voice to unite the fremen in a T.E. Lawrence type revolt in the desert, and eventually he & the fremen destroy the Harkonnen & control Arrakis, and effectively control the galactic empire. The non-villain actors struck me as being rather stiff compared with those in Lawrence of Arabis. At the end, he uses The Voice to bring rain to Arrakis for the first time in recorded history. The emperor, the navigators, the Harkonnen, the witches – they all seem like pretty awful “people,” but I don’t see how an environment – and by extension a galactic empire -- controlled by a Voice is all that progressive. Sounds a bit like the Mrs. Davis of the series Mrs Davis (Mrs Davis is the IT voice in everybody's head in the series).
Anyways, I actually had more fun watching 2 Tsui Hark movies on Amazon Prime. Two Hark movies in my own private collection are Peking Opera Blues & Flying Swords of Dragon Gate. Could he be categorized as the Steven Spielberg of Chinese mainstream cinema? Anyways, the films I’ve just watched & enjoyed were part of the Detective Dee series he’s been cranking out: Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013) & Detective Dee: the Four Heavenly Kings (2018). I’ve also seen Detective Dee: the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) a while back, which in terms of narrative would be the sequel to Four Heavenly Kings.
Detective Dee (Di Renji, played in the 2 Prime flicks, Mark Chao; Andy Lau in the 2010) is a member of the Tang Dynasty investigative bureau (sort of like the FBI) who is a sort of Sherlock Holmes. His nemesis is the emperor’s consort, Empress Wu Zeitan (Carina Lau) who is always trying to control the emperor & as we have already learned in Phantom Flame, will become the first female emperor, or empress (getting the genders incorrectly would get you beheaded in those benighted days). Detective Dee has a comical buddy, Shautuo (Kenny Lin), a medical man from the provinces, useful since Dee is often poisoned. In Sea Dragon, he first meets his rival, but later bf, Yuchi (Shaofeng Feng), head of the imperial guards, who does most of the wuxia heavy lifting (bouncing from roof to roof, sword fighting). Wonderful special effects, especially in Heavenly Kings, where it is frequently pointed out that the amazing wonders conjured up by the magicians are actually powerful illusions, which are both self-referential movie moves, but also part of the Buddhist themes of illusory materiality. What I saw last night looked even better than my first viewing (of Kings) from some time ago; could be the 4K streaming. Just writing about all this makes me want to watch it again; Heavenly Kings is leaving Prime at the end of June; I believe Sea Dragon will hang around for a bit, and Phantom Flame might be on freevee with commercials.
The more general fascination with the story, one that has generated numerous adaptations, is purportedly the combination of its being a prototype of Game of Thrones late medieval/renaissance intrigue coupled to an environmental theme. Thousands of years into the future a scattered galactic empire is held together by the use of the spice narcotic that allows “navigators” to transport ships, cargo, & passengers across light years of space. The essential element is only available on a desert, sand dune covered planet, Arrakis aka Dune, where it is mined. Environmental note: water is extremely scarce, chief danger is enormous sandworms, there is an unknown population of desert dwelling humanoids called fremen, with luminous blue eyes – as a sidenote I believe the spice is sandworm poo, but I could be misremembering the book. The galactic emperor assigns the lucrative mining rights, formerly held by the Harkonnen family, to the Atreides family, but the Harkonnens generate a hostile takeover shortly after the Atreides move in. The Harkonnens kill the family head, Duke Leo Atreides (Wolfgang U-Boat Petersen; human political future history only seems capable of reverting to feudalism) & exile to the shifting sands of Arrakis his son Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) & his mother, the duke’s consort Lady Jessica (Francisca Annis). Exile to the desert is equivalent of submarining someone to Titanic depths, where the Harkonnen expect the last of the Atreides will die of heat, thirst, or become sandworm poo. But the Atreides have a couple aces up their sleeves. Lady Jessica is a member of a witch sorority the galactic emperor uses as support staff, and through her Paul has inherited witch powers. The most formidable power seems to be The Voice. Paul uses The Voice to unite the fremen in a T.E. Lawrence type revolt in the desert, and eventually he & the fremen destroy the Harkonnen & control Arrakis, and effectively control the galactic empire. The non-villain actors struck me as being rather stiff compared with those in Lawrence of Arabis. At the end, he uses The Voice to bring rain to Arrakis for the first time in recorded history. The emperor, the navigators, the Harkonnen, the witches – they all seem like pretty awful “people,” but I don’t see how an environment – and by extension a galactic empire -- controlled by a Voice is all that progressive. Sounds a bit like the Mrs. Davis of the series Mrs Davis (Mrs Davis is the IT voice in everybody's head in the series).
