Weblog 231
July 11, 2010~ 12:00 am
What a helter swelter we've been through all last week....unrelenting heat. So often, I - who cannot swim, fantasized about doing just that- in the clearest, coolest aquamarine water possible.
(That would be me .... on the right) .... hanging on to someone who can swim. LOL!!!
Seriously though, I think a blistering heat wave does something to the human brain. It makes it squirmy and brittle. There's been more violence in the local news this past week than I've seen in a 7 day stretch in some time. Are we truly more violent? I don't think so.... just hotter, more easily angered, sitting closer to some very nasty breaking points.
For some reason, the idea of heat, and proximity to water .... and dark things lurking underneath, made some pictures I came across on Friday connect to me in visceral ways. I became sunken into them and into the place they were showcasing. Can you identify this?
Lovely, isn't it? That contrast of brilliant yellow as the setting sun paints it so gloriously, and the blue blue of the water. Here it is closer, cast in light from a different angle.
Any ideas? A resort, perhaps? Some place for the wealthy to fly off to, where money's no object? How about this as a clue....
It all looks vividly alive, doesn't it? Well, the palatial looking estate is actually a cemetery in Venice, Italy. Hard to believe such wonderful appointments should hold only the dead. Of course, those places are not built for the dead, they're designed for the living who mourn, and want to believe their departed are protectively positioned in a place that is charmingly laid out. It may as well have a sign that says "No death here!" (Venice is very good at encasing its rot within beauteous craftsmanship ... deathless architecture and art.) Can you now guess at the golden fragment above?
Yep. It's part of an intricate Venetian mask to be worn at 'carnivale', and it's not papier mache' but gilded and set with semi-precious stones, its purpose the same as 'whistling in the graveyard' -the city that hosts it set on mouldering, sea-eroded, pollution-scarred bricks and dark alleyways everywhere, but oh the gothic pull of a city like Venice- ancient, secretive, with so much that is hidden- appeals to me this week.
It calls to mind a strange, strange film I watched before I ever had a computer to write about it-- "The Comfort of Strangers", a morbid tale based on an Iwan McEwan novel of the same name. I remember watching Helen Mirren play a crippled (in more ways than 'bodily') wife of Christopher Walken, whose part called for an oily persuasiveness he handled with aplomb. Walken is always 'alien', but in this film he brings a hint of underlying madness to the role, simply being himself -but with a bad Italian accent, which only adds to the 'wrongness' of the situation. He and Mirren are a sexually twisted Venetian couple whose desire is to lure two visiting English tourists, grown somewhat bored in their relationship, into Walken's marvelous old palazzo along the Grand Canal, and in doing so, successfully pull them into a web as nastily dangerous as it is unthinkable....old money.....old secrets. Plenty of perversion and chills.
In remembering the film, I recall the breath-taking, bright beauty of the then quite young Natasha Richardson, who stood in such contrast to the darkness of a crumbling world deep in the heart of a decaying city. It's a story that haunts me, and because of that, Venice remains draped in perceived menace. (Maybe that's silly but it's true; it's what makes it so intriguing.) I'd like to visit that city one day; in part, because of a totally offbeat film I'd watched years ago. We are drawn to what frightens us.
A reminder to be careful where you knock....
and what doors open for you. (Yes, that weathered old door knocker with the grave-- almost Incan head, is from a Venetian door. Where else?)
On Friday night, I finally cranked up the DVD player and watched the much touted film, "Precious". Having seen it now, I can say with no equivocation.....WAYNE WOULD HAVE HATED IT! (I got through it) and was completely awestruck (perfect word. A mixture of 'amazement and dread') by one performance: the mother's role played by BET's comedienne Mo'Nique.
That lady sweated out a tour de force...a true stunner... (and in one of the most unsympathetic, vile screen roles anyone has ever been asked to play, and she did it in a way that made you feel your insides were being pulled right out of you.) A performance that leaves one wrung out, sickened by her cruelty and purposeful ignorance.... but if anyone EVER deserved an Academy Award, that lady did for an unbelievably wrenching performance.
And yet.....and yet.....I have big problems with the film as a whole.
