Eyes on the plane

Wolf Blitzer on CNN earlier this afternoon, in the aftermath of Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan’s meeting with Donald Trump: “We’ll continue to monitor the takeoff of that plane.” Trump’s plane, of course. CNN kept that parked plane in sight, in one on-screen window, while talking heads continued to talk in another.

Andrew Sullivan’s recent lament about the failure of “elites” to protect democracy from the likes of Donald Trump misses the point that Trump’s candidacy is itself the product of an elite — not a political elite but a media elite, one that has kept Trump (and even his parked plane) front and center for months now. As Leslie Moonves, CBS executive chairman and CEO, said, in a remark that by now ought to be infamous, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” And CNN, and MSNBC, &c. Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy, we should remember, was the work of media and political elites.

A related post
Kristol, Palin, Trump

[There’s more that Sullivan gets wrong, I think. He dismisses Bernie Sanders as a “demagogue” (conflating him with Trump) and displays surprising enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Sullivan in 2007: “We have no excuse if Hillary Clinton becomes president. We know what and who she is.”]

Twelve more movies

[And no spoilers.]

Brooklyn (dir. John Crowley, 2015). In the early 1950s, a young Irishwoman (Saoirse Ronan) leaves home for a new life in Brooklyn. She meets a nice Italian boy (Emory Cohen). Complications follow. There are moments of human interest: learning to twirl spaghetti, buying a bathing suit — which the characters, inexplicably, call a “bathing costume.” That odd bit of diction is a symptom of what’s wrong with this film, which is too pretty, too quaint, too staid. It is set in The Past, a world of slow-motion effects, swelling music, and tricks with color filters. There is never a sense of being in mid-century New York — New York, for Chrissake! Compare the noisy, sexy city of On the Town (1949, dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen). Ireland, with different color filters, looks like a Lands’ End catalogue. I had high hopes for Brooklyn , but I ended up hating it. (Elaine did, too.)


[Like a Lands’ End catalogue. Click for a larger view.]

*

Homicide (dir. David Mamet, 1991). Joe Mantegna as a detective investigating the murder of a candy-store owner. Our household’s second Mamet film. (The first was House of Cards .) Here, as there, nothing is what it appears to be. An amazingly clever plot whose details never invite disbelief.

There is also a pocket notebook.

*

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1927). A silent fable of country and city, love and hate, treachery and fidelity, as The Man (George O’Brien) and The Woman (Janet Gaynor) rediscover their marriage. The story is told almost entirely in gestures and expressions, with almost no intertitles for dialogue. Such faces! Whatever else I miss out on in life, I am grateful to have seen Sunrise .


[The Man, calling out in the dark. Click for a larger view.]

*

All Things Must Pass (dir. Colin Hanks, 2015). The rise and fall of Tower Records. The personalities on display are not especially interesting, and their relations to music are never present. What do these people listen to? What do they buy? They are, in the end, retailers who sought to move a lot of product. I found it curious that we never see anyone’s record collection, nor do we ever see anyone handling records. (The few dozen LPs on one interviewee’s shelf appear to be leaning against a turntable, which makes me wonder if they are merely a prop.) Especially odd: the film makes no mention of independent record stores (some of which, like Newbury Comics, have outlasted Tower) or the resurgence of vinyl.

*

Deux jours, une nuit [Two Days, One Night ] (dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2014). A boss has realized that it’s possible to do the work of his solar-panel factory with sixteen employees instead of seventeen. He gives the employees at a choice: they can have a bonus, but only if they agree to one of their number losing her job. That would be Sandra Bya (Marion Cotillard), who has recently returned to work after suffering from depression. In the course of a weekend, Sandra visits (or attempts to visit) each of her co-workers to plead her case. So much of life in this story: marriage, parenthood, friendship, national identity (at least one worker is an immigrant), and, always, the conflict between self-interest and solidarity. In lesser hands, this story might have served as propaganda about the evils of capitalism. Instead, it’s a story about the complexities of human relationships and motives.

*

Song Without End (dir. Charles Vidor and George Cukor, 1960). A lavish biopic, with Dirk Bogarde as Franz Liszt. Great music, plausible approximations of piano-playing, and famous people passing through. Chopin, it’s you!

*

The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, 2012). in 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown in a military coup. A wave of killing followed — half a million to a million or more enemies, alleged communists and ethnic Chinese. This film is a documentary in which several of the men involved in the killing talk about and reenact their deeds. They are in love with movies, having begun their criminal careers scalping tickets as “movie-theater gangsters.” So now they become directors and performers, making their own movies of torture and murder within Oppenheimer’s movie, complete with costumes, makeup, and special effects. My first time through, I lasted fifteen or twenty minutes. But I decided that I had to watch. The lesson: barbarism won. Says Adi Zukaldry: “We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished.” Dozens of people who worked on the film are identified in the closing credits as “Anonymous” — a reminder of the great danger involved in making this film.


[A most remarkable moment: Anwar Congo (said to have killed a thousand people) watches a scene in which he plays a victim of torture and execution. Click for a larger view.]

*

Der letzte Mann [The Last Laugh , or The Last Man ] (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1924). Emil Jannings as a hotel doorman who is demoted to lavatory attendant, losing his uniform and dignity. This silent film has no dialogue and virtually no intertitles. As in Sunrise , the story is told through gestures and expressions: the massive, heavy-coated figure of the opening scene turns into a stooped, shrunken man who leans against walls as he walks (like Dickens’s Phil Squod). The ending is entirely improbable and entirely welcome.