Anyways, I actually had more fun watching 2 Tsui Hark movies on Amazon Prime. Two Hark movies in my own private collection are Peking Opera Blues & Flying Swords of Dragon Gate. Could he be categorized as the Steven Spielberg of Chinese mainstream cinema? Anyways, the films I’ve just watched & enjoyed were part of the Detective Dee series he’s been cranking out: Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013) & Detective Dee: the Four Heavenly Kings (2018). I’ve also seen Detective Dee: the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) a while back, which in terms of narrative would be the sequel to Four Heavenly Kings.
Detective Dee (Di Renji, played in the 2 Prime flicks, Mark Chao; Andy Lau in the 2010) is a member of the Tang Dynasty investigative bureau (sort of like the FBI) who is a sort of Sherlock Holmes. His nemesis is the emperor’s consort, Empress Wu Zeitan (Carina Lau) who is always trying to control the emperor & as we have already learned in Phantom Flame, will become the first female emperor, or empress (getting the genders incorrectly would get you beheaded in those benighted days). Detective Dee has a comical buddy, Shautuo (Kenny Lin), a medical man from the provinces, useful since Dee is often poisoned. In Sea Dragon, he first meets his rival, but later bf, Yuchi (Shaofeng Feng), head of the imperial guards, who does most of the wuxia heavy lifting (bouncing from roof to roof, sword fighting). Wonderful special effects, especially in Heavenly Kings, where it is frequently pointed out that the amazing wonders conjured up by the magicians are actually powerful illusions, which are both self-referential movie moves, but also part of the Buddhist themes of illusory materiality. What I saw last night looked even better than my first viewing (of Kings) from some time ago; could be the 4K streaming. Just writing about all this makes me want to watch it again; Heavenly Kings is leaving Prime at the end of June; I believe Sea Dragon will hang around for a bit, and Phantom Flame might be on freevee with commercials.
31featherbear
Next on my DVD-Netflix queue: Lulu (1997). 3 h 3m. Opera by Alban Berg, using parts of 2 plays by Frank Wedekind. The music is twelve tone, the drama is expressionistic. There’s a very detailed description of the work, though not the performance, on Wikipedia, including a detailed summary of the plot. While I’m familiar with Berg’s opera Wozzeck (based on a play I admire by Georg Büchner) & his violin concerto, I’m unfamiliar with this one, incomplete at the composer’s death; the first 2 acts & part of the third were finished; it was completed in the late 1970s from the composer’s sketches. The music I found listenable, if not conventionally melodic; as noted I’m familiar with and like Berg’s other works & thanks to early music education I’ve never found atonal music to be off-putting.
This was a TV videorecording of a theater performance staged by Graham Vick; Andrew Davis conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I found the stage design by Paul Brown fascinating (there is just one set). The floor is a series of concentric, movable wooden circles which at certain points allow the performers to appear to “skate” or “glide” before the audience; there is a very large hole at the center. In high school I worked in a stage construction crew & that hole looked like my nightmare accident waiting to happen; the performers are constantly moving so close to it, focusing on the very difficult singing; tightrope without a net stuff. Furthermore, the performers sometimes have to navigate a curving series of wooden steps extruded from the background wall leading up to one of the door exits; no guardrail of course.
Christine Schäfer didn’t really look my vision of Lulu, but she seems to have no trouble handling some hair raising arias. The opera begins with a stage manager (Jonathan Veira) acting the part of a carnival barker. Some of the opera reminded me of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, and I note that Teresa Stratas played Lulu in the first recording of the complete version of Lulu; Stratas went on to record 2 CDs of Kurt Weill songs I treasure; perhaps I subconsciously think of Stratas as Lulu. At some point the barker mocks the audience by reflecting them in a mirror. I thought this might just be stage business for the occasion, but it might have actually been intended by Berg. The Wikipedia article points to the use of mirroring or palindrome techniques in both the narrative & the musical score. A portrait of Lulu as Eve recurs throughout the opera rather like Dorian Grey.
