Sherry Chandler

Monday musings

Well, it’s Monday and a brand new month, which so far seems to be coming in like a lamb, St David’s day, and the first day of meterological spring. So there must be something to celebrate, though there are still dirty drifts piled up here and there and snow is back in the forecast for midweek.

I’ve tried to be patient with this winter. We do, after all, live in a temperate zone, and a certain amount of winter is a pre-requisite. Freezing is good for keeping pests in control. And at least this year hasn’t — so far — gifted us with ice storms like we had last year. Ice is hard on trees and other living things.

But I am hungry for the sun. Such a gray winter we’ve had.

But Stoney has a photo to cheer my heart.

It occurs to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about movies here. It’s not that we haven’t been watching movies. Just that none of the ones we watched seemed worth the energy of writing a post about.

I make an exception for Crazy Heart. It’s a fine movie, and well worth writing about, but it has been written about at length, and beyond the fact that I think it’s worthy of all the praise it’s gotten, I don’t see that I need to add much.

The Dresser is a fine movie and so is The Lion in Winter but nobody needs me to tell them so.

Mr. Thank You (Arigatô San) is a pellucid black and white movie from 1936 Japan. Directed by Hiroshi Shimizu, it’s a portrait of rural Japan in depression. Mr. Thank You is a bus driver and some of the shots of that bus on mountain highways is worthy of anything Eastern Kentucky can produce. Some excellent photography and some geography and culture lessons for me.

The movie we watched this week, 1941’s Man Hunt was directed by Fritz Lang and I know it must have been recommended somewhere as a masterpiece of its time. Certainly it’s remarkable for being anti-British propaganda made in Hollywood by a German director. But I found the propaganda over the top, the plot fantastic, and the classism and sexism difficult to ignore. Otherwise there is a wide-eyed Roddy McDowell as a clever plucky cabin boy and a young John Carradine as a villain of the Reich, complete with swordstick.

One delightful gem we stumbled across was Ginny Mule’s The Accountant, which won the 2002 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. I refer you to Yellowhammer Press for a good review/description of this film. They say:

This film masterfully expresses something about the rural South that is so necessary, so utterly visceral, and yet something that is captured so rarely — that the disappearance of the family farm, the corporatization of food production in America, and the caricaturization of the Southern farmer and his culture have acted in concert to destroy a way of life. In short, it’s a movie about the end of a South in which small farmers are still financially viable and culturally necessary.

But it is also a wildly quirky comedy. Here’s a taste:

“Not so much seedy as downright abject”

It is the sad poetry of that line that expresses Peckinpah’s vision, in which people find the courage to do what they must do in a world with no choices.

So says Roger Ebert about Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).

The line in question is Elita’s. Elita the prostitute and Bennie the bartender’s lover. She says it to Bennie as she is being led away to be raped by a nameless biker, played by Kris Kistofferson. “‘I been here before and you don’t know the way.”

According to Susan Compo in her biography Warren Oates: A Wild Life (Univ Press of Ky, 2009), Peckinpah had originally intended the movie as a vehicle for Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda, a casting that, in hind sight, I find utterly unthinkable. Cat Ballou, this is not.

Compo says that Peckinpah also tried James Coburn and Peter Falk before he finally offered the part to Warren Oates.

Oates was never, ever going to say no. “If a director like Peckinpah offers me a film tomorrow, I’m not going to read the script,” he told Image et Son. “I wouldn’t know how to stop myself. There aren’t many people I’d say that about.” [p. 275]

If it had not been for my interest in Warren Oates, I would not have watched Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Having seen it, I can’t imagine anybody but Warren Oates in the lead role. With any of those other actors, the movie would probably have been a more typical Hollywood adventure, and a Hollywood adventure is not what Peckinpah had set out to make.

I have to say that he got me in this one. Two-Lane Blacktop, the other cult film for which Oates is famous, struck me a pretty lame. The only vital thing in it was Oates’s performance. But Alfredo Garcia is a gripping film.

According to Compo, Oates got $50,000 for doing the film and his co-star Isela Vega got $7,000 for the role of Elita. Vega’s performance is compelling. I have a lot of respect for Jane Fonda, but she could not have done this role the way Vega did it. Jane Fonda has no idea of a world where there are no choices.

