The Philadelphia Story - 1940 - VHS

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Late in the evening last Thursday I got a bit of a wild hair and decided on a whim, "I'm going to go through my old VHS collection!" So that's what I'll be doing on my lone nights off. (I watched The Front for the first time in over five years this night too. Notes on this to come.)

I began with the best in my collection, George Cukor's classic romantic comedy, The Philadelphia Story. It's been years since I've seen it, so I was long overdue for the good buzz of Katherine Hepburn giggling in a champagne stupor while Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant swoon about her (and we swoon back, of course.) It's practically written in stone that this movie is one of the greats, but being away from it for so long I kind of forgot. I've taken the hugest sigh of relief after watching it, and can report fully that it is (it really is) the perfect movie.

I shouldn't be surprised to say so, but what struck me most was how much energy the script and the characters have. For those who haven't seen it, or at least not in awhile, the basic story begins with Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) and C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), as an unhappily married couple in a playfully violent and dialogue-less process of divorce. Tracy dumps his belongings on the front porch in the opening scene; he pushes her to the ground with a threatening fist for more, but retrains himself. As quick as Dexter is gone, we're fast-forwarded to Tracy's new life, on the eve of her second marriage to a stiff named George. And in one slim day and night the entire story transpires.

Gossip rag columnist Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) teams up with his frank female photographer, Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), to capture the Lords in their family home. One hitch, Dexter plants the unwanted journalists as blackmail against Tracy and her father, since the old man was caught on camera having an affair. To avoid having her family's name smeared in the tabloids, Tracey lets them in, and henceforth Dexter, who's wrangling to get his wife back. Between snippy and witty remarks, Macaulay falls in love with Tracy; Liz longs for Macaulay; and George grumbles about humorless—who Tracy reflects in her drunken voice characterization, "Hello, George."

That's my favorite moment. 67 years later and this movie is brand new. And anyway, who can't fall in love with Jimmy Stewart as he gazes at Katherine Hepburn with such tenderness? I don't know a single male actor, living or deceased that emotes so much love with as much subtlety.

Something To Cheer About - 2007 - DVD

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Look for this film in theaters next week, Friday, April 27th.

Something To Cheer About is a short hour-long documentary that reunites the 1955 Crispus Attucks High School basketball team, the first all-black team to win the Indiana state championship. It was a brief history lesson about the boys, the dilapidated neighborhood they lived in, and the racial injustices they faced at the time, but it was too nostalgic about those racially tense times to take at face value. The biggest problem for me (which will be expanded upon in my review in Four Magazine next week) is how the central subject (i.e. racism) is so blatantly smoothed over as if it's not an issue anymore. The film features the players now full grown and elderly, but never addresses their class and social status in present times--and a good guess is because it hasn't changed much at all. I found it increasingly frustrating to take the film seriously, to turn a shining smile at the story on-screen, because at the end of the day, these guys who were discriminated against fifty years ago still are today. The climax of the story was a half-time honorarium at an Indiana Pacers game, but you could see the confused faces in the stadium that were unsure of who exactly these people were, and accordingly watched their perfunctory applause.

The film was labor of love for its director Betsy Blankenbaker, and she says that the remaining players are currently "security guards, doormen...some were just unemployed." On the other hand, one is the dean of a school, and another is the legendary Oscar Robertson. So let's hear about that story---where are these guys? How have they worked through discrimination? How do they continue to? How have some succeeded, and others not? In short, based on the history Blankenbaker gives us, there are much greater social ramifications for these players, but we never hear it, and unfortunately, that's what's going to make this history relevant to our time now.

The Wings of Eagles - 1957 - DVD

Sunday, April 8, 2007

The Wings of Eagles is practically a remake of The Long Gray Line, or even a story reminiscent of Mister Roberts considering the sentiment for the military Ford repeats through each. It's movies like this that disrupts my joy for Ford, because it's just too damn patriotic. I think Ford fares better working with Westerns, where he can be just as patriotic but with a rougher edge. By virtue of the cowboy setting his characters are going to be angrier and a lot more vulnerable, but once he frames clean-cut soldiers in a sterile modern military environment, they're sort of dull.

John Wayne plays Frank W. 'Spig' Wead, a Navy man at odds with a rival in the Army. The interactions between each ringleader and their posse is cartoonish. Their fights are staged under the whip of tight choreography: their fighting in one room leads them linearly into and across other rooms; a door opens and they fall into the obstacles that room has in store, in once instance a swimming pool. Scenes like these are funny, but they're taken out of time. The slapstick scenes are almost too clever for their own good, because it's too overwhelming to return to the droning military drama when they're over.

One point of interest, however, is the stock footage from Navy filmstrips and direct clips from his earlier military-sponsored film, The Battle of Midway.