First off- and I know people are gonna disagree, I think the role of Precious was miscast. My apologies to the author of the book 'Push', upon which this story is based, but I don't see a girl THAT LARGE, that sideshow LARGE as being anything other than a distraction to the plot. Somewhat overweight or chubby, and it's very believable. THAT overweight, and she becomes too much of a contradiction to the rest of the plot....she's pathologically huge. Her size- (and it's bigger than merely queen-size or overweight, it's morbidly obese) makes it hard to accept that a character that BIG -and after years of brutal sexual abuse, would constantly be dreaming girlish dreams of true romance as she flies off into fantasies of being a 'stage heart throb', a 'go-go dancer', etc. I know it's true that girls who have been the victims of incest or molestation often house themselves in a greater padding of flesh for the same reason a castle has thick walls: to protect and insulate, but they WANT TO BE 'undesirable' because that's safe-- THAT'S THE FRICKIN' POINT! And to my mind, that's in direct conflict with what Clarice Precious supposedly dreams about on a daily basis.
Yet Gabourey Sidibe in her role as Precious, is forever drifting off into a fantasy world where she is pretty and glamorous, constantly dreaming of being attractive to the opposite sex-- and I think that's ridiculous. Especially after the years of sexual abuse at the hands of her piggish father. (One would think all that perversion would do much to dampen a young girl's normal dreams of romance and 'happily ever after', but it sidesteps that little wrinkle and never explains.) That's simply bad screen-writing.
I think the main character's strangeness of appearance, juxtaposed with 'sugar and spice', 'pink and pretty fairytales' weaken a film that, by its very INCENDIARY subject matter, should have been able to withstand a damned typhoon before it succumbed to smarminess, yet succumb it did ... whenever those glittery, pink and 'precious' flights of fancy came dancing across the screen like a line of Ziegfield Folly girls, they merely distracted, were simply asinine... and counterintuitive to the story.
Mariah Carey was strong, STRONG in her role sans make-up, all no-nonsense and Bronx accent -and Mo'nique was the A-bomb.....but then in the key role, we have a mumbling, surly, locked-down character whom everyone in social/helper roles seems to be able to magically detect is a diamond in the rough. (WHAT DID THEY SEE? What they detect IS totally unapparent to the movie viewer, and that too, is bad screenwriting.) She's illiterate.... barely speaks audibly, and she punches people. There is not one scene where anyone in a 'helper role' peeks through the veil for a moment and spies potential... not one. The best that can be said about Sidibe's role is that she suffers believably. There is nothing about her persona what would draw a caseworker or a teacher closer, convinced there is hidden potential. Maybe there was in the novel, but it's not shown in the movie.
Lee Daniels, the film's extremely personable and charismatic director, remarked that if they'd tried to put "Push" on the screen- as written- it would have been rated X. (Again, I repeat what I had to say about the film adaptation of 'The Road'....SOME BOOKS SHOULD NOT BE MADE INTO FILMS.) Maybe this was another one-- but something tells me it could have been done better.
The earth-shattering performance of the mother alone was worth the doing, but it should have had a better film wrapped around it.
(And if Mr. Daniels was concerned about raunchiness, I'd like to point out he might have skipped the rape scenes and their repeated flashbacks completely. They weren't needed and became the ugliest parts of the film.) Rape.....incest and DISNEY-type interwoven segments, it's all just jarring, jarring, jarring. (This film should have had a serious overhaul before release. It's a film that tried too hard to be unique, and suffered in its most extreme elements by taking honest grit and mixing it with illogic and downright silly snippets of fantasy production numbers.)
It's too bad. Mo'Nique deserved a better vehicle for her jewel of a performance. As is... a triple A+ for all females in the film (except for 'Precious herself) --and an F for its overall coherence and reality.
So we come back to Venice....
and its surreal beauty overlaid on corruption. So much of life is like that. We're just like this cat
staring out, trapped in rotting place, surrounded by water... it's a Venetian cat, to be sure. He knows he's stuck. He knows that beauty is suspect and he is poised and hanging on by claws, wary of falling into it, as are we each of us...and there's nowhere else to go.
July 11, 2010~ 8:45 pm
I had a lovely Quiche Lorraine for dinner with mum this evening....marinated tomatoes, a bran muffin, chicken spaetzle soup, sliced pears and chocolate ice cream for dessert. Yum! When I left, my nephew's wife and three of her children had stopped in to visit mum, and were determined to drag her off to the Spanish class in the activity room. LOL!!! (Good luck, guys.) The activity lady with the southern accent had taken the microphone while we were eating dinner to announce, "Spanish at six thirty in the activity room. Abblah esPAN-yol, y'all!" Mum rolled her eyes and I said, "Going?" "HELL no!" she said, and laughed.
