From The Big Short

From the last minutes of The Big Short (dir. Adam McKay, 2015). Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) is on the phone:

“I have a feeling that in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people.”

And Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) follows up with voiceover narration:

“But Mark was wrong. In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agencies executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled. And Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries.

Just kidding.

The banks took the money the American people gave them and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people. And this time, even teachers.”

That last sentence puzzled me — it seems an especially novel charge. But at least one deep thinker at the Heritage Foundation did indeed blame teachers’ unions for the housing bubble.

I strongly recommend The Big Short , which takes an inventive approach to telling a Strangelovian story. Breaks in the fourth wall and explanatory cameos by Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, Margot Robbie, and Richard Thaler add to the general sense of unreality. This film would make a nice double-bill with Inside Job (dir. Charles Ferguson, 2010): two sides of the same rotten coin.

[Paragraph breaks for Vennett’s voiceover are mine.]

Pear crate art

[Don Juan California pears. As seen earlier this week on Magnolia Boulevard, Burbank, California. Click for a larger view.]

More crate art
Blue Goose oranges : Encyclopedia Brown : Repetition pears : Sunkist oranges : Tweed oranges

Orange enamel art

[Juan Esteban Perez, Burning Sunset (1970). Enamel on copper, silver wire. As seen at the Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, earlier this week. This work is part of the exhibition Little Dreams in Glass And Metal: Enameling in America, 1920 to the Present. Click for a larger view.]

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange batik art : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange dress art : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange parking art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

Thirteen more movies

All of which I can recommend with enthusiasm.

Happy-Go-Lucky (dir. Mike Leigh, 2008). Sally Hawkins as Poppy Cross, an indefatigably cheerful, funny, kind teacher. It’s other people who have life the wrong way round. The fourth Mike Leigh film we’ve seen.

*

Phffft (dir. Mark Robson, 1954). Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as partners whose marriage flickers and dies before coming back to life. Two comic geniuses at play. Best moment: mambo. With Kim Novak in her second credited film role. Bonus feature: a bachelor pad with a bearskin rug.

*

Good Neighbor Sam (dir. David Swift, 1964). Jack Lemmon as a suburban everyman involved in a scheme to secure his wife’s best friend’s inheritance. I imagine that this film represents grown-up, slightly risqué comedy before “the Sixties” began. With Mike Connors, Dorothy Provine, and the ill-fated Romy Schneider. Also featuring the Bradbury Building and the Hi-Los.

*

The Ox-Bow Incident (dir. William Wellman, 1943). Mob action and lynching in nineteenth-century Nevada. That the ending seems inevitable in no way detracts from the movie’s power. Such a cast: Dana Andrews, Frank Conroy, Jane Darwell, Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Anthony Quinn, Leigh Whipper, and others. Even the Bowery Boys’ Billy Benedict shows up. How had I never seen this movie before?

*

A Borrowed Identity (dir. Eran Riklis, 2014). A young Palestinian man among young Israelis at a school for the arts. A film about friendship, kinship, eros, selfhood, and cultural constraints. How much can one change before ceasing to be oneself?

*

Pushover (dir. Richard Quine, 1954). Fred MacMurray in a Double Indemnity -like role as a police detective gone wrong. Kim Novak appears in her first credited film role. Also includes a pocket notebook. I could watch such black-and-white stuff forever.

*

Ball of Fire (dir. Howard Hawks, 1941). Already the subject of this post. Grammar and usage and squirrel fever. One favorite moment: the conga line. Cinematography by Gregg Toland, which means a moment or two of the deep-focus technique even in a light comedy.

*

Lemon Tree (dir. Eran Riklis, 2008). The Israeli Defense Minister moves to a house on the Israel-West Bank border, and a Palestinian woman takes legal action to preserve her lemon grove, which Israeli authorities claim may offer a hiding place for terrorists. Based on true events.

*

Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950). Dana Andrews plays Mark Dixon, a rogue cop with a dark secret in his past. (Notice that even the proprietor of his favorite café knows him only as “Mister Detective,” no last name.) The film’s stationery supplies are the subject of this post.