The Wings of Eagles was made in cooperation with the U.S. Navy.

"Pre-Show for the Optical Unconscious!"

Friday, March 30, 2007

Below are the four movies screened at the U of Chi's pre-show for the Student Conference in Cinema Studies, the highlights of which are reviewed at Scarlett Cinema.

Swing You Sinners (1930)
The Mascot (1934)
Street of Crocodiles (1986)
Faust(1994)

For the record, I am a virgin to all Quay Brothers' films, but my bloated expectations of them were met when I finally saw Street of Crocodiles. It bears a striking resemblance (at least from my memory) to the Nine Inch Nails "Closer" video seen here:

Images like the heart connected to electrical mechanisms are probably the closest comparison to the creaking structure in Street, and they both take place within a contained space, the subjects moved invisibly by an external source--or at least it seems. The mechanisms take on a life of their own (they are animated, somehow), but taking a look at "Closer" for the first time in years it's clear the music video is far more concerned with carnal instincts and images of the flesh--and is punctuated affectionately by Trent Reznor's lyric "I want to fuck you like an animal." Yeah. Street of Crocodiles doesn't quite go down that route, but they both have a frightening quality that's enabled by the domains they inhabit; both pictures have a surgical look to them, with the Quay Brothers' film being the more precise vivisection of mechanical movement. The NIN video is decidedly computerized in comparison. The humid meat locker that Reznor stands in is interrupted with pictures of other humans, or at least subjects that resemble the human form, making it not nearly as Closterphobic as Street. There is a definite roof over our heads in the miniature room of Street of Crocodiles, not so with "Closer," but it evoked the memory just the same.

To see for yourself, here's clip of the Quays' film--it's much colder, and a lot creakier. (turn the sound off---that's a Tool song in the background!):

confusion calls! (the visitor part 0)

isn't life confusing?!?

i've always thought so, but hey i guess with a brain the size of a peanut things don't make as much sense to me as to others... bear with me, but as you'll see everything i've dealt with today has mucked up my understanding of the world...

so in my effort to settle into a "normal" life i've just gotten the means to stay "in touch" with people... though i'm very confused as to how i'm touching them, and more to the point why they'd want me to touch them? my claws are kinda sharp...

why do i need to be able to "reach" people?... okay you humans have weird phrases for saying talking to... this would be me worse then touching people! my arms are way too short to reach anything!!!...

well back to the question i asked in the first place... why do i need to be able to "reach" people? the department of conservation insisted that i get in contact with them fairly soon so that they can start their monitoring and conservation program around me... i am again the only tyrannosaur in new zealand, making me very endangered...


there was one other person i hadn't talked to in far too long as well... that was of course my agent peter bond...

so to solve this overall communication problem i seemed to have built up too... which can happen when you waste two months on a countdown of doom!... i popped into a store on my way to work and bought a "cell" phone (the major cause of my confusion other then these language things)...


well here i am in the midst of my first call totally baffled out of my tiny brain. i know i called peter, and that i was supposed to be talking to him about progressing my life, but it's not working the way my old phone in canada worked!

but i guess i'm jumping to the middle of the story. sorry about that people of the innerweb. see all this confusion... it just doesn't suit me so well...

let's jump to right after i bought my new "phone"...

2 hours earlier...

having just bought this new phone i went into work at the otago museum. with no sign of intrusion or danger to the galleries or displays i figured i could waste some time to investigate my phone.

after all what did they mean by "cell" phone?

_

now i couldn't see how my phone was alive, that alone made of cells. as far as i could tell it was like any other ordinary phone... only missing a cord... yet the name implied it was some sort of bacterial communication wonder. i just wasn't getting something about this!

i resorted to the only thing that made sense to me... SCIENCE!

to do so i made use of the bestest tool for the job... conveniently placed within a few meters of my optimum patrol spot at work. so if anything did happen to my charge (the museum's stuff) i'd be in position to act!...

that tool. the microbescope! its like i told you people of the innerweb, it totally is coming in handy!

placing my new acquisition under the scope i was going to learn its secrets...

okay even though i've worked in various museums throughout the years (well okay two. the tyrrell for 3 years, and the otago museum for 3 weeks) and seen countless people operate scopes of various sorts, the thing is i still have no clue how to use one!

i've always wanted to be a sciencologist, but naturally my brain capacity has been a limitation. proving that i just can't do it i can't even work the most basic of science instruments. a microbescope.

when i try to look at the cells in my phone all i get is a big phone shaped back thing in the lens! so totally not like guys who work these things in the movies see!

so here was confusion point the first people of the web wide world...

i had hoped my confusion would remain to just this one major, but indirect enigma. alas it wasn't to be. cause the instant i made my first call i was in for a humdinger...

answering my call was none other then peter bond... special talent agent extraordinaire.

this time he said he was somewhere in London, and though he claimed it was the high life he was seeking there i coulda sworn it sounded a little dodgy (in kiwi that means suspicious). what with sirens and similar things in the background... or so i thought... he reassured me that it was just filming of a new movie... alright why would peter lie to me?

he was pleased (as he always is) to hear from me. "it's been a long time traum baby!"

i told him all about my last month and a half...

by the end of the story he was very impressed."traum i'm loving the fact that you solved all that, and didn't need my help once. i wish all my assets or uh clients i mean were so self managing as you."

