This week has been relatively quiet. I’ve been trying to get an estimate on replacing our 450′ red tip hedge but I’ve gotten only promises so far. One landscape company would only estimate that replacing the red tips which, evidently, have largely succumbed to disease over the last decade, would cost around $2,000. I still need to clarify if that estimate includes tearing out the old plants or if it just is for planting the replacement.
Ligustrum is a hardy plant that grows fairly quickly and can be quite tall. Tall, quick, and full are important. This hedge divides our property from the only road that entirely transits our neighborhood and we need to keep curious eyes out of our back yard and the pond that some might find attractive on a hot day.
Bad Time For Movies
August normally is a bad time for movies as studios wind down their summer blockbusters but are holding back for their spate of fall serious movies, or films, as they like to refer to their most artistic attempts. Recent attempts at movies have been
Superbad, 
Rush Hour 3,
The Invasion,
Underdog
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,
The Last Legion,
and a host of other dismal-looking and sounding movies.
Movies We Saw
Nevertheless, we’ve seen some very good movies over the last several months.
Paris, Je T’aime is a series of filmed short stories about relationships in Paris. Each segment has its own director, including Gus van Sant, Wes Craven, the Cohen brothers, Gérard Depardieu, and some others I don’t know. The stories are a varied sort, both in style and quality. But the movie was very unusual and often quite interesting. Well worth seeing.
Live Free or Die Hard lives up to the series’ reputation. Filled with Internet operators, encrypted files, stolen passwords, lots of cool computer screen shots and the hyped-up language of computer operations, the Die Hard franchise is successfully brought into the digital age.
Sicko definitely has a message for its audience: the Bush Administration will cheat citizens in favor of its corporate friends. According to Michael Moore, the administration withholds information and distorts reality to convince citizens that they are powerless and should not resist political priorities. Aside from this radical and largely unsupported message, Moore is very effective in communicating the helplessness of many people relying on government health programs and those qualifying for no health programs as the attempt to find medical help for their problems. Emotion is so effectively portrayed I found myself blinking away tears at the terrible injustice these people were suffering. A brilliantly designed j’accuse.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the 5th movie and book in the 7-book series. I was a little leery of this one, considering the director’s experience mostly was in British television but he managed the story quite well and brought us the requisite number of quite believable special effects. Well done. Hogwarts once again looks like a real place populated by real wizards. He did well enough to get the assignment for the next in the series. I don’t appear to be the sole enthusiast for this movie. So far the movie has grossed $850 million world-wide.
Hairspray is not the edgy 1988 version directed by John Waters and starring a host of edgy actors like Divine, Deborah Harr, Ricki Lake, Pia Zadora, Jerry Stiller, Rik Ocasik, and Sonny Bono (!!). No, this one is based on the Broadway musical significantly neutered and sanitized for a broad audience. This one is directed by a former choreographer with a slight directorial history and starring a far more mainstream cast: John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifa, Allison Janney, and, to add just a bit of racy casting — Christopher Walken. Entertaining but just not the same thing that John Waters created.
The Bourne Ultimatum is the only theatrical movie we’ve seen over the past several weeks. Boxoffice totals have dropped deservedly. This weekend’s gross is only 60% of the weekend gross three weeks ago (when Bourne came out) and heartily deserves this drop. Bourne is a very exciting movie. The director uses a very active camera to keep the viewers a part of the action. When the movie ends two hours later I hardly notice the time. I honestly though we were only an hour into the movie. Great movie.
Netflix Movies We Saw
Rashomon depicts a rape and murder through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the perpetrator and, through a medium, the murder victim. The story unfolds in flashback as the four characters—the bandit Tajōmaru, the murdered samuri Kanazawa-no-Takehiro, his wife Masago, and the nameless Woodcutter—recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. But it is also a flashback within a flashback, because the accounts of the witnesses are being retold by a woodcutter and a pries to a ribald commoner as they wait out a rainstorm in a ruined GateHouse. Each story is mutually contradictory, leaving the viewer unable to determine the truth of the events.
Kurosawa’s admiration for silent film and modern art can be seen in the film’s minimalist sets. Kurosawa felt that sound cinema multiplies the complexity of a film: “Cinematic sound is never merely accompaniment, never merely what the sound machine caught while you took the scene. Real sound does not merely add to the images, it multiplies it.” Regarding Rashomon, Kurosawa said, “I like silent pictures and I always have … I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.”
(Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa)
Accordingly, there are only three settings in the film: Rashomon gate, the woods and the courtyard. The gate and the courtyard are very simply constructed and the woods are simply real wood. Partly an artistic decision and partly a function of the paltry budget Kurosawa got from Daiei, the studio producing the film. However, when Kurosawa was younger, he studied and painted western paintings. His knowledge of modern art helped him balance the complication of sound films with the thin budget he had to make this movie by making images simpler.