There is also a pocket notebook.

*

City Girl (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1930). In Sunrise The Woman from the City is trouble. Here, a girl from the city, Kate (Mary Duncan), is an unwitting catalyst for intergenerational trouble when her husband Lem (Charles Farrell) brings her back to the family farm. As William Carlos Williams wrote, “the country will bring us no peace.” Well, it might, eventually. In our house, Murnau is batting a thousand.

There is also a pocket notebook.

*

The Letter (dir. William Wyler, 1940). Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, adultery, and murder in British Malay. With a strong streak of Orientalism. From a play by W. Somerset Maugham.

*

Odd Man Out (dir. Carol Reed, 1947). I’ve now seen four Carol Reed films, each terrific, but Odd Man Out is the best — which means better than The Third Man (1949). Like The Third Man, it’s a story of a man pursued, just one day and night in the life of Johnny McQueen (James Mason), a revolutionary in Northern Ireland, wounded in a botched robbery and now on the run. His efforts to get back to his people put him in one extraordinary episode after another. In an extended encounter with a painter and an ex-medical student, reality itself is stranger than McQueen’s hallucinations.

*

The Wedding Night (dir. King Vidor, 1935). Gary Cooper as Tony Barrett, a hard-drinking writer whose most recent novel is declared unworthy of publication. Tony and his wife Dora (Helen Vinson) retreat to the country (Connecticut), where he meets the girl next door, Manya Novak (Anna Sten), the daughter of a Polish tobacco-farming patriarch (Ralph Bellamy). Dora goes back to the city, and a delicate friendship develops between Tony and Manya. But the patriarchy has its own ideas about how she must spend her life. And I suspect that the Hays Office had its ideas about how Manya and Tony should conduct themselves. I would like to have seen a pre-Code version of this film.

This film made me realize that Charles Vidor and King Vidor were not the same person.


[Anna Sten was supposed to be the next Greta Garbo. She now looks like a prefiguration of Madonna. Click for a larger view. See also this image from Nana (dir. Dorothy Arzner and George Fitzmaurice, 1934).]


Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen more : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen

[Google Ngram Viewer shows a nearly 19:1 ratio for bathing suit and bathing costume in 1952. Bathing suit began to overtake bathing costume in 1860.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[Charles Farrell as Lem Tustine in City Girl (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1930). Click either image for a larger view.]



A farm boy travels from Minnesota to Chicago, carrying a pocket notebook. As the film’s title suggests, he will meet someone.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : The Lodger : Murder at the Vanities : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Orange art turtle

[Click for a larger turtle.]

We noticed turtle before orange . This handy page brought me to the conclusion that this fellow is an Eastern box turtle, Terrapene carolina carolina .

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 enamel 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

One more reason to eat sardines

From 2014, but it’s news that should stay news: Sardines Take 400 Times Less Fuel To Catch Than Shrimp (Smithsonian ).

Thanks to Matt Thomas at Submitted for Your Perusal for alerting me to this article.

Related reading
All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Crosswords, copied New consequences for a plagiarizing editor.

Book tour

[Photograph by passenger-seat occupant Elaine Fine. Click for a larger truck.]

So that’s how the books get to the Book Fair.

Elaine and I are perfectly matched when it comes to maturity. We were both thrilled to see a Scholastic Book Services truck this morning, and more thrilled to see the truck turn to enter a school parking lot just after this STOP sign. We did not, however, attempt to crash the Book Fair. We have our limits. (And enough books already.)

Here is a great Flickr album: Nostalgia for the Scholastic Book Club.

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Scholastic madeleines

Overheard

[The television was on for “warmth.” ]

“Nothing like a good cup of tea in a crisis.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[We are fortunate to have a local station that broadcasts out-of-copyright movies, again and again and again. This line of dialogue is from Devil Girl from Mars (dir. David MacDonald, 1954). Yes, British sci-fi.]

New directions in spam

A scam that warns of a scam:

This is Agent Ethel McGuire and we are here in Nigeria as an FBI/UNITED NATION delegate that have been delegated to investigate these fraudsters who are in the business of swindling Foreigners that came for transaction in Nigeria .

Please be informed that during our investigation,we found out that there is a total sum amount of money $12.5 million that has been assigned in your name as the beneficiary and these fraudsters are busy swindling you without any hope of receiving your fund.

These are the works of the fraud stars who needed to extort money from you in the name of this transfer.

Hard to decide whether “fraud stars” is a mistake or a pun. But watch out for the fraud stars.

The strangest thing about this e-mail is that there is indeed a former FBI Special Agent named Ethel McGuire. Keep fighting for us, Agent Emerita McGuire!

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All OCA spam posts (Pinboard)

[I always check the spam folder, which often contains real e-mail. And less often, evidence of innovation along the spamways. I’ve cut and pasted from the e-mail, keeping all its inelegancies.]

Proust at auction

Letters, photographs, manuscripts, books, the property of a great-grandniece, to be sold by Sotheby’s. Nothing yet on Sotheby’s website.

May 16: Now there’s an auction catalogue. The Proust section begins on page 98.

Related reading
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A visit to the Kolb-Proust Archive