Seventh heaven

When I first became a LAMB and I saw some blogs with these "awards" festooned all over their sites, nieve me actually thought they represented physical awards, like a golden Oscar statuette. When I realized otherwise, I thought, well, okay, whatever, but I'll certainly never get one... 

A year and a half later and my, how things change! I have the adorable Ruth from Flix Chatter to thank for recognizing WSW with this latest blog "award," the 7X7 Link Award, which I will gladly display with pride after I fulfill the requirements that go with this particular one. Apparently there's some information I have to provide...

1: Tell everyone something about yourself that nobody else knows.
"Nobody" meaning my blog audience, or "nobody" meaning in life?

Sheesh, as if I don't reveal enough about myself in this blog... Okay, how's this: when I was about - oh, I dunno, six or seven, perhaps - I was walking home from school and I climbed up on the ledge of a front garden and balanced myself along it. It couldn't have been more than a foot off of the ground, but I was still a little kid and so when I inevitably fell off it and busted my ass on the concrete, it hurt like hell. I landed on my left hip and the bruise it left on my leg, on the front of my thigh, has stayed there ever since. It's down to the size of  about a penny and it's the sort of thing you wouldn't notice unless I pointed it out to you. I can just barely feel it now. It's one of those bodily imperfections I've learned to live with, though it didn't scare me from perching up on ledges and walking along them. I still do it every once in awhile.



2: Link to a post I think fits the following categories:
- The Most Beautiful Piece. My post on the film The Way breaks with the traditional format in a particularly appropriate manner.
- The Most Helpful Piece. I like to think my guide on surviving a summer full of blockbusters was helpful.
- The Most Popular Piece. In terms of hits, that would be my Rocky Horror Picture Show post by a very wide margin. In terms of comments, that would be my piece on LAMB podcasts.
- The Most Controversial Piece. Debatable if I've ever had any truly "controversial" posts, but I suppose the closest I ever came to it was my argument for why Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 wouldn't get nominated for Best Picture.
- The Most Surprisingly Successful Piece. A joke post on fairy tale adaptations I'd like to see has gotten a surprisingly high amount of traffic.
- The Most Underrated Piece. I really liked my Born on the Fourth of July piece. Short and to the point.
- The Most Pride-worthy Piece. Hedwig and the Angry Inch probably best exemplifies what WSW is all about in terms of my approach to writing about movies.

3: Pass this on to 7 fellow bloggers.
Ah. The gift that keeps on giving. Well, I'm not sure who does and doesn't have one yet, so I hope no one gets any repeats...

Alex has to get one, of course. Raquelle too. And it looks like neither Page nor Becky have gotten in on this yet, so there ya go. Here's one for Brandie and her cohorts, and one for Jacqueline, and if I may be permitted to extend this outside the film blogger field, then I should like to give one to Michelle also.

There you are. Hope I did this right.

MUST-READ interview with a video store owner

I'll have more to say about this article on Tuesday, but for now, you absolutely must read this wonderful interview conducted by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry with Joe Martin, owner of a Brooklyn video store on the verge of closing after ten years. They talk at length about the recent home video market and the changes it has seen and they defend the existence of not only video stores, but VHS tapes as well. Great read.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games
seen @ Center Cinema 6, Sunnyside, Queens, NY
3.27.12


Recently, I wrote about a blind spot I tend to have for certain fanboy movies, and I tried to be as honest as possible with myself about the possible reasons why. Looking back on it now, I feel fairly confident that the conclusions I came to are the right ones, based on my experience and my biases. One thing that subsequently occurred to me came as I wrote to my pal Bibi about this: in recent years, I've been cutting myself off from more and more aspects of pop culture that I used to indulge in all the time - comics, TV, modern music - and it could be that I'm risking a sort of cultural alienation if I continue. And while becoming a hermit is not completely without a certain appeal, I'm fairly sure that it's not what I really want when push comes to shove.


Okay, so maybe not everything that's popular sucks. Intellectually, I know that, but it's a mindset that I'm trying to take baby steps away from. Won't be easy, but the first step I took was this week, when I saw The Hunger Games, a movie that came with a mountain of hype behind it (and we all know how I feel about hype), based on an unfamiliar-to-me series of young adult novels.

It was good, however I thought it was also a pastiche of a lot of similar futuristic bloodsport/reality television/youth-sploitation movies. The common comparison I keep seeing is to the Japanese film Battle Royale, but I saw elements of The Running Man, The Truman Show, Logan's Run, Westworld, etc. Still, it sustained my interest, thanks in large part to another great performance from Jennifer Lawrence. The early scenes in her home district, in fact, reminded me a whole lot of her breakthrough film Winter's Bone.


I really could've done without all the relentless cutting! Gary Ross directed Games, and this looks very different from either Pleasantville (another movie about teenagers thrust into an artificial environment against their will for the entertainment of others) or Dave. Games has more moving camera shots, more handheld shots, and it looks grittier in comparison. Non-stop editing and blurry action scenes were never a problem in Ross' other films, and here, especially in the first half, it was relentless to the point of distraction and I hated it. Still, Games is worth seeing for Lawrence alone.

