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Dec23

Hurtin like a big dog

It is Tuesday afternoon December 23rd. I have been looking at the ceiling for over two weeks now. That’s what you do when you hurt your back. You lay there looking at the ceiling wondering if you will ever get better. You make deals with the gods, the devil and any one else that will listen. “Just let me get through this and I will quit drinking, druging, chasing women and find the lord. I will give the church all my money”. The next day you wake up felling a little better and have second thought’s about giving all your money away.

I’m still hurting, I did something with ice that crippled me for a couple days and my legs are still twisted. But. it’s the 23rd, Christmas is just about here and after all the planning I just gotta go. So I gonna fashion a little bed in the back of Stacey’s car and ride it out. All five and a half hours. I’m sure I’ll be making deals half way through the trip, but i gotta go.

Merry Christmas.

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Dec12

Hope for a Racist, and Maybe a Country

Doc. Benway

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: December 12, 2008 from today’s NEW YORK TIMES

Twice in the last decade, just as the holiday movie season has begun to sag under the weight of its own bloat, full of noise and nonsense signifying nothing, Clint Eastwood has slipped another film into theaters and shown everyone how it’s done. This year’s model is “Gran Torino,” a sleek, muscle car of a movie Made in the U.S.A., in that industrial graveyard called Detroit. I’m not sure how he does it, but I don’t want him to stop. Not because every film is great — though, damn, many are — but because even the misfires show an urgent engagement with the tougher, messier, bigger questions of American life.

Few Americans make movies about this country anymore, other than Mr. Eastwood, a man whose vitality as an artist shows no signs of waning, even in a nominally modest effort like “Gran Torino.” Part of this may be generational: Mr. Eastwood started as an actor in the old studio system, back when the major movie companies were still in the business of American life rather than just international properties. Hollywood made movies for export then, of course, but part of what it exported was an idea of America as a democratic ideal, an idea of greatness which, however blinkered and false and occasionally freighted with pessimism, was persuasive simply because Gene Kelly and John Wayne were persuasive.

While it’s easy to understand why the last eight years (or the last 50) have made it difficult to sell that idea to the world or even the country, it’s dispiriting that so many movies are disconnected from everyday experience, from economic worries to race. Pauline Kael used to beat up on Stanley Kramer, the director of earnest middlebrow entertainments like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” but at least these movies had a connection to real life or an idea about it. Ms. Kael also famously branded Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” as “deeply immoral,” even fascistic, but the film became a classic because of its ambiguous engagement with American violence and masculinity. Mr. Eastwood and a .44 Magnum did their bit too.

Dirty Harry is back, in a way, in “Gran Torino,” not as a character but as a ghostly presence. He hovers in the film, in its themes and high-caliber imagery, and of course most obviously in Mr. Eastwood’s face. It is a monumental face now, so puckered and pleated that it no longer looks merely weathered, as it has for decades, but seems closer to petrified wood. Words like flinty and steely come to mind, adjectives that Mr. Eastwood, in his performance as Walt Kowalski, expressively embodies with his usual lack of fuss and a number of growls. A former auto worker at Ford, Walt has just put his longtime wife in the ground when the story opens. From his scowl, it looks as if he would like to join her.

Instead he sits on his front porch chugging can after can of cheap beer in the company of his yellow Labrador, Daisy, watching the world at a safe distance with a squint and a stream of bitter commentary. Kept at bay, the remaining members of his family — including two sons with big houses, big cars, big waistlines — have no choice but to let him stew alone. Yet the rest of the world refuses to leave Walt be, despite his best efforts and grimace. The world first creeps into his peripheral vision, where a family of Hmong immigrants live in the rundown house next door; and then, through a series of unfortunate events, some artful and others creaking with scripted contrivance, it stages a life-altering home invasion.

Written by a newcomer, Nick Schenk, the story eases into gear with an act of desperation.Under violent threat from some Hmong gangbangers, the next-door neighbor’s teenage son, Thao (Bee Vang), tries and fails to steal Walt’s cherry 1972 Gran Torino, and in the bargain nearly loses his life to its angry, armed owner. Thao’s family, led by his mouthy, friendly sister, Sue (a very good Ahney Her), forces the teenager to do penance by working for Walt, an arrangement that pleases neither the man nor the boy. No one seems a more unlikely (or reluctant) father surrogate than Walt, a foulmouthed bigot with an unprintable epithet for every imaginable racial and ethnic group. Growling — often literally, “Grr, grr” — he resists the family’s overtures like a man under siege, walled in by years of suspicion, prejudice and habit.

Walt assumes his protector role gradually, a transformation that at first plays in an often broadly comic key. Mr. Eastwood’s loose, at times very funny performance in the early part of the film is one of its great pleasures. While some of this enjoyment can be likened to spending time with an old friend, Mr. Eastwood is also an adept director of his own performances and, perhaps more important, a canny manipulator of his own iconographic presence. He knows that when we’re looking at him, we’re also seeing Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name and all his other outlaws and avenging angels who have roamed across the screen for the last half-century. All these are embedded in his every furrow and gesture.

These spectral figures, totems of masculinity and mementos from a heroic cinematic age, are what make this unassuming film — small in scale if not in the scope of its ideas — more than just a vendetta flick or an entertainment about a crazy coot and the exotic strangers next door. As the story unfolds and the gangbangers return and Walt reaches for his gun, the film moves from comedy into drama and then tragedy and then into something completely unexpected. We’ve seen this western before, though not quite. Because this isn’t John Wayne near the end of the 20th century, but Clint Eastwood at the start of the still-new 21st, remaking the image of the hero for one more and perhaps final time, one generation of Americans making way for the next.