*

The Lavender Hill Mob (dir. Charles Crichton, 1951). Alec Guinness (Holland) and Stanley Holloway (Pendlebury) plot to steal gold bars, melt them into souvenir Eiffel Towers, and smuggle them out of England. A genial, clever comedy in which everything hinges on a question of pronunciation.

*

Armored Car Robbery (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1950). About as inventive in plot and characterization as its generic title suggests. But Guy Roe’s cinematography is genuinely inventive. And there’s an exchange name. And it’s fun to see William Tallman on the wrong side of the law. (He later played District Attorney Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason .)
*

Crime in the Streets (dir. Donald Siegel, 1956). Teenage gang members and the settlement-house worker (James Whitmore) who tries to steer them straight. With John Cassavettes, Mark Rydell, and Sal Mineo as aspiring psychokillers. Virginia Gregg, character actress of countless television shows, has what must be her finest moment, as a long-suffering mother. A great musical score by Franz Waxman. Watch the opening credits and tell me that this film didn’t influence West Side Story .

*

La Vie de Bohème (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 1992). Our household’s Kaurismäki spree continues, at least intermittently. This loose adaptation of Henri Murger’s novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème looks like a black-and-white French film from the 1950s. Very quietly funny at the expense of creative types. (The composer Schaunard curses a cabdriver who has the nerve to want to charge him for going only a few miles: “The swine!” ) Other favorite bits: the reappearing jacket, the piano performance, and the announcement “I’m going to sit and order a drink” — namely, water. With three Kaurismäki old reliables: Matti Pellonpää, Kari Väänänen, and André Wilms.


[In reverse alphabetical order: Wilms, Väänänen, Pellonpää.]

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Twelve more films
Thirteen recommendations
Fourteen more recommendations

An EXchange name on screen

Armored Car Robbery (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1950) is not especially rich in plot or character development. But it compensates, with Guy Roe’s cinematography and lots of mid-century material culture. The first few images are from the film’s start. We move behind that door to see vertical files and handwritten messages. The messages travel by conveyor belt to a hub of activity. And dig the desk telephone, wooden file trays, and dip pen. Click on any image for a larger view.







Later in the film, someone opens a file cabinet. I would like to think that the needed file sits in a Filex Visible Name Folder, but I can’t be sure. Whatever is printed on the folder is visible, but not readable. (Yes, I slowed down and zoomed in. No luck.)



And there’s an telephone exchange name, written in pencil. I like seeing the shine on the last few digits. SUnset was indeed a genuine exchange name.



Armored Car Robbery is now packaged as film noir. It’s not. It’s a caper movie, cops and robbers. But if those who control the rights to old black-and-white stuff believe it can be made more marketable if labeled film noir , that’s fine by me. As long as it gets to DVD.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire

Mystery actor

He seems to be realizing that he likes the taste of blood, even his own. Do you recognize him? I think I would have, but his name flashed on the screen (opening credits) just as this shot began. Leave your best guess in the comments.

More mystery actors
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Mystery actor

Do you recognize him? I didn’t. Leave your best guess in the comments.

Here are links to posts with a dozen more mystery actors, from Naked City , Route 66 , and “the movies”:

? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Robert Walser: “When a child cries”

Robert Walser, “Frau Scheer,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Another world

Joseph Joubert:

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Also from Joseph Joubert
Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

Pencil stocks threatened

It begins:

A surge in the number of people buying adult colouring books has threatened pencil stocks world-wide as manufacturers struggle to cope with an increased demand for quality crayons.
 
The world’s biggest wooden pencil manufacturer, Faber-Castell, say they are experiencing “double-digit growth” in the sale of artists’ pencils and have been forced to run more shifts in their German factory to keep up.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Crayon is Britspeak: “a pointed stick or pencil of coloured chalk or other material, for drawing” (Oxford English Dictionary ). For “It begins,” see here.]