Now normally, this might be the end of it, were it not for a very disturbing trend I've noticed while preparing this piece. Apparently there's a segment of the audience who have read the books and are shocked, SHOCKED, that some characters look differently than how they'd imagined them in the books. Specifically, they're surprised some characters are black. 


Now I knew that Lenny Kravitz was in the movie, so I figured it wouldn't be completely devoid of color, but still, I admit, I consciously kept an eye out for how many non-white characters would be in the film. There were indeed a few, and I had no problem with how they were depicted. The problem is with this portion of Fandom that automatically assumed Games was set in an all-white world.

There's a lot I could say about this, but what it comes down to is simple: when you're part of a privileged majority, one in which your stories, your experiences, your perspective is considered the default setting by unspoken agreement, this kind of reaction, to seeing people who don't look like you, is not surprising at all. You don't have to think about minority representation because it's not an issue you have to worry about. You take it for granted that yours is the "normal" perspective.


This reminds me of a situation a few years ago in which a prominent, white sci-fi author wrote a well-intentioned essay on how to approach writing "the other" in literature. Let's just say it was not well-received by the POCs within the online sci-fi community. My understanding is that the black characters in Games were, in fact, described as such in the book, so how did Fandom Assembled somehow miss that? (Maybe the black characters should've worn hoods.)

See, this is what I meant when I said that Fandom can be disappointing. And because this is an issue that's bigger than Fandom, I'm not sure what can be done about it.


But I don't wanna end this on a down note, so I'll return to my original point. I was mistaken; not everything that's popular sucks, and I'll try to remember that in the future.

Bully for us

The documentary “Bully” will be released without a rating, its distributor, the Weinstein Company, announced Monday in a news release. The decision to release the film unrated comes after a contentious battle between the MPAA and “Bully’s” backers, including its director Lee Hirsch and Hollywood heavyweight Harvey Weinstein. 

The MPAA gave the film — which followed bullied children around for one year and spoke to the families of kids who committed suicide — an R-rating over six uses of the “F” expletive, a decision the Weinstein Company appealed to no avail. Despite criticism from celebrities, including Meryl Streep and Justin Bieber, politicians, educators and writers — who believed the film would be unable to reach its target audience without a PG-13 rating — the MPAA and its chairman, former Senator Chris Dodd, did not back down from their decision.

Like most kids, I had my share of bully problems. I vividly remember two in particular from third grade; their names, if I recall correctly, were Eric and Patrick. My biggest problem as a kid was my great big mouth. It got me into more trouble than I care to remember. At some point in my early childhood, I developed a sense of machismo, and if insulted, I had to respond in kind, which inevitably led to fisticuffs.

Eric and Patrick knew they could bait me, so they did, and often. I don't remember with what; it was probably fat jokes. I got a lot of that growing up. Anyway, they wouldn't even have to beat me up all that often. I got much more verbal abuse from them than anything else. I almost always ended up throwing the first punch, though, and as a result I'd be the one who got in trouble, not them.

I told my father about these guys, and one day he met me after school so that he could see them for himself. Now, I've written here before about what a people person my father was, how gregarious and charming he could be with others. And he wasn't looking for a confrontation per se. He just wanted to talk to Eric and Patrick. And he did.

And he ended up doing the absolute last thing I wanted him to: he befriended them! Why would he do that? I wondered. I wanted him to strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger! What good was becoming their buddy?

Plenty good, as it turned out. Eric and Patrick eventually laid off on me, though it took awhile. Not a solution I would've imagined, but then, it was exactly the sort of thing my father would've thought of. He was not a violent man. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was intellectual in a down-to-earth way, one might even say he was street smart. He knew enough to keep a level head when it came to dealing with bullies.

As a social worker, he'd absolutely have to. He dealt with kids all the time. That's why I know he'd be quite disturbed to read about how serious the problem of bullying in school has become. I believe he'd be in favor of a film that tried to document this situation using real case studies.

But I don't believe he'd be put off by the language such a movie would have. My father wasn't nieve; he worked with enough children to know that many of them use profanity, though he himself never did (and frowned on it in our house). His great gift was the ability to relate to people on multiple levels without the need for profane language of any kind, without coming across as being elitist or judgmental. (Even he had his blind spots, though, but that's another post.) Too many people tend to think that you won't be taken seriously unless you swear, but not my father.

My wonderful sixth grade language arts teacher, Ms. Brooks, once imparted to us that yes, there were indeed times when she said "shit," which shocked and amused us at first - ooooh, teacher said a curse word in class! - but in that particular case she was making a point, that just because she stands in front of a blackboard talking to ten-year-olds all day doesn't make her any less human.

Obviously, I'm in favor of the movie Bully being shown as is, profanity and all, and it's good to see that it will be, MPAA be damned. Language is imperfect, but it's the best thing we have when it comes to communicating. Deciphering what's behind language - the things that go unsaid as well as said - is tricky, and difficult to learn, but if we remain hung up on the words themselves we'll only get so far. And bullying is too critical an issue to let language get in the way of finding solutions.