Indeed, when Bennie proposes to Elita during a picnic, there were tears from onlookers and actors. “I just knew there was no place to hide in that scene,” Oates told Donnie Fritts, who played a biker in the movie. “She had me, and I was cryin’ too.” [Compo, p. 280]

For a plot synopsis, see Wikipedia. For a great review, see Roger Ebert. For the story of on-the-set hi jinks, see Compo’s biography.

“The script deals with female vengeance,” Peckinpah said. [Compo, p. 275]

So it does. Maybe that’s why it resonates so with me.

No business

Oh, it’s Saturday morning and I don’t have much to say except where’s my coffee cup?

And of course it’s in the microwave where I put it to warm it up.

You’d think I’d learn.

There’s a family in New York City who gave up microwaves — and toilet paper and heat, cars and even public transportation. I don’t know what to make of such experiments except that they make me feel vaguely guilty and depressed. I am in no position to do any such thing. In fact, it seems to me to be a gesture of the privileged.

The local Advertiser has a feature about a couple who have started a new business, Earth Positive Energy, LLC. They’ll install solar panels and wind turbines with the end of either going off grid or selling energy back to the power companies. They system “typically” pays for itself in 6-10 years. But before it pays for itself, I have to pay for it. In ten years, I’ll be 75. And in who knows what kind of hock to the medical system. Can I undertake that kind of debt?

So I hang clothes on the line when weather permits, recycle, compost, grow a garden, write micropoems and macropoems about birds. And feel depresses.

Anyway, we watched There’s No Business Like Show Business this week. It was sort of fun to watch Marilyn Monroe parody herself in numbers like “Heat Wave.” But of course she reveals herself to be just a sweet young thing in the end.

And what’s not to like about Ethel Merman belting out the title song.

Mitzi Gaynor is winning but Johnny Ray oversells.

Predictably enough, though, I preferred Donald O’Connor. Here’s his big solo number and not a mule in sight.

Three Little Words

Three Little Words, the 1950 biopic of songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, is most remarkable for Debbie Reynold’s brief appearance, pantomiming a Betty Boop style “I Wanna Be Loved By You” (boop-oopy-doop). Helen Kane, the real-life model for Betty Boop who popularized the song in the 1928 musical “Good Boy,” did the actual singing.

I would not have recognized Debbie if we hadn’t just watched Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a film I’ve always loved for Donald O’Connor’s dancing.

Not Gene Kelly’s, you say?

Well, no one can resist “Singin’ in the Rain.” But . . .

In the shadowy years of my late 1940s, very early 1950s childhood, my brothers often got stuck with taking their quite-literally-baby sister to the Saturday matinee at the county seat while my parents did the weekly shopping. I could tolerate my brothers’ first love, The Bowery Boys, but I fell in love with Donald O’Connor in Francis the Talking Mule (1950). So it was a delight to discover that he had talents far beyond those of playing straight man to a jackass who talked like Chill Wills.

I’ve always thought O’Connor’s dancing was under-rated. Perhaps that’s because his style is so light and efficient, his grace so casual. Like Fred Astaire, Donald O’Connor makes dancing look easy. Now I know dancing is hard, and I think Gene Kelly wanted to make it look hard. He sacrificed grace for muscularity, and there’s a certain muscle-bound quality to his work. But Fred Astaire, and to an admittedly lesser degree, Donald O’Connor made it look like anybody could do it.

The dancing in Three Little Words is fine. What dancing wouldn’t be with Fred Astaire and Vera Allen. Still, I don’t find the choreography as interesting as in 1953’s The Band Wagon with Cyd Charisse. Nor is the dancing nearly as much fun as the 1930’s pictures with Ginger Rogers, whom somebody somewhere said had the rare quality of being able to act while dancing.

Red Skelton’s performance as Harry Ruby is remarkably subdued for Red, though in the genre of serious-acting-turned-in-by-a-comedian, I’d give it about a C.

