Saturday, October 22, 2011
Movie Review: THE BIG YEAR - Birdwatching Extreme
A bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush to a hunter, but to a competitive birdwatcher (a "birder"), a bird in the hand is as worthy a prize as the chirp of a bird on a tree branch a quarter mile away.
That's because the mere sound of a bird, correctly identified, could tally a point of one on a "year list" - a year long count of bird species, a game played as disciplined as a round of gold, by birdwatchers who have advanced their sport to a competitive level.
It is the subject of the new movie, THE BIG YEAR, starring comedy kingpins Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson, and if we are to half-believe the tongue in cheek written opening of the film - "This is a true story, only the facts have been changed", - those privileged or passionate enough to spend an entire year documenting bird species do it for the love of the birds, the thrill of the hunt, and the bragging rights to being hailed Birder of The Year by "Birder" magazine. Plus all that comes with that, which apparently doesn't amount to a sack of birdseed.
Hopping on a plane to Alaska or climbing a snowy mountain peak at the mere rumour of a rare species is commonplace to these obsessed adventurers, yet with all the potential for a wild and crazy chase across the continent snapping pictures of birds, (Can't you just picture Jack Black at the weak end of a tree branch with a camera?), THE BIG YEAR scores its points on its gentle nature, even as you feel the hard scribe of a screenwriter avoiding heavy ventures into screwball and sentiment.
So we get a swath of human detail: marital strife, financial strife, meaning of life strife, as groundwork for three guys racing around the country with the passion of a Herculean task and the duty of an office stenographer. After about the 200th recorded species, you begin to care for these slightly cliched characters, (one's rich, one's poor, one is a cocky king of the birders jock), and envy the freedom and single-mindedness they possess on their seemingly insignificant mission. Following a quaint wintry trail in pursuit of a snowy owl with a sparkling limitless credit card in your pocket, becomes a fitting movie ideology.
The three leads deliver expected solid performances and Black is especially inviting as an aimless (except for birds), thirty-something who abandons life's duty for the chance to wear the crown of birding. There is an eye-popping list of actors, including Angelica Huston, Brian Dennehy, Diane Weist, and others offering strong selfless support.
The screen is often a flurry of computer graphics depicting competing bird counts, maps, and images of species, while the camera trails the birder's wayward paths like a bloodhound in pursuit. The birds themselves, more often than not, are just short of genuine, with a Disney-like touch up, making them appear like a distant naturalized cousin to an actual bird.
It's a breezy yet frantic romp in pursuit of something forever elusive. An attempt to define life by the achievement of a task, in this case the number of birds found and recorded in a calandar year. The critics have been harshly negative to this film but it somehow all works, for me anyway. Then again, I can tell the difference between a hairy woodpecker and a downy woodpecker in a heartbeat.
this article was first published by the author at blogcritics.org.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Kate Bush - Wild Man - radio edit still video - YouTube
wrote this in early October - nothing to write home about
Found myself unexpectedly at The Sportsman's Tavern on Saturday afternoon watching local musician and ensemble Leroy Townes perform two sets of smart country rock. Townes has a strong vocal range with a commanding sound and his ensemble is a tight jam banging group of local musicians, with special mention to the perfectly nimble slide guitarist, whose name I can't find. Exceptional original lyrical compositions balanced nicely in my beer sipping brain. The passing of my father 12 years ago came to mind. He would have digged this band. Special mention to good friend Al who introduced me to Townes as a "writer". I did a double-take. I could have looked around the room asking, "where's a writer?". His wife once introduced me to someone as an "actor". At least they come up with creative excuses for my poor existance. God luv 'em.
Did the door at Subversive Theatre's production of THE PESECUTION AND ASSASINATION OF JEAN PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS de SADE. A brilliant playful and disturbing production based on a true incident that burrows through theatre's fourth wall and makes you feel you are certainly sitting, maybe rightfully so, in the center of an insane asylum, either rounding up crazies or joining the psychotic conga line. Chris Standart takes the stage of the lunatic asylum as de Sade, a finely balanced blend of lunacy and lucidity.
