I am bumping along the dirt road of love, dragged like the cans towed from a bridal car. I am launched into a shallow arc through the air. Intoxicated by the speed of the car, I forget how it started and enjoy the flight. Landing grazes me in several places as I skid to a […]
Author: Dan Randow
I wish I’d made this up but the idea came from email as spectroscopy, quite cool in itself. Ed tells me that spectroscopy is the analysis of light frequency to determine molecular structure. You go layer by layer, identifying the number of electrons in each. As a metaphor for this, it stands up. I know […]
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Snippet of Futurism
A few snippets of enjoyment and a foray into futurism, amidst my misery. I have joined a team that is entering the 48 Hours film competition this year. Hanna and a bunch of the folks working on her movie are in it. At least one of the team was in the group that won the […]
There are a million things I’d like to write here. This is first. I got a little close to a new someone. Chicky Babe, her name is. It isn’t of course, but pratt/wannabe that I am, I called her that and it stuck. It could be that it’s useful to have a pseudonyms for my […]
Perhaps I shouldn’t be thinking about new love. Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to find love in the first place. Perhaps I shouldn’t have listened to Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris sing “Sweet Carolina” 17 times today and tried to sing it myself 27 times. I looked in Jane’s diary today. Not a private one, […]
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Hope in Devastation
Barefoot Gen Rating: 5 out of 5 Author: Keiji Nakazawa My Mum (thanks 🙂 sent me all four of the Barefoot Gen series (I’m still not sure whether there are four or ten in total). I read the first two last year: Jane got them out of the library. The third and fourth succumbed over […]
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Small Epiphanies
Look Both Ways IMDB Year: 2006 Writer: Sarah Watt Director: Sarah Watt Rating: 5 out of 5 Those stars that I put on these reviews? You know that they don’t mean “it’s good”, don’t you? What they mean is I like it. The Aussies have done it again. Strangely, only I added Little Fish to […]
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Disposable fascinations
Rating: out of 5
It works because it plunges me into a dilemma. Capote is singularly single-minded. Can anyone quote his line as he bribes the Prison Warden for access to visiting Perry? But is his work really his sole motivation? Yes, if you count his identification with Perry as providing the content for his literature. “It’s as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he went out the back door and I went out the front.” We don’t so much love him as get drawn into the question.
Capote doesn’t love Perry either. He’s just drawn into the question. The fact that, apparently, he isn’t horrified by him is all that distinguishes their relationship from ours with Truman.
Of course Philip Seymore Hoffman deserved the Oscar. I was a fan already. He commits from the outset. Effete, right? As the audience moves on to its next fascination, PSH is the only one who isn’t disposable.
Tags: capote
Rating: out of 5
I don’t usually like feel-good movies. I like gritty. I cut a little slack for NZ movies. I liked Whale Rider. The reason that most feel good movies get up my nose is their sentimentalism, simplistic emotion, schmaltz, sugariness or, worse saccharine. If I’m going to feel really good at the end of something, I want it to be for a reason, hard-won in some way that has some depth, that illuminates something about the world or humanity.
Yes, I liked Me and You and Everyone We Know. I even liked “the Station Agent” (it went right to the limit, then pulled back). But I really did not like “Amelie” or , “Erin Brokovich”, as examples.
No. 2 I like because it is about life. Old Maria recognises the stuckness in herself and the system around her. A legacy from those who have gone before, the second world war, colonialism. In her irrascible way, she makes an intervention. Not a didactic or particularly calculated one but a disrupting one, none the less. She has been reading social complexity theory. It works because something shifts. Gradually, the associating, eating, singing, dancing, fighting, truth, love and leadership that she wishes for all emerge.
Maybe I am naiive, but for all the simplicity of the plot, I can’t say I found it predicatable. More, easy to go along with. And it was beautifully portrayed, with many funny scenes of ordinariness. I think my favourite was a dialogueless moment between Maria and Charlene in Maria’s bedroom. Yes, the music was stirring but the interaction between the two was rich and profoundly moving. That’s gotta be a measure of acting and directing.
I say “Yes” to this celebration of life with vivid performances from everyone in the cast.
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Left Bung Ear
Jane, cobwebs are one thing. Even though you’re dead, I still don’t think it’s ok to have comment spam all over your blog. So I deleted it and switched on comment moderation (it’s on my blogs too, now). Do notice that since you got that job, you haven’t been the most prolific poster. Spose I […]