Lulu, like Wedekind’s Pandora, is the expressionistic eternal female whose seductiveness destroys men (I’m currently reading Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, and such themes were definitely in the air at the time.) Lulu’s path begins with her current husband dropping dead when he catches her with the artist who creates The Portrait; she then marries the artist (Stephan Drakulich), who kills himself; she then marries a rich publisher, Dr. Schőn (German=Beauty; some heavy singing by Wolfgang Schőne (!), who doubles as Jack the Ripper (!); some kind of palindromic allegory going on here). The publisher’s son, Alwa (David Kuebler) becomes Lulu’s love slave after she murders papa; Berg apparently fiddled with the Alwa part and made him a stand-in for Berg himself. Lulu also has a lesbian love slave, Countess Geschwitz (Kathryn Harries), who helps Lulu escape from prison by infecting them both with cholera & then impersonating Lulu. There’s a silent film montage in the middle of the opera, apparently intended by Berg, that enacts the ruse/escape from the prison hospital, which is then later narrated, Singsprache style (more mirroring) at a party depicting runaway capitalism, where the host tries to blackmail her into a sex-trafficking ring. She escapes, again by having someone else impersonate her. But Lulu is caught in a downward spiral (recall the sort of spiral staircase on the background wall of the stage set), and in the last act she is a streetwalker, resulting in the murder of Alwa, the Countess, and herself, most of the murdering courtesy of the double of her original victim, Dr. Schőn, i.e. Jack the Ripper. Lulu's murder takes place "off stage" actually down in that hole in the middle of the set. Sensational stuff.
This was a TV videorecording of a theater performance staged by Graham Vick; Andrew Davis conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I found the stage design by Paul Brown fascinating (there is just one set). The floor is a series of concentric, movable wooden circles which at certain points allow the performers to appear to “skate” or “glide” before the audience; there is a very large hole at the center. In high school I worked in a stage construction crew & that hole looked like my nightmare accident waiting to happen; the performers are constantly moving so close to it, focusing on the very difficult singing; tightrope without a net stuff. Furthermore, the performers sometimes have to navigate a curving series of wooden steps extruded from the background wall leading up to one of the door exits; no guardrail of course.
Christine Schäfer didn’t really look my vision of Lulu, but she seems to have no trouble handling some hair raising arias. The opera begins with a stage manager (Jonathan Veira) acting the part of a carnival barker. Some of the opera reminded me of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, and I note that Teresa Stratas played Lulu in the first recording of the complete version of Lulu; Stratas went on to record 2 CDs of Kurt Weill songs I treasure; perhaps I subconsciously think of Stratas as Lulu. At some point the barker mocks the audience by reflecting them in a mirror. I thought this might just be stage business for the occasion, but it might have actually been intended by Berg. The Wikipedia article points to the use of mirroring or palindrome techniques in both the narrative & the musical score. A portrait of Lulu as Eve recurs throughout the opera rather like Dorian Grey.
Lulu, like Wedekind’s Pandora, is the expressionistic eternal female whose seductiveness destroys men (I’m currently reading Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, and such themes were definitely in the air at the time.) Lulu’s path begins with her current husband dropping dead when he catches her with the artist who creates The Portrait; she then marries the artist (Stephan Drakulich), who kills himself; she then marries a rich publisher, Dr. Schőn (German=Beauty; some heavy singing by Wolfgang Schőne (!), who doubles as Jack the Ripper (!); some kind of palindromic allegory going on here). The publisher’s son, Alwa (David Kuebler) becomes Lulu’s love slave after she murders papa; Berg apparently fiddled with the Alwa part and made him a stand-in for Berg himself. Lulu also has a lesbian love slave, Countess Geschwitz (Kathryn Harries), who helps Lulu escape from prison by infecting them both with cholera & then impersonating Lulu. There’s a silent film montage in the middle of the opera, apparently intended by Berg, that enacts the ruse/escape from the prison hospital, which is then later narrated, Singsprache style (more mirroring) at a party depicting runaway capitalism, where the host tries to blackmail her into a sex-trafficking ring. She escapes, again by having someone else impersonate her. But Lulu is caught in a downward spiral (recall the sort of spiral staircase on the background wall of the stage set), and in the last act she is a streetwalker, resulting in the murder of Alwa, the Countess, and herself, most of the murdering courtesy of the double of her original victim, Dr. Schőn, i.e. Jack the Ripper. Lulu's murder takes place "off stage" actually down in that hole in the middle of the set. Sensational stuff.
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