Here's a promo for Kate Bush's new album, 50 WORDS FOR SNOW, due out Nov. 21. It's a quirky indulgence seeming to chronicle historian's quest (thirst) for prehistoric man. Or it may be referencing Truffaut's "The Wild Child", a French film loosely based on an 18th Century documented case of a child discovered living independently in the woods.
Found myself unexpectedly at The Sportsman's Tavern on Saturday afternoon watching local musician and ensemble Leroy Townes perform two sets of smart country rock. Townes has a strong vocal range with a commanding sound and his ensemble is a tight jam banging group of local musicians, with special mention to the perfectly nimble slide guitarist, whose name I can't find. Exceptional original lyrical compositions balanced nicely in my beer sipping brain. The passing of my father 12 years ago came to mind. He would have digged this band. Special mention to good friend Al who introduced me to Townes as a "writer". I did a double-take. I could have looked around the room asking, "where's a writer?". His wife once introduced me to someone as an "actor". At least they come up with creative excuses for my poor existance. God luv 'em.How 'bout this fine October weather? I'm loving the Bills 4 and 1 season but although my faith for a Super Bowl win isn't diminished I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. They are playing exceptionally but are only capitalizing on their opponents' weakness. They need to be more aggressive to make it all the way to 2012. Even more so, I'm addicted to the MLB playoffs, as I fine baseball, at it's best, can be even more exciting and dramatic than football. I'm predicting Texas and St. Louis will be the World Series contenders. Given my record for predictions, it will probably be Detroit and Millualkee. And I'm toying with cracking The Ginter Code.
Did the door at Subversive Theatre's production of THE PESECUTION AND ASSASINATION OF JEAN PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS de SADE. A brilliant playful and disturbing production based on a true incident that burrows through theatre's fourth wall and makes you feel you are certainly sitting, maybe rightfully so, in the center of an insane asylum, either rounding up crazies or joining the psychotic conga line. Chris Standart takes the stage of the lunatic asylum as de Sade, a finely balanced blend of lunacy and lucidity.And now I have to go to work and fight for my right to party.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Movie Review: MONEYBALL
Sabermetrics, a statistical analysis of baseball performance is a non traditional grading system coined by writer statistician Bill James, current advisor for The Boston Red Sox, that emphasizes players' ability to score points as opposed to old-school measures like RBI and speed. The Oakland Athletics attempt at sabermetrics in the 2002 Major League Baseball season is the subject of Moneyball, a funny and serious baseball drama produced and starring Brad Pitt, based on Michael Lewis' 2003 book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
Unless you're steeped in statistical baseball drama, maniacally scribbling numbers and geometries in a scratchpad, sabermetrics amounts to common sense, the same sense Athletics team manager Billy Beane, (Pitt) realized after failing to win a World Series bid in 2001, while attempting to compete with financially privileged teams like The New York Yankees, who won the American League title over The Athletics in 2001.
It was Beane's conclusion money ruled baseball and without it less fortunate teams like The A's could not compete. Their best players were picked off the team with the lure of money and their scouts could not offer the mega-bucks being offered to new talent. Certainly not a new concept in major sports.
While Beane 's advisers and team owner, Stephen Schott, insisted on working within the framework of their limited budget to develop talent, not to purchase it, Beane's chance meeting with Peter Brand, (a pseudonym for statistician whiz Paul De Podesta, played by Jonah Hill), a recent college graduate scouting for The Cleveland Indians and a sabermetric nerd of the highest order, turned the tables on the 2002 season, as the two baseball hounds scouted players for Oakland with their meager offerings based on statistics ignored by other teams.
Hence the pitcher who "throws funny", (Chad Bradford), and the former catcher, first baseman (Scott Hatteberg), who never played first base before and fears the ball coming "anywhere in his general vicinity". The use of sabermetrics resulted in a much healthier season for Oakland, although not quite that championship season, and this biographical film depicting Oakland's rise from the bottom of the league to the top of their division in the 2002 season, is as easy-going and fun as a wad of bubble gum in your mouth while thumbing through a pack of baseball cards.
