Necros

Wwe watched New York, New York last night and i was left indifferent. Contrast this with my dead-tired amazement Friday night viewing Persepolis before the debate. I had feared the same sort of childhood memoir which I loathe in all forms, but this refreshingly transgressive, befanged, if you will.

Enough chatter about the dead!

Towering, simply Towering - or one man can eat 50 eggs

It is no longer news that Paul Newman has died. There is little that I could add here that I am sure has not already appeared in the cycle of things - folks better prepared to knock out his filmography and pay homage to his legacy have already been at it. Let me say only this, I read once that Steve McQueen, the great Steve McQueen who was able to cover over just how uninteresting and wooden Yul Brynner was in the fantastic "Magnificent Seven", threatened to muck up the whole thing if Newman's name appeared above his on the billboards advertising the "Towering Inferno" - he knew. From Fast Eddie Felson to John Rooney and all the rest beside, Newman was, and played nothing less than, a real cool hand. So long as it is him we consider, all the rest of us are always and forever only shaking over here boss.
-fp

Model Behavior

Ten days or so ago my wife and I viewed an unfortunate film, one where the second scene displayed an inchoate Richard Burton placed upon an Alpine slope and looking eternally lost in proximity to modern objects: a parachute and a field radio. My wife quickly noted, "My god, how drunk is he?"

Indeed this essay was to be about Richard Burton, both his hair and his unholy glaze which cement his performance in Where Eagles Dare. Instead, I must shift emphasis upon Joanthan Lethem's essay Art of Darkness which was featured in last Sunday's NYT Op-Ed section. The essay grapples with the notion that the film The Dark Knight was symbolic of the nation's need for president Bush to protect us from darkened others, and in the case of the sub-prime market, from ourselves as well. Filtering my reading of the essay through the morning's memory of Eagle Eye, another cineplex warning concerning geopolitics and paranoia, I admit to being impressed by Lethem's characterization of Dark Knight as "a morbid incoherence...chaotic form its ultimate content."

Elsewhere Lethem notes, "The Joker's paradox, of course, is the same as that of 9/11 and its long aftermath: audacious transgression ought to call out of us an equal and adamant passion for love of truth and freedom, yet the fear he inspires instead drives us deep into passivity and silence."

This passivity and silence were being plucked again last night in Oxford, MS. I remain at a loss as how the frayed appeal of blocky nationalism and a consumer culture under constant ravaging by ennui and economic famine has managed so uniformly the lemur's stroll into the sunset.

Perhaps my answer lies within another of Lethem's observations. "No wonder we crave an entertainment like "The Dark Knight" where every topic we're unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion."

Oh, Jesus

The loquacity of Joel's grappling with the Rambo franchise and its latest installment pushed my hand and I put down Season 5 of The Wire and instead rented Rambo so that my wife and I could sit and alternate between being bored and baffled for 80 minutes last night.

Why, dammit?

As noted, the film achieves an overkill with viscera being blasted onto the camera's lens, but with this nod to veracity, why are the mercenaries depicted walking in a cluster -- through the world's most densely sown fields of landmines? Is it possible that Christians - when bound and neglected (or fed to swine) in serial rain for a fortnight - can then sprint upon being freed from their tethers? As the opening sequence reveals, the Burmese military have been accused of using chemical agents again dissident populations. So -- what happened to, even, oh I don't know, a conventionally armed air force; perhaps it was their day off. My wife noted it was likely Sunday: praise Jesus.

Let us all be Loaded up and Truckin'

When this little less-than-sober charade of erudition began there was discussion about much, only the barest minimum of which - no more than a scaffolding really - ever made it on to the electronic vellum here. Recently, it was once again brought up (again, not here) that there was never a charter as such laid down for the FoSF. Despite the vagaries of this space, most of what has been of interest has in some way been concerned with notions of hotel-cinema. What is meant by the idea, what truths does such lay bare and how might it be even defined. As to the last there was discussion of what drove nails through planks; is it driven by actors (Kurt Russel, Willem Dafoe, Bruce Campbell, et al) is it directors and their visions' (Fuller, Stallone - fits in both categories obviously - Milius) or is it, as I might stress, situational? These are issues that will continue to be rounded out, even if in the discourse of things, but with that said I have to lay hold to a bard for this board. If there ever was a man who sang the soundtrack of hotel-cinema it was the gifted guitarist Jerry Reed. God speed Snowman.