"the only thing i want you to do traum is to work on spicing up your blog a bit more," was peter's only compliant.

i really wanted to know what he had in mind for my blog. i told him some of the stuff i'd done like beefing up the sidebar with things like the rearranging of my links (oh people of the innerweb if there are broken links cause of that please let me know), posting the tyrannosaur poem, and putting the cast of my life on there. also my new blog banner and blog title...

expecting him to deliver me a wealth of his talenty knowledge on how to make my blog even better suddenly something happened on peter's end that confused me...

out of no where i heard another phone ring!?! thinking it was just someone else's, and that peter was just close to them, i asked him some more questions about my blog. suddenly he interrupted me "sorry traumador. i'm going to have take this text. i'll be right back okay."

just like that MY talent agent put me on hold! well or at least he held my phone away from him as he proceeded to call someone else on his other phone...

i couldn't make much out of the other conversation, but i coulda sworn i heard him say the name larry... which would be a big coincidence considering my cousin of the same name... but i guess peter as the highly skilled talent agent he is would have a lot of clients, and surely odds are high that one would have a name similar to my cousin... the odds of him being the agent to two t-rexs though that seems less... doesn't it?

so here i was. with my new mysterious cell phone. able to call anyone from anywhere, and my special talent agent wasn't willing to talk to me... i was mighty confused about that!

it's about here i started to tell the story isn't it people of the web wide world isn't it?

i think this part is what confused me most. peter is my special talent agent. why isn't he helping me with my special talents? i called first. whoever this other person is can't they wait. they did call after me. i have to wait for things all the time when i'm not the first person there... isn't that how it works?

man just when i thought things were turning around for me, and back to good...

finally peter came back on "traum are you still there?" he asked. "look i know this is a funny request, but can you give me your current address?" right after he asked that though he said a strange thing "yeah he's here."

whose here? i hadn't said anything that alone about anybody... then i realized. he was still talking to the other person, and now me at the same time! what was going on?

reluctantly i told him... if i couldn't trust my talent agent who could i trust after all... as i told him my details he repeated them... clearly for the other person to get...

after i was done telling him "you get all that... perfect... absolutely... that's what i'm here for... don't mention it... you take it easy you big lug. be in touch soon," peter happily concluded. with that i could tell he'd hung up on the mystery caller...

"who was that?" i wanted to know.

"oh no one too important," peter seemed to hesitate. "just one of my more high needs clients. definitely not of your stability or potential let me assure you though. have to give guys like him a little extra love and care. they can't all be troopers like you my little predatory friend!"

well that would explain why that person took priority over me i guess... i did manage to wait patiently... then something else occurred to me...

"why did they need my address though?" i inquired.

"oh that," if i didn't know any better i could have sworn peter was at a loss for words. however with my peanut brain i don't know any better... "i was just facilitating a possible gig for you is all, but of course they need your contact info."

huh? peter wasn't making sense.

"wait wasn't that a client not a employer?" i was even more confused then all the times earlier in the day.

"remember traumador i have many different types of clients. i am a talent agent after all, and people and dinosaurs mind you all have different kinds of talents," he quickly answered. "point is this you might get a visit in the near future from my client with a very important offer that could do wonders for your future, but they've asked me not to divulge too much in fears of... well let's just say risking your success."

what? a visit? from who? man i seriously was wondering if i'd gone insane or something. or my brain had finally been overloaded with enough!