It also offers the warm-hearted side drama, in this case Beane's relationship with his sweet young daughter, but director Bennett Miller never allows the film to venture far outside the hardcore baseball interplay it examines. The added bit of family fluff never interferes, indeed enhances Brad Pitt's commanding performance, which exudes a confidence akin to the leisurely pace of a baseball game early in the season, brimming with the excitement of an underdog team turning a losing season around.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Darling, I Have Your Epic Poem Right Here
EGGS AND BEAT
Eggs and beat
i know you're watching
we are so bored
you beat four eggs in a bowl
and served it down my throat.
It was just so freaky
once a year i see her
then i dream her
then i feed her
so i timed it at a minute and a half
and didn't look back.
Bet she's gonna lay a bet on me
Do I lose you now?
I dreamt i woke and started my day
and called out the morning window
"get the willowy girl to sing again"
and me and you and the mathematician
all pinned notes to the back of the bar.
Ha! You.
You fucking scare me
You're an anonymity
Killing me softly
but you're wrong about what's inside me
I'm a biological terrorism devotee
with no discipline
no hammer
Just teeth.
Eggs and beat
i know you're watching
we are so bored
you beat four eggs in a bowl
and served it down my throat.
It was just so freaky
once a year i see her
then i dream her
then i feed her
so i timed it at a minute and a half
and didn't look back.
Bet she's gonna lay a bet on me
Do I lose you now?
I dreamt i woke and started my day
and called out the morning window
"get the willowy girl to sing again"
and me and you and the mathematician
all pinned notes to the back of the bar.
Ha! You.
You fucking scare me
You're an anonymity
Killing me softly
but you're wrong about what's inside me
I'm a biological terrorism devotee
with no discipline
no hammer
Just teeth.
Monday, July 4, 2011
3 Films: 10 Rillington Place - The Shipping News - Withnail and I
Superman, oh Superman!
"I never said your film reviews suck. I said they were boring."
Blog block and roll. Here are three films I've attached to my soul over the last handful of years. I deem them all worthwhile mental investments.
The decision to abolish capital punishment in Britain in 1965 is partly a result of the wrongful execution of John Evans in 1950, who was convicted of murdering his baby girl and sentenced to death by hanging. 10 Rillington Place (1971) tells that story and the story of the real murderer, serial killer John Christie, who murdered at least eight women in England in the 1940s and '50s, burying some of their bodies in a concealed crawlspace in his apartment after having postmortem sex with them.
The first time I watched this movie online, (I unexpectedly just happened to click it on) I was riveted in my seat like I was 10 years old watching Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho for the first time, my hands clenching the armchairs like I was gripping the safety bar on a roller coaster. It is the dismal, hopelessly horrific dark atmosphere and the snail's pace crawl of it that mesmerized me into equal parts repulsion and fascination.
The horror is heightened considerably by the on-location filming at the very address the main murders took place. 10 Rillington Place is a depressing, very British dark and dingy row of apartment houses with rooms, as the British say, not big enough to swing a cat. The infamous street has since been renamed.
Directed by Richard Fleischer, who directed another fine true murder film, The Boston Strangler (1968), and is the son of cartoon animation pioneer Max Fleischer, the movie boasts an exquisite British cast with Richard Attenborough as serial killer John Christie, certainly one of the creepiest movie villains ever to peer luridly out a window, and John Hurt, as the unfortunate and illiterate John Evans, who rallies a performance that cries out for the abolition of the death penalty. But be forewarned - the film is relentlessly grim.
How I hated The Shipping News (2001). I saw it in the dead of winter in the coldest theatre in western New York, so frigid that the small handful of audience in attendance were hunched over, huddled in winter garb -gloves, scarves, hats - attempting to conserve body warmth, as if we were sitting around a life saving campfire and not looking up at a movie screen. That the movie screen was projecting the winter season in Newfoundland was like experiencing a survival endurance test.