When I got home, replenished the feeding area for the birds, et al- and grabbed a chair and a cup of coffee to sit and watch them eat, I was astonished to see THIS guy....
MY FIRST SQUIRREL! He was a soft, light brown, and calm as can be.
I was thrilled! I had no idea where he'd come from, but cracked corn enticed him out of his hidey hole. (I had to stop with the peanuts. I discovered that salt is TOXIC to birds, and I found a dead house sparrow under my steps this week. Killed - either by my ignorance, or a bird disease of some kind. I buried the little guy, feeling guilty as shit.) So this week, I bought ONLY Audubon Cracked Corn and suet cakes. Only the bluejays have rejected it (and in a fit of pique, after landing and looking for the anticipated, usual nut pile)-- but you win some, you lose some- and now I have a SQUIRREL!
The pigeons (and sometimes I get as many as a DOZEN at once, stomping and pecking at corn on the tree stump, the yard audibly COOING with pigeon-gobble sounds) well, the pigeons looked PICTURE PERFECT tonight....
as the squirrel continued his chomping, sitting up and looking cute as can be, holding each kernel and nibbling, eyeing me calmly. THEN.....all the birds whooped up and off, bcaaaaaaaaaaause......THIS GUY
showed up. My 'lone crow'- my buddy, Mr. Black Mack. (I wish you could see how LARGE he is, but the picture doesn't do him justice. He comes and visits every night, just he alone, his crow buddies elsewhere, and has taken to claiming the green birdfeeder dish and the water dish by Beethoven's grave as his own.
But GUESS who'd also found it? LOL!!!
NUTKIN! Squirrel NUTKIN. After I snapped this (and the quality is poor because I was shooting through the screen) I stood up to get a better angle, and damned if both squirrel and crow took off, high-tailed for parts unknown on the hillside across the trolley tracks. (Yes....I do live on the wrong side of the tracks.) Last thing I saw was a bushy tail leaping up my railroad tie steps, scooting across alley, streaking over the trolley tracks and into the brush. Man....I hope that little guy doesn't get hit by a car or a trolley making that foraging mission down here for food....great! ANOTHER WORRY. (I sure love seeing him though.)
***
(Return To Weekly Archives)
What a helter swelter we've been through all last week....unrelenting heat. So often, I - who cannot swim, fantasized about doing just that- in the clearest, coolest aquamarine water possible.
(That would be me .... on the right) .... hanging on to someone who can swim. LOL!!!
Seriously though, I think a blistering heat wave does something to the human brain. It makes it squirmy and brittle. There's been more violence in the local news this past week than I've seen in a 7 day stretch in some time. Are we truly more violent? I don't think so.... just hotter, more easily angered, sitting closer to some very nasty breaking points.
For some reason, the idea of heat, and proximity to water .... and dark things lurking underneath, made some pictures I came across on Friday connect to me in visceral ways. I became sunken into them and into the place they were showcasing. Can you identify this?
Lovely, isn't it? That contrast of brilliant yellow as the setting sun paints it so gloriously, and the blue blue of the water. Here it is closer, cast in light from a different angle.
Any ideas? A resort, perhaps? Some place for the wealthy to fly off to, where money's no object? How about this as a clue....
It all looks vividly alive, doesn't it? Well, the palatial looking estate is actually a cemetery in Venice, Italy. Hard to believe such wonderful appointments should hold only the dead. Of course, those places are not built for the dead, they're designed for the living who mourn, and want to believe their departed are protectively positioned in a place that is charmingly laid out. It may as well have a sign that says "No death here!" (Venice is very good at encasing its rot within beauteous craftsmanship ... deathless architecture and art.) Can you now guess at the golden fragment above?
Yep. It's part of an intricate Venetian mask to be worn at 'carnivale', and it's not papier mache' but gilded and set with semi-precious stones, its purpose the same as 'whistling in the graveyard' -the city that hosts it set on mouldering, sea-eroded, pollution-scarred bricks and dark alleyways everywhere, but oh the gothic pull of a city like Venice- ancient, secretive, with so much that is hidden- appeals to me this week.
