Turtle Blues

Lately, if I get a window seat on an airplane I look for humans when the plane is taking off or landing. I see plenty of cars scutting along. I rarely, if ever, see actual humans, even when the planes are low enough to the ground to make them out. We have become a country of turtles or hermit crabs. We spend most of our time under a shell of some kind.

-- J

A little perspective

Balloon Juice:

If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

"Until then, I just can’t seem to get all worked up about the crazy scary black preacher that Obama has to 'throw under the bus.'"

The media needs to be talking about the important things, not former preachers and lapel pins.

Notes on "Gulliver's Travels"

Gulliver's Travels: should be required reading for software people. Big Endians, Little Endians, lots of natural law philosophy, and Yahoos! I had forgotten about the chapters on Laputans and Balnibarbians which together catalog everything that can go bad in a software project.

- J

Notes on "Figaro"

The Berkeley Rep. is presenting Figaro, on an adaptation from Theatre de la Jeune Lune of the Beaumarchais play, The Marriage of Figaro, and the Mozart opera reimagined by wrapping it a flashback seen from the perspective of the French Revolution. The play was apparently controversial in its time and some have said it was a precursor to the Revolution. It is an interesting concept and nicely executed. It was rather more opera than drama, though. I imagine if I were more familiar with the original opera I would have been better entertained.

- J

Notes on "Atonement"

The 2007 movie Atonement felt emotionally false to me. Very nice cinematography and competent acting, but to what end?

- J

Notes on "Fellini's 8 1/2"

I remember being enthralled seeing 8½ in the seventies. Seeing it recently, I felt less involved. Some individual scenes are quite memorable: a coming of age memory on the beach where the village outcast dances for the young Fellini and his school mates, a scene taking the water at a health spa, and a scene on an aborted movie set. Unusually for an Italian movie, there is no whorehouse, but there is a fantasy harem sequence. It amounts to about the same thing I suppose.

- J

Notes on "La Vie en Rose"

La Vie en Rose is a biopic about Édith Piaff. It is told as a sequence of montages unrelated in time. Unlike many films that use this technique, there is no wrapping narrative that explains the jumps. This is not a sequence of interconnected memories. Rather, it appears, the filmmaker made a standard biopic in standard narrative order: star as a child has traumatic experience, star gets foot in the door by chance, star struggles to adjust to changing tastes, star has problems with drug abuse, star abandons those who love star, star collapses on stage, star has comeback concert, star dies. I think they realized that they had done this, so decided to randomize the chronology to so that it would not be so apparent.

- J

Notes on "Savages"

I heard from several source that The Savages was a movie about disfunctional siblings caring for an emotionally distant parent with dementia, but funny! I can confirm all but the last clause. It was a well acted movie and emotionally honest, but it was not funny, at least not for me.

- J