I was a solemn child, often alone. Though I loved comedy, I was threatened by its more violent side and I didn’t often laugh. I found Charlie Chaplin movies intolerably sad, even in those jerky old television showings. I don’t remember whether I laughed at Francis and Donald O’Connor, but I do remember one Saturday afternoon when I was all alone in the house for some reason, guffawing and snorting all the way through an old Saturday afternoon re-run of The Fuller Brush Man (1948). For that, I will always love Red Skelton.

Oh yes, the Marx Brothers, I couldn’t watch their comedies either, until I got older and more capable of intellectual distance. (Sorry Lance Mannion, if you ever read this, but I’m with your mother on the Three Stooges.) Which reminds me to mention that Three Little Words is also remarkable for the fact that nobody ever performs more than a few bars of “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” which Kalmar and Ruby wrote, along with “Hello I Must Be Going,” for the stage play of Animal Crackers.

Colonialism and the missonary position

In the DVD commentary track, Sherman Alexie says he’s surprised that no cirtic had addressed “The Business of Fancy Dancing” as a musical. The fact surprises me too because the movie has pageantry, dancing (fancy and otherwise), and gorgeous music. (See Swil Kanim.) Add to that mix Sherman Alexie’s poetry and you have one powerful film, a “visual poem” to quote Gary Glazner.

Here is Alexie talking about his concept of poetry in this film:

I was interested in making a movie about a writer and a poet specifically. The movies I have seen about writers are rarely about their work and you never see or hear the poetry. They are always about the poet’s life and never the poems. I wanted to make a movie that really featured the poems as well as the poet. So in my film you have performance of the poems; you see the poet doing the poems in bookstores and at readings on stage. It also has poems in voice over montages of images and it has poems up on the screen as epigraphs. I wanted to have words, images and stanzas be very much a part of the movie. I tried to think of the movie itself in terms of stanzas, that it was one long poem. Each edited section was a stanza itself; I moved them around, juxtaposing ideas and images. I thought of them as separate units during editing that I could move around and change the meaning based on the arrangement. There is still a story to be told, a narrative. Most mainstream movies are narrative-driven and I wanted this film to be at least as much lyrical as narrative.

I have just recently watched another film about a poet — “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle”. Both films feature a lot of poetry, both use humor to address painful subject matter, both use cinematic techniques that remind you that this is film and tell a somewhat nonlinear story. But where “Francydancing” left me feeling sad but somehow enriched, “Mrs. Parker” merely left me feeling depressed.

Part of that may be class prejudice. Hard to feel sad for some one who is at the top of the heap. Though now I think of it, Alexie’s poet protagonist is at the top of that same heap and I can feel both his sorrow and his joy in that accomplishment. Part of it is no doubt performance. Though Jennifer Jason Leigh won awards for this role, I never got beyond the mannerisms and the fact that this was Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker. Alexie’s actors are performing closer to home, doing a lot of improvising and using their own biography. Easier to seem authentic perhaps.

Maybe it’s the artistic vision. Wit distances, and Dorothy Parker was a wit. But Alexie is also a poet of wit.

So what was it that made me like “The Business of Fancydancing” so much more? Maybe it comes down to artistic vision and the writer/director’s ability to pull us into the life of his characters.

And whence my post title? When asked by a journalist how he came to be named Polatikin. Alexie’s gay poet protagonist says he doesn’t want to discuss colonialsim and the missionary position.

Speaking of wit.

Oh no, not Netflix

Via The Writing on the Wal, Lawyer alleges price fix in Wal-Mart-Netflix deal:

Lawyer Daniel Becnel of Reserve, La., complained in a lawsuit filed Monday in Baton Rouge that Wal-Mart and Netflix improperly negotiated Wal-Mart’s departure from the online video market that previously had only two major competitors, Netflix and Blockbuster.

According to Becnel, Wal-Mart’s presence drove down prices and Netflix suffered reduced profits. Wal-Mart would have suffered, too, if Netflix began selling DVDs, so the companies entered an improper agreement, Becnel says in the lawsuit, which alleges antitrust violations.

When Wal-Mart quit the online DVD rental business, it converted its customers’ accounts to Netflix accounts. Netflix then began promoting Wal-Mart and Walmart.com as places to buy DVDs.