After repeated viewings, (the beautiful blue and white Newfoundland scenery kept getting my attention when it ran on cable), I saw another film entirely. It's a rosy-cheeked black comedy exploring the inherent nastiness of the human condition while mellowing that notion with a life affirming swath of goodness.
Everything that didn't work in the film the first time I saw it nestles into a companionable place when I watched it again and again - the wimpy self-pitying introduction of a boy being taught how to swim by his father who tosses him into the water like he's unloading a sack of unwanted kittens - the mystical subplot of a skinny ghost accompanied by a white dog roaming the stormy nights and seen only by a child with gifted perception - a gay older woman still traumatized by a familial rape in childhood - and several other wayward plot lines which were an attempt at humanist statements but fell short of coherent theme and profoundness.
I was wrong. There is a ghost roaming the stormy night, a special child can hear an old house speak, the scars of childhood can destroy an adulthood, and just because your ancestors were cut-throat pirates doesn't mean you carry the bad seed. The Shipping News is indeed a movie with enough heart and humor to warm the coldest winter, (but apparently not the coldest theatre).
From a popular novel by Annie Prowlx, (Brokeback Mountain) the movie stars Kevin Spacey, no longer too subtle but just perfect as a bewildered man who turns to his new found Newfoundland heritage for guidance, Julianee Moore as a romantic interest with a shameful secret and a recipe for seal flipper pie, and Judie Dench as gay Aunt Agnis.
One thing I didn't miss in that cold theatre was the dynamic portrayal of Petal, the prostitute that marries the protagonist, by Cate Blanchett. All eyes on her in a brief performance that rushes by like a gale wind in hot pants.
There's gay Aunt Agnis in The Shipping News and there's gay Uncle Monty in Withnail and I (1986), a semi-autobiographical British film written and directed by Bruce Robinson. I ran across it one day channel-surfing when Jimi Hendrix's All Along The Watchtower blared out of the speakers sound tracking two English blokes sharing a bottle of whiskey while cruising out of London in an old jalopy. I've been laughing at substance abuse ever since.
"I never said your film reviews suck. I said they were boring."
Blog block and roll. Here are three films I've attached to my soul over the last handful of years. I deem them all worthwhile mental investments.
The decision to abolish capital punishment in Britain in 1965 is partly a result of the wrongful execution of John Evans in 1950, who was convicted of murdering his baby girl and sentenced to death by hanging. 10 Rillington Place (1971) tells that story and the story of the real murderer, serial killer John Christie, who murdered at least eight women in England in the 1940s and '50s, burying some of their bodies in a concealed crawlspace in his apartment after having postmortem sex with them.The first time I watched this movie online, (I unexpectedly just happened to click it on) I was riveted in my seat like I was 10 years old watching Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho for the first time, my hands clenching the armchairs like I was gripping the safety bar on a roller coaster. It is the dismal, hopelessly horrific dark atmosphere and the snail's pace crawl of it that mesmerized me into equal parts repulsion and fascination.
The horror is heightened considerably by the on-location filming at the very address the main murders took place. 10 Rillington Place is a depressing, very British dark and dingy row of apartment houses with rooms, as the British say, not big enough to swing a cat. The infamous street has since been renamed.
Directed by Richard Fleischer, who directed another fine true murder film, The Boston Strangler (1968), and is the son of cartoon animation pioneer Max Fleischer, the movie boasts an exquisite British cast with Richard Attenborough as serial killer John Christie, certainly one of the creepiest movie villains ever to peer luridly out a window, and John Hurt, as the unfortunate and illiterate John Evans, who rallies a performance that cries out for the abolition of the death penalty. But be forewarned - the film is relentlessly grim.
How I hated The Shipping News (2001). I saw it in the dead of winter in the coldest theatre in western New York, so frigid that the small handful of audience in attendance were hunched over, huddled in winter garb -gloves, scarves, hats - attempting to conserve body warmth, as if we were sitting around a life saving campfire and not looking up at a movie screen. That the movie screen was projecting the winter season in Newfoundland was like experiencing a survival endurance test.