That probably sounds heavier than I mean, but “Gran Torino” doesn’t go down lightly. Despite all the jokes — the scenes of Walt lighting up at female flattery and scrambling for Hmong delicacies — the film has the feel of a requiem. Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and ’70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt’s love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.

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Dec12

MY NEW DIET

Doc. Benway

I’m on a new diet. I’m not losing any weight, but I am losing my mind. This is it. This is what I eat every four hours, twenty four hours a day. I manage to work a cup of coffee in every once in a while, just to shake things up bit.

Pain sucks, I can’t think of anything good that could come from it. An all knowing and loving god? I don’t think so. If she knows me and she loves me I wish she would give me a break.

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Dec04

The Sterile Cuckoo

Doc. Benway

I have no idea what this title means, The Sterile Cuckoo. But since I’ve written a bit about movies lately I though I would research this one. Stacey and I have seen it on t.v. a couple times just recently. Never heard of or seen it before. I really enjoyed it. I think Stacey did as well. It’s cool. It’s a world totally unknown to me. It’s 1969, in upstate New York, higher education, it’s all foreign to me. But some how romantic. And you never really figure out just how damaged Pookie Adams, Liza character is. And maybe she’s not damaged at all, one never really knows.

I wish I would have written this piece, I think it is spot on and perfectly descriptive of this movie.

I saw The Sterile Cuckoo by accident in 1970. I went to the movie theater to see True Grit because John Wayne had been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. The double feature that day included The Sterile Cuckoo and it changed the way I would view movies from that day on. I loved every second of this achingly beautiful story about first love for a gangly, awkward, pushy, scared girl and a shy young man. Liza Minnelli is so incredible in this role as she conveys the desperation of a woman who has probably never been loved and can’t understand that it scares people away if you hold too tight and reveal too much. She has no game to play and it costs her. She is the whole movie as all the emotions of the part are captured in her beautiful, expressive eyes. Her monologue in the phone booth near the end of the film should be required viewing for anyone interested in persuing an acting career. Few before her or since have pulled off such a challenging feat with such seamless realism. She was fantastic in Cabaret because it showcased the full range of her talents but this is her best work as an actress.

So I dug a little deeper and learned the title is from the book the movie was adapted from. It’s the name of a poem Pookie wrote and recited near the end of the book. Anyway if ya like movies from the 60’s and 70’s you should check this out. It’s now one of my favorite films.

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Dec04

The Crescent Theater

Doc. Benway

Stacey and I went to a movie at the new Crescent Theater in beautiful downtown Mobile. We enjoyed “I Served the King of England”. It was funny, it was sad and it was bit dark. I’m not sure how long this film has been around, it seemed really fresh, if you will and you should. You should go to the Crescent Theater and enjoy a movie. It will be an independent film you will see. Those are the only movies the owner/operator, Max Morley, will show at his theater.

The Crescent Theater is located at 208 Dauphin St. Originally built in 1865 when Vaudeville shows were performed there regularly, this was before motion pictures started. It became a movie theater in the early 1900s. It has also enjoyed a life as a restaurant. Now, thanks to Morley and his business partner it will live on as a movie theater.

The Crescent is newly renovated, it’s nothing like an old movie house. The popcorn is good, but if you didn’t know where you were you would think you were in any movie theater anywhere. That’s ok because the renovation is really well done, everything is brand new and state of the art.

Now folks just need to go. I think the films will run for about a week, playing twice a day and then the next one starts. It cost $8 and that’s fair. They have beer, wine and like I said good popcorn. They have everything else you may want, all the typical theater food stuff.

The guy who has open the Crescent, Max Morley has been a part of many renovations in downtown Mobile. He has developed many loft/cond sites and has one or two above the theater for sale. I think he told us one of the condos was priced at 1.2 million. Could that be right? 1.2 million, that’s a lot for Mobile, hell that’s a lot for any place!

But, hey it’s Mobile, they do things different down there. Currently there is a restaurant in Mobile where you can pay $150 for a glass of wine. TURE that. Like Eugene Walters was know to say “Mobile is sweet lunacy’s county seat”.

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Dec02

In Bruges

Doc. Benway

In Bruges is a movie we watched the other night. It’s a kinda dark comedy, set in the town of Bruges. That’s the place the crime boss sends a couple hit men after they kinda botch a job. He tells them they need to go hide out til the heats off. Bruges, a small town in Belgium, is the place he sends them to hide. Click here to see more photos of the town.

This is a old street in Bruges, with the Church of Our Lady tower in the background. The town is beautiful and the movie was good. Bruges is a town built on canals. It was established in 1128, it’s really old. It is in the Flemish region of Belgium. It has a large, busy sea port. International tourism is huge as Bruges is considered a European capital of culture.

Like I said the movie was good, it was also funny. I like the scenery of Bruges and would like to visit. The movie moved at a good pace and that was good. There was a romance part to it , but it didn’t ruin the movie for me, this time anyway. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson were the stars and they were good together. Like I said, a good movie, I liked it and everyone dies at the end. Oops sorry.

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Archive for December, 2008

Hurtin like a big dog

Hope for a Racist, and Maybe a Country

MY NEW DIET

The Sterile Cuckoo

The Crescent Theater

In Bruges

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