Category: Movies

Mary Poppins Remixed

The Mary Poppins soundtrack is one of my earliest musical memories. Back in the 80s, I laid out my vision for a sampled 60s world of dance music but my partners wouldn’t buy it so it’s gratifying to see that the musical on Broadway etc. has made it happen. My parents and relatives took me to a lot of movies as a kid. Were it that Julie Andrews got as much recognition as MJ, I would be a less cynical person.

Up the Yangtze

Up the Yangtze still 1

I recently had a dinner with a cousin who is working in China. He said any businessman worth his gold watch should be asking himself and every business associate he meets with, “What’s your China angle?” That night I watched Up the Yangtze, a most remarkable documentary about how the Three Gorges Dam project is affecting the lives of people who live along the Yangtze River.

Up the Yangtze still 2

Everyone in this film, from the tourists to the tour guides to the exiled shack family, has swallowed some sort of Kool-Aid. (I use Kool-Aid not in the Jonestown sense but in the sense that it isn’t complete nutrition. [Kool-Aid must hate either usage.]) There’s a quote from Confucius in the opening titles: “By three ways may we learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; third, by experience, which is the bitterest.” The movie shows the main characters doing all three, however, when they’re doing the first staring off into space, they often look as though they’ve been hit by a truck.

Up the Yangtze still 3

The main protagonist is a young farmer girl forced to work on a tour boat because her grades weren’t good enough for a scholarship and her family can’t afford to send her on. They need her income yesterday. None of her scenes appear in the deleted scenes section of the DVD. The Times praised the movie for refusing to editorialize, and so it’s telling watching the deleted scenes which feature the most middle-class, ambitious characters –the senior tour guide and bellboy. They are praising China and assuring themselves of success in a way which is charming, convincing, and naive all at the same time.

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Bang on Cans, Pots, and Pans

Here’s where I encourage all new music enthusiasts to come down to the World Financial Center tomorrow, May 31st, for the Bang on a Can marathon. Among the opening acts will be Dither shown below playing at the New Music Bakesale and Andy Akiho who I saw perform at the beginning of the month at the Manhattan School of Music. I thought I had shots of Terry Riley performing with the Bang on a Can Allstars but I can’t find them. Here’s a handy YouTube library of many of the acts performing.

Dither Quartet

R. Stevie Moore
This is R. Stevie Moore performing in Brooklyn.
He won’t be performing at the marathon but he should be.

Still Life, Jia Zhangke
And finally, a still life from the movie, Still Life by Jia Zhangke — could be my brain on new music.

Benchmarks

Benches, 111 St., Riverside

A life coach is a psychiatrist/therapist with a best (possibly a mild) seller and without a degree. Instead of having a whistle and making you do push-ups and laps and drills like a sports coach, they give you list-making exercises and paraphrase Bing Crosby songs in elaborate metaphors, ending with some variation of the punchline in “Happy Talk.”

I’m morbidly watching Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. In order to be the best at what he does, he destroys himself while being an amiable monster. Picturing him in a confrontation with a life coach results in a few moments of good sitcom.

Today is my birthday. While I’ve done some stupid things, the only thing I ever punched really hard is my bed.

Spam Attack

One of my posts was getting spammed 50 times a day in the comments and there was nothing on it I could see that would warrant such an attack, not even a dirty innuendo or a cuss word. I changed the name of the post a bit and removed some of the links and tags but that didn’t stop it so I just deleted the post. Another post is still getting spammed three times a day with much dirtier stuff and I changed the title of the post radically so we’ll see if that works. I think the key is: don’t link to anything with dubious spam ads on it (non google sort of) because they get a linkback alert and they find you. I thought by now some superhero antispam hacker would’ve found them and shut them down somehow.

Anyway, I watched Miyazaki’s first major anime feature: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Check out the voiceover cast: Alison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, Uma Thurman, Chris Sarandon, Edward James Olmos, Emily Bauer, Shia LaBeouf, Mark Hamill. Hellz yeah. Great cartoon.