After repeated viewings, (the beautiful blue and white Newfoundland scenery kept getting my attention when it ran on cable), I saw another film entirely. It's a rosy-cheeked black comedy exploring the inherent nastiness of the human condition while mellowing that notion with a life affirming swath of goodness.
Everything that didn't work in the film the first time I saw it nestles into a companionable place when I watched it again and again - the wimpy self-pitying introduction of a boy being taught how to swim by his father who tosses him into the water like he's unloading a sack of unwanted kittens - the mystical subplot of a skinny ghost accompanied by a white dog roaming the stormy nights and seen only by a child with gifted perception - a gay older woman still traumatized by a familial rape in childhood - and several other wayward plot lines which were an attempt at humanist statements but fell short of coherent theme and profoundness.
I was wrong. There is a ghost roaming the stormy night, a special child can hear an old house speak, the scars of childhood can destroy an adulthood, and just because your ancestors were cut-throat pirates doesn't mean you carry the bad seed. The Shipping News is indeed a movie with enough heart and humor to warm the coldest winter, (but apparently not the coldest theatre).
From a popular novel by Annie Prowlx, (Brokeback Mountain) the movie stars Kevin Spacey, no longer too subtle but just perfect as a bewildered man who turns to his new found Newfoundland heritage for guidance, Julianee Moore as a romantic interest with a shameful secret and a recipe for seal flipper pie, and Judie Dench as gay Aunt Agnis.
One thing I didn't miss in that cold theatre was the dynamic portrayal of Petal, the prostitute that marries the protagonist, by Cate Blanchett. All eyes on her in a brief performance that rushes by like a gale wind in hot pants.
There's gay Aunt Agnis in The Shipping News and there's gay Uncle Monty in Withnail and I (1986), a semi-autobiographical British film written and directed by Bruce Robinson. I ran across it one day channel-surfing when Jimi Hendrix's All Along The Watchtower blared out of the speakers sound tracking two English blokes sharing a bottle of whiskey while cruising out of London in an old jalopy. I've been laughing at substance abuse ever since.
Heavy pot smoking, booze galore, delicious decadence, a drug dealer who behaves as though he just stepped off a toadstool in Alice in Wonderland, a week in the country and a soft charming center detailing that special time in life when you know it's time to step up to the plate of adulthood or die. Indulge in this film and enjoy but be prepared to take in a little culture on the side. This ain't no Cheech and Chong pot-o-rama.
p>Two young unemployed British actors at the end of the swinging sixties, living in squalor in a London flat, manage through some manipulation to take vacation in the country in the dilapidated cottage of Uncle Monty.
And that's pretty much it. Except that you may never meet a more comical, pathetic and beloved character than Withnail in all of movie-dom. The would-be Shakespearean actor is a feast for the amused mind made celebratory by the fact that this role was actor Richard E. Grant's debut movie performance.
And at the risk of sounding like just any movie critic, (bad grammar keeps me unique), Richard Griffiths portrayal of Uncle Monty, the queer once thespian, eccentric aging faggot, grieved to the soul with dramatic remorse and wailing to the wind lamenting former lovers, is just about the most assured, perfectly nuanced comedic performance I have ever seen.
And I like the character of "I" too - writer Robinson's injection of his young self, played by Paul McGann, the only solid character, although seeming on the verge of drug collapse, we dare relate to.
It's not quite the perfect movie. The sparks subdue a bit by the time Withnail and I get to the country, but their odyssey is a trip well worth taking. Withnail and I secures a strong cult following with websites devoted to it and a deadly game that attempts to duplicate all the drinks consumed by Withnail in the film. My favorite bit - out of alcohol and suffering withdrawal, Withnail consumes the last remaining lighter fluid in a bottle and then reaches for the anti-freeze when "I" warns, "you should never mix your drinks".
Withnail and I was co-produced by the late George Harrison.
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