Fredric March on Broadway

The March-In-March Blogathon is a celebration of the life and career of the actor Fredric March, hosted by the website Sittin' on a Backyard Fence. For a complete list of participating blogs, visit the host site.

Fredric March is remembered today by film historians as one of the few multiple Oscar -winning actors, capturing Best Actor twice for both the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and for Best Picture winner The Best Years of Our Lives, as well as starring in such renowned classics as Design For Living, Les Miserables, Anna Karenina, A Star is Born, Death of a Salesman and Inherit the Wind. He was also a notable stage actor, with a career on Broadway that ran concurrently with his Hollywood career, and which led to great successes as well.

March first appeared on Broadway in the mid-20s after working as an extra in films shot in New York. In 1926 he starred in a comedy called The Devil in the Cheese (with Bela Lugosi, among others). By the decade's end, he signed with Paramount Pictures and began making movies full-time, receiving his first of his five Oscar nominations for 1930's The Royal Family of Broadway and winning the Oscar for Jekyll two years later.


In 1927, March married actress Florence Eldridge, who performed with him on film and television as well as on stage. In 1938, March returned to Broadway with Eldridge in a comedy called Yr. Obedient Husband, which was a huge bomb. They publicly apologized for it after it opened, taking out pages in the New York papers and running a cartoon of a trapeze artist missing his partner and saying "Oops! Sorry!"


In 1942, however, March and Eldridge would hit it big on Broadway with Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth, with Tallulah Bankhead, and directed by Elia Kazan. An unusual family comedy, it embodies different time periods simultaneously and contains a number of Biblical and ancient Greek references. The play would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

In 1946, March made Best Years and would go on to win his second Best Actor Oscar for it, and later that same year he and Eldridge starred in Ruth Gordon's Years Ago. Gordon, a legendary writer/actress known for acting in such films as Harold and Maude and Rosemary's Baby and writing films like Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike (with her husband Garson Kanin), wrote Years Ago as an autobiographical account of her teenage years, when she first pursued a stage career. March played her father (Eldridge played her mother), and he would go on to win the Tony Award for Best Actor in the Tonys' inaugural year of 1947. In 1953 Gordon would adapt her play into the film The Actress, with Spencer Tracy in the March role.


In the 1950s, March continued alternating between the stage and film, plus he began appearing in television productions, including a 1954 anthology series called The Best of Broadway, in which he revived his role in The Royal Family of Broadway. In 1957 March and Eldridge starred in perhaps their biggest stage play, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the tumultuous Tyrone family, which mirrored O'Neill's own. 

March and Eldridge played James and Mary Tyrone in the Broadway debut (the world premiere was in Stockholm), which also included Jason Robards Jr. March won his second Tony Award for his role, and the play won Best Play. In 1962, Sidney Lumet would direct a film version with Katharine Hepburn. March would later call Journey his favorite stage play.


March would make one last Broadway play after Journey, Paddy Chayefsky's Gideon in 1961, about the Biblical judge, starring Douglas Campbell in the title role and March as an angel. March's film career continued, including roles in Seven Days in May and The Iceman Cometh, before dying in 1975. A complete list of his Broadway roles can be found here.

Casablanca

Casablanca
seen @ College Point Multiplex Cinemas, College Point, Queens, NY
3.21.12

I have so many thoughts about Casablanca that I find I can't arrange them in a seamless narrative, so I'll have to list them point-by-point instead:

- I'm more convinced than ever that movies need to be seen on a big screen with a (good) audience, especially classic movies. I don't care what anybody says, watching a movie, any movie, on an iPod is not really watching it. This is a point I've made here before and I'll continue making it for as long as I write this blog.

I had seen Casablanca before, naturally, but it wasn't until last night that I truly appreciated it. On a big screen you notice things you wouldn't on a TV or a computer monitor - and yes, I know they make TVs bigger now, but not everyone owns those widescreen ones (yet), and even the biggest of them still can't compare to a movie screen.

I also had a good audience to watch it with. They clapped at the scene where Victor leads the crowd at Rick's into a chorus of "La Marseillaise" to drown out the singing Nazis, and at least a couple of women actually hissed every time Renault's boss came on screen! And of course, everyone cheered when Rick finally killed him.

This was the rare movie where I sat in the middle of the row instead of on the end. I had no choice; I was waiting on line for candy, and by the time I got inside the room it was mostly full. I sat next to an old dude with a younger companion and they exchanged brief but quiet asides throughout the first half. Didn't bother me too much; I can hardly begrudge a little talking in appreciation of a movie like this. The old guy breathed kinda heavily, though, and that bothered me a little more, but what can you do?

WSW Rerun: Rocky IV

Circumstances have forced me to go with a repeat for the first time today, but I'll be back on Thursday with a post about the Casablanca anniversary screening. In the meantime, enjoy this re-mastered (spell-checked, pictures added) post from November 2010 about the movie Rocky IV. This is one of the first posts where I began to feel like maybe I had found my rhythm. It's about the movie, but it's also about my childhood, my father, the Cold War, and one of my old neighborhoods as well. As most of you know by now, I write about way more than just the movies I see, and this early post is as fine an example of that as you'll get. Back with new stuff on Thursday.

Rocky IV