I love my Netflix account and will no doubt keep it. It gives me access, out here in the country, to movies I would not otherwise find in local venues. As Jeff points out, the local library has an excellent selection of films on DVD, and we do make use of our library, but they don’t have the selection available from Netflix. For the most part, I don’t buy DVDs.

This story seems typical of the entrepreneurs of technology — Netflix, Google. They start out going after the giants with their slingshots and then one day they’ve become one of the giants.

I’ve put a new link to The Writing on the Wal on my sidebar. It’s a muckraking blog that does good work.

By the way, Wal-Mart wants your medical records.

Shakespeare — Portraits

The Shakespeare portrait newly unveiled by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust shows us a man with a twinkle in his eye and a Mona Lisa smile just beginning to curve on his lips.

Methinks he would have been a jolly man with whom to quaff a glass of ale.

Certainly he looks lively and intelligent enough to have written his own works and he is handsome enough to have charmed a virgin queen.

Shakespeare has been showing up in my reading lately. Adam Gopnik — yes, I’ve been back at my stack of old New Yorkers — says

There�s another rhetorical style that runs like the Mississippi right down the middle of the mid-nineteenth-century American mind, shaping phrases and supervising thoughts, flowing as strong as the classical, the Biblical, and the lawyerly, and that is the Shakespearean. Lincoln�s love of Shakespeare is familiar, but is usually treated as a delightful character trait, like his fondness for ice cream or the comedy of Artemus Ward. But Lincoln�s taste in Shakespeare was narrow, significant, and almost obsessive. He didn�t love �A Midsummer Night�s Dream� and �As You Like It�; it was the histories and three of the tragedies that held him. In 1863, he repeatedly went to see �Henry IV� when James H. Hackett was playing Falstaff, with all the Falstaffian black comedy against conscription and the cult of honor. He took volumes of Shakespeare out of the Library of Congress; went to a Washington theatre to see the famous E. L. Davenport in �Hamlet�; attended private recitations of Shakespeare; sought out a production of �Othello�; watched Edwin Booth, John Wilkes�s brother, in �Richard III,� and the greatest American Shakespearean, Edwin Forrest, in �King Lear,� at Ford�s. Just five days before the assassination, on April 9, 1865, steaming up the Potomac in the Presidential yacht, he spent �several hours� reading aloud from Shakespeare to those on board. Reciting from his favorite plays was a weakness of his; on August 22, 1863, [his secretary] Hay records in his diary that he fell asleep at the Soldiers� Home while listening to Lincoln recite Shakespeare.

The idea of Abraham Lincoln boring the help with recitations of Shakespeare pleases me. But it was not Shakespeare of the Giaconda smile that Lincoln loved. Gopnik continues:

But even stranger and more striking is Lincoln�s identification or, at the very least, fascination with the figure of Claudius. In that same letter to Hackett, Lincoln insisted that Claudius�s soliloquy beginning �O, my offense is rank� was superior to any of Hamlet�s, and we know that he committed it to memory, and would recite it at length even to acquaintances�an artist who had come to paint his portrait, for instance. Lincoln�s evaluation was as unorthodox then as it is now. And what is the burden of Claudius�s speech? It is about guilt and ambition, and about the fraternal blood-dealing that that produces. As Kenneth Tynan has pointed out, Claudius�s tragedy is that he is clearly the most able man in Denmark, but he has got his throne through blood and cannot be free of the taint.

As it happens, we have just been watching the 1980 BBC production of Hamlet, in which Derek Jacobi plays the antic cherub and rolls his barrel basso provocatively over some of Shakespeare’s most delightful lines. Jacobi’s Hamlet is truly mad, and his scene-chewing rather overpowers Patrick Stewart’s quieter Claudius. A member of my household was also moved to giggles by the wig Stewart is wearing for the production. It does tend to reduce that great dome of skull to silliness.

Still, Claudius cannot be completely denied his moments. And Stewart is a masterful actor.

Just as an aside, before I go on to more serious matter, Lalla Ward, onetime Romana (the only woman Time Lord) to Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, made an aggressive and affecting performance as Ophelia.

But here’s the speech in question, from Hamlet Act 3, Scene 3:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.