Its emphasis on the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy, has led some to see the movie as an allegory of the defeat of Japan in World War II.
James F. Davidson’s article “Memory of Defeat in Japan: A Reappraisal of Rashomon” in the December 1954 issue of the Antioch Review, is an early analysis of the World War II defeat elements. (Rashomon: Film Focus by David Richie)
Another allegorical interpretation of the film is mentioned briefly in a 1995 article “Japan: An Ambivalent Nation, an Ambivalent Cinema” by David M. Desser. Here, the film is seen as an allegory of the atomic bomb and Japanese defeat. It also briefly mentions James Goodwin’s view on the influence of post-war events on the film.
Symbolism runs rampant throughout the film and much has been written on the subject. Miyagawa, the films cinemaphotographer, stated in an interview that the forest setting was symbolic of the mystery shrouding the actual details of the dramatic events. Bucking tradition, Miyagawa directly filmed the sun through the leaves of the trees, as if to show the light of truth becoming obscured. Even the commoner plays a significant symbolic role, nearly as important as the principal characters, as the representative of that cold-hearted component of all men, the one dedicated to the advancement of rational self-interest above all competing considerations. The self-congratulatory smiles and derisive snickers punctuating his frequent, self-righteous statements provide further confirmation of this.
Night Watch This first installment of the trilogy based on the best-selling science fiction novels by Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko plays upon the tension between light and dark, pitting the superhuman Night Watch patrollers (known as the “Others”) against the shadowed forces of the night. But the biggest fear of all stems from the lines of an ancient prophecy, which warns of a renegade Other whose betrayal could bring chaos to the land. The visual design of this movie is impressionistic and abstract.
Out of the Past Jacques Tourneur directs this definitive noir classic (remade in 1984 as Against All Odds with Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward) about a trio to reckon with — troubled private investigator Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), drop-dead beauty Kathie (Jane Greer) and moneyed mobster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Bailey is hired to find Kathie, Sterling’s former mistress. When he finds her, the unexpected occurs.
Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Over time, he believed he was trusted by the bears, who would allow him to approach them, and sometimes even touch them. Treadwell was repeatedly warned by park officials that his interaction with the bears was unsafe to both him and to the bears. “At best he’s misguided,” Deb Liggett, superintendent at Katmai and Lake Clark national parks, told the Anchorage Daily News in 2001. “At worst, he’s dangerous. If Timothy models unsafe behavior, that ultimately puts bears and other visitors at risk.” Treadwell filmed his exploits, and used the films to raise public awareness of the problems faced by bears in North America. In 2003, at the end of his thirteenth visit, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were attacked, killed and eaten by a bear.
For Grizzly Man, Herzog used sequences extracted from over 100 hours of video footage shot by Treadwell during the last five years of his life, and conducted interviews with Treadwell’s family and friends, as well as experts and authority figures. Herzog also narrates, and offers his own interpretations of the events. In his narration, he depicts Treadwell as a disturbed man who may have had a deathwish toward the end of his life, but also refuses to condemn him for this.
The film refers to an audio recording of the fatal attack, captured by Treadwell’s video camera, but although Herzog is shown listening to it on earphones, it is not played in the film. In fact, Herzog advises the owner of the tape, Jewel Palovak, a friend of Treadwell who held onto the tape but refused to ever listen to it, to destroy it immediately.
Herzog uses his own experience with difficult actors and his artistic interest in personalities consumed by a personal project to inform his narrative of Treadwell’s quest. It makes this film quite compelling and interesting from its first moment to its last.
The Invasion. Because of the bad reviews Marian wasn’t interested in seeing this movie but I decided to go today. Certainly had a lot of star power: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig (the new 007), Jeremy Northam (Gosford Park) , Roger Rees (West Wing, Gray’s Anatomy). The director is Oliver Hirschbiegel ( Ein Ganz Gewohnlicher Jude). Maybe that was the problem. Ably put together but utterly devoid of tension, interest, passion. The infected people hardly are scary, the transition to spore-slave is uninteresting. I found myself wondering how Kidman avoided tripping over her extremely tight skirts. The movie is not so much bad as it is bland, uninteresting, uniformly dull.
This is Thales, considered the first real philosopher. This is what people in the 6th century BCE Asia Minor looked like. I’m the old fart in the class by a long shot, although not quite as old as the people I’m studying. The instructor and I are about the same age but I’m at least a generation older than anyone else. A sharp bunch — philosophy majors mostly. I’m struggling to keep up with their class discussions. I’m a little out of practice.
Rose Saddleblanket
an image of frustration. Good photo, I must say.
A high-water warning in Kingfisher.
Kingfisher from the air.
Well, what is wrong with this cartoon? From my perspective it stereotypes black Americans as the bling-wearing, big-mouthed, low-hanging-shorts-wearing solitary source of murder in the newspaper’s coverage area. The two frightened children are out in the violent streets at night without supervision.