It calls to mind a strange, strange film I watched before I ever had a computer to write about it-- "The Comfort of Strangers", a morbid tale based on an Iwan McEwan novel of the same name. I remember watching Helen Mirren play a crippled (in more ways than 'bodily') wife of Christopher Walken, whose part called for an oily persuasiveness he handled with aplomb. Walken is always 'alien', but in this film he brings a hint of underlying madness to the role, simply being himself -but with a bad Italian accent, which only adds to the 'wrongness' of the situation. He and Mirren are a sexually twisted Venetian couple whose desire is to lure two visiting English tourists, grown somewhat bored in their relationship, into Walken's marvelous old palazzo along the Grand Canal, and in doing so, successfully pull them into a web as nastily dangerous as it is unthinkable....old money.....old secrets. Plenty of perversion and chills.
In remembering the film, I recall the breath-taking, bright beauty of the then quite young Natasha Richardson, who stood in such contrast to the darkness of a crumbling world deep in the heart of a decaying city. It's a story that haunts me, and because of that, Venice remains draped in perceived menace. (Maybe that's silly but it's true; it's what makes it so intriguing.) I'd like to visit that city one day; in part, because of a totally offbeat film I'd watched years ago. We are drawn to what frightens us.
A reminder to be careful where you knock....
and what doors open for you. (Yes, that weathered old door knocker with the grave-- almost Incan head, is from a Venetian door. Where else?)
On Friday night, I finally cranked up the DVD player and watched the much touted film, "Precious". Having seen it now, I can say with no equivocation.....WAYNE WOULD HAVE HATED IT! (I got through it) and was completely awestruck (perfect word. A mixture of 'amazement and dread') by one performance: the mother's role played by BET's comedienne Mo'Nique.
That lady sweated out a tour de force...a true stunner... (and in one of the most unsympathetic, vile screen roles anyone has ever been asked to play, and she did it in a way that made you feel your insides were being pulled right out of you.) A performance that leaves one wrung out, sickened by her cruelty and purposeful ignorance.... but if anyone EVER deserved an Academy Award, that lady did for an unbelievably wrenching performance.
And yet.....and yet.....I have big problems with the film as a whole.
First off- and I know people are gonna disagree, I think the role of Precious was miscast. My apologies to the author of the book 'Push', upon which this story is based, but I don't see a girl THAT LARGE, that sideshow LARGE as being anything other than a distraction to the plot. Somewhat overweight or chubby, and it's very believable. THAT overweight, and she becomes too much of a contradiction to the rest of the plot....she's pathologically huge. Her size- (and it's bigger than merely queen-size or overweight, it's morbidly obese) makes it hard to accept that a character that BIG -and after years of brutal sexual abuse, would constantly be dreaming girlish dreams of true romance as she flies off into fantasies of being a 'stage heart throb', a 'go-go dancer', etc. I know it's true that girls who have been the victims of incest or molestation often house themselves in a greater padding of flesh for the same reason a castle has thick walls: to protect and insulate, but they WANT TO BE 'undesirable' because that's safe-- THAT'S THE FRICKIN' POINT! And to my mind, that's in direct conflict with what Clarice Precious supposedly dreams about on a daily basis.
Yet Gabourey Sidibe in her role as Precious, is forever drifting off into a fantasy world where she is pretty and glamorous, constantly dreaming of being attractive to the opposite sex-- and I think that's ridiculous. Especially after the years of sexual abuse at the hands of her piggish father. (One would think all that perversion would do much to dampen a young girl's normal dreams of romance and 'happily ever after', but it sidesteps that little wrinkle and never explains.) That's simply bad screen-writing.
I think the main character's strangeness of appearance, juxtaposed with 'sugar and spice', 'pink and pretty fairytales' weaken a film that, by its very INCENDIARY subject matter, should have been able to withstand a damned typhoon before it succumbed to smarminess, yet succumb it did ... whenever those glittery, pink and 'precious' flights of fancy came dancing across the screen like a line of Ziegfield Folly girls, they merely distracted, were simply asinine... and counterintuitive to the story.
Mariah Carey was strong, STRONG in her role sans make-up, all no-nonsense and Bronx accent -and Mo'nique was the A-bomb.....but then in the key role, we have a mumbling, surly, locked-down character whom everyone in social/helper roles seems to be able to magically detect is a diamond in the rough. (WHAT DID THEY SEE? What they detect IS totally unapparent to the movie viewer, and that too, is bad screenwriting.) She's illiterate.... barely speaks audibly, and she punches people. There is not one scene where anyone in a 'helper role' peeks through the veil for a moment and spies potential... not one. The best that can be said about Sidibe's role is that she suffers believably. There is nothing about her persona what would draw a caseworker or a teacher closer, convinced there is hidden potential. Maybe there was in the novel, but it's not shown in the movie.