New York City Fire Escapes

Many of us have these tiny balconies to hang out on on a nice day but we usually don’t. Why is that? What if a fireman sees you? Is it against the law? (Most people know you can’t grow your garden on your fire escape or use it for any other storage because whatever it is might block your escape from a fire. It’s in your lease.) Because you can see through them, being on them creates vertigo whether you are susceptible to vertigo or not. They usually look and feel flimsy. You wouldn’t jump up and down on them no matter what. Adding to the stigma, some people have thrown parties on fire escapes and the excess weight and crumbling construction has caused them to collapse (although a google search turned up nothing recent). Finally, you’re an exhibitionist if you hang out on your fire escape. The whole neighborhood can see you letting it all hang out when maybe they’re just used to blurry glimpses of you naked every few months. Are you cool with that?

Before air conditioners, people would sleep on them on the hot humid summer nights as seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Also famously, Nick uses the fire escape to visit his neighbor Murray in A Thousand Clowns, while Murray uses it as his soap box. “Everybody out in the street for calisthenics and volleyball!” Something like that.

I have a misremembered memory of Batman talking to the citizens of Gotham (Sammy Davis in German here; Lurch here) on fire escapes as he climbed up the sides of buildings but then climbing up a fire escape would’ve been too easy for Batman.

Please enjoy these fire escape portfolios and essays.

The Genius of the Crowd


Matt Dillon nailed Charles Bukowski in the movie Factotum. He never smiles and got the cadence just right. Someone should cast him again in another Bukowski / Chinaski novel turned movie. Mickey Rourke missed in Barfly.

There’s a man playing a lonely trumpet outside. I turn on WNYC and listen to the talk radio people go on and on about the G20 potentates on parade. Saturday Night Live will do something clever with this.

A Short Review: The Fall (2006)

I agree with the Ebert assessment of The Fall: Definitely see it for the eye candy. The behind-the-scenes stuff on the DVD don’t do justice to the numbing number of shots in exotic locales that were set up — some for a two-second scene or less. From the opening credits which depict a rescue effort unfolding in slow motion to the final denouement, the visual artistry (costuming, cinematography, locales, special effects) gets in the way of the problematic story which turns out to be a good thing as there’s no way to turn it off. The director is quoted on one of the extras saying something like “Either this movie works or it’s going to be a long, bad music video.” This tautology is clearly on display and interestingly, Tarsem Singh got his start directing fantastical music videos and TV commercials. Possibly to prevent the latter from occurring to the audience, Tarsem chose Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony for much of the soundtrack.

It’s about an injured stuntman in a hospital telling a story to a little girl which is fine, however, I generally don’t like movies with narration for the usual reasons cited by critics for liking the director’s cut of Blade Runner over the theatrical release. The story the stuntman tells is fraught with errors in fashioning a proper hero story namely, too many heroes with too many moral ambiguities. It’s a pleasure watching the girl actor, Catinca Untaru, bring the story within the story back to the child’s realm sort of knowing the stuntman is going to screw it up again with the bile from his misanthropic unrequited soul and broken body.

Well, hm. The more I write about it, the more I like it. 4/5 stars.

Before He Was Famous: Robert Duvall


Robert Duvall in The Time Tunnel


Everybody doing the funky chicken in the time tunnel lab

Hulu has the entire run of a show I loved as kid: The Time Tunnel. I used to tumble around with friends in slow motion pretending to land in some other time before playing cowboys and indians or cops and robbers. The wiki article has some good trivia on the show. It was produced by Irwin Allen who also did Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space and then went on to do a few of the famous 70s disaster movies like Towering Inferno and the original Poseidon Adventure. For this, people called him The Master of Disaster.

I was rather surprised to find Robert Duvall in one episode playing a time-traveling tool. How many actors can go from playing idiots in kitschy old sci-fi shows or movies to the Oscars® and superstardom? (And which of them worked with George Lucas? Duvall is also in THX-1138.) Harrison Ford is the only other one I can think of and he has only managed a nomination. On a similar tangent, it’s interesting that a former porn star, Sibel Kikelli, won the German Oscar for best actress (the Deutscher Filmpreis) in 2004. (Head-On is a great film by the way.) You go girl.