"let's refocus this onto you traumador," peter went on." as for your blog, here's what i want you to do. all those touches on the sidebar and layout are good, but you need to improve the content. stop telling us just stuff about what you're up to. tell us what you think and feel about the human world. let us see the sensitive, and thinking dinosaur you are. let us the outside world see why it is that you deserve to be allowed into our world, and deserve to be allowed you do traum!"

okay that was more like it!

i forgot for that moment what had just happened. my talent agent was back, and man was he telling me what i needed it hear!

i'd have to figure out what was need to up the anti on my blog, and what new things i could do to increase its "traumador identity"...

writing about the whole day here now though i still agree i need to do that to my blog... but i also have to wonder what this whole "you might get a visit in the near future" business was about too...

special treat

well people of the world wide web due to all the commotion and craziness of the countdown of doom i've neglected a key promise i made to you guys a while back. i'd hoped to be sure to get a vlog up every 25 posts or so, but if you were paying attention i've gone a few over that with no vlog.

now sadly i still haven't had time in my busy schedule (what with the new job, and figuring out what life in dunedin is REALLY about) to get a vlog done. however the crazy guys at prehistoric insanity (the nice people who make my vlogs possible) have posted the UNOFFICIAL royal tyrrell museum training video. guess who it's about...

that's right... this is the true story of how it was all those years ago i got my job in drumheller!

it is kind of a fitting thing for me to post right now. the museum is no doubt in the midst of gearing up for a new summer, and this will be the first summer in years i haven't been there!

fortuently i don't have time to get sad or homesick about that last fact.

so take a trip back into my past... the year was 2004...

fool around in april

just when i thought things would be settling in to a sort of normal state the unthinkable has happened!

so there i was walking beside a nuclear reactor when all of a sudden BOOM!!!

the stupid thing exploded! bombarding me with all sorts of rays and radiation. for the first few minutes i felt fine...

suddenly i could feel my body getting bigger and my DNA changing inside me. next thing i knew...

i'd transformed into the giantnormous mutant monster

TRAUMZILLA!!!

destroyer of man, consumer of forests, and scourge of society!

_

my first rampage was through the patch of largest trees in all of DUNEDIN!!!

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april fools!

_

man you'd be kinda stupid (more so then even me!) to have fallen for that one. it's just a funny picture i took using perspective... or no... come to think of it i think craig said prospecting (though not sure what looking for fossils or gold has to do with pictures?)... anyways that tree is like a million times bigger then me in real life.

_

as much fun as it would be to be that tall and scary i'm still sadly the smallest t-rex you ever did see!

_
boy oh boy people of the innerweb, it sure is nice to have free time to pull jokes like that. it's even a bigger relief to have completed the criteria set out for me by the government. now that i've survived the countdown of doom with all its nonsense it is nice to be able to just write a NORMAL blog entry for a change...
_
so what have i been up to now that i'm a legal extracontinental organism of new zealand. well first thing was first. i needed to move into my new home...

that is now here: the dunedin botanic garden!

still can't believe my luck on this one! it may not be a paradise for us none-extinct dinosaurs like the tyrrell, but hey that didn't quite hold up anyway.

if you're into the outdoors, forest, and having a lot of people over then i have the best home ever. it's bigger then even a mansion! ten square kilometers or so i've heard...

this particular view is the living room i've decided. it is very nice, and has a great view. however it has next to no good shelter, and is packed with visitors all the time. i don't want people going through my stuff or wandering into my room.

so yeah this will be staying my living room for now.

so the question became where do i find my room?

well unlike other people's homes mine has signs directing you to all the different places located within. (also shows how much bigger my home is due to it's need for signs... kinda a nice nostalgia factor too. the tyrrell used to have signs all over the place in it...)

i opted to check out the higher ground where less people tended to wander. on the signs were a bunch of "dells" which i'd never checked out (and i was curious about. i've never seen computers grow in the wild...)

as i wandered it looked a little less then promising though. there was a really groomed and stepped hill, but it was even worse for shelter then the living room. it can rain a LOT in dunedin...

that all changed the instant that i hit the entrance to the "rhodoendron" "dell". wow what a cool mysterious jungly entry tunnel into the wild...

i had to check this out.

seeing the jungleness of the place something deep within me stirred with excitement... was this something to do with my tyrannosaur instincts? ever since my quest into BC i've found i like forests... especially when i was on the run after the eco-center incident. i rather enjoyed that night out in the forest...

it somehow felt right. my being here in this spot i mean. like i was supposed to be in such surroundings...

even more interesting was the pathway that started in the middle of the dell. according to local legend the end(s) of this trail are unknown, and it is something of a maze throughout the more deep parts of garden, and that none who has ever ventured in has ever returned... having seen the end anyways.

now at first i wasn't too sure what to make of this story...

heading down the trail just a little though i began to see a bit of the weirdness. with seemingly no reason the path suddenly arched up about the dell and up onto one of the surrounding hills, but ALSO kept going through the heart of the dell...

weird...

i'm going to have to look into this maze thing later...

for now i've found what i was looking for... off the path in the forest i found this nice little isolated spot. with nice tree and fern cover, a soft fungus floor, and most important in the middle of the wild. next to no sign of humans in here...

home sweet home!

all i have to do is make it a little more lived in, but i think this will be a perfect base from which to start my new life people of the innerweb...