Lee Daniels, the film's extremely personable and charismatic director, remarked that if they'd tried to put "Push" on the screen- as written- it would have been rated X. (Again, I repeat what I had to say about the film adaptation of 'The Road'....SOME BOOKS SHOULD NOT BE MADE INTO FILMS.) Maybe this was another one-- but something tells me it could have been done better.
The earth-shattering performance of the mother alone was worth the doing, but it should have had a better film wrapped around it.
(And if Mr. Daniels was concerned about raunchiness, I'd like to point out he might have skipped the rape scenes and their repeated flashbacks completely. They weren't needed and became the ugliest parts of the film.) Rape.....incest and DISNEY-type interwoven segments, it's all just jarring, jarring, jarring. (This film should have had a serious overhaul before release. It's a film that tried too hard to be unique, and suffered in its most extreme elements by taking honest grit and mixing it with illogic and downright silly snippets of fantasy production numbers.)
It's too bad. Mo'Nique deserved a better vehicle for her jewel of a performance. As is... a triple A+ for all females in the film (except for 'Precious herself) --and an F for its overall coherence and reality.
So we come back to Venice....
and its surreal beauty overlaid on corruption. So much of life is like that. We're just like this cat
staring out, trapped in rotting place, surrounded by water... it's a Venetian cat, to be sure. He knows he's stuck. He knows that beauty is suspect and he is poised and hanging on by claws, wary of falling into it, as are we each of us...and there's nowhere else to go.
July 11, 2010~ 8:45 pm
I had a lovely Quiche Lorraine for dinner with mum this evening....marinated tomatoes, a bran muffin, chicken spaetzle soup, sliced pears and chocolate ice cream for dessert. Yum! When I left, my nephew's wife and three of her children had stopped in to visit mum, and were determined to drag her off to the Spanish class in the activity room. LOL!!! (Good luck, guys.) The activity lady with the southern accent had taken the microphone while we were eating dinner to announce, "Spanish at six thirty in the activity room. Abblah esPAN-yol, y'all!" Mum rolled her eyes and I said, "Going?" "HELL no!" she said, and laughed.
When I got home, replenished the feeding area for the birds, et al- and grabbed a chair and a cup of coffee to sit and watch them eat, I was astonished to see THIS guy....
MY FIRST SQUIRREL! He was a soft, light brown, and calm as can be.
I was thrilled! I had no idea where he'd come from, but cracked corn enticed him out of his hidey hole. (I had to stop with the peanuts. I discovered that salt is TOXIC to birds, and I found a dead house sparrow under my steps this week. Killed - either by my ignorance, or a bird disease of some kind. I buried the little guy, feeling guilty as shit.) So this week, I bought ONLY Audubon Cracked Corn and suet cakes. Only the bluejays have rejected it (and in a fit of pique, after landing and looking for the anticipated, usual nut pile)-- but you win some, you lose some- and now I have a SQUIRREL!
The pigeons (and sometimes I get as many as a DOZEN at once, stomping and pecking at corn on the tree stump, the yard audibly COOING with pigeon-gobble sounds) well, the pigeons looked PICTURE PERFECT tonight....
as the squirrel continued his chomping, sitting up and looking cute as can be, holding each kernel and nibbling, eyeing me calmly. THEN.....all the birds whooped up and off, bcaaaaaaaaaaause......THIS GUY
showed up. My 'lone crow'- my buddy, Mr. Black Mack. (I wish you could see how LARGE he is, but the picture doesn't do him justice. He comes and visits every night, just he alone, his crow buddies elsewhere, and has taken to claiming the green birdfeeder dish and the water dish by Beethoven's grave as his own.
But GUESS who'd also found it? LOL!!!
NUTKIN! Squirrel NUTKIN. After I snapped this (and the quality is poor because I was shooting through the screen) I stood up to get a better angle, and damned if both squirrel and crow took off, high-tailed for parts unknown on the hillside across the trolley tracks. (Yes....I do live on the wrong side of the tracks.) Last thing I saw was a bushy tail leaping up my railroad tie steps, scooting across alley, streaking over the trolley tracks and into the brush. Man....I hope that little guy doesn't get hit by a car or a trolley making that foraging mission down here for food....great! ANOTHER WORRY. (I sure love seeing him though.)
(Return To Weekly Archives)
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