about "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave"

Dracula, dying alone, gasping, clawing at the skies, clawing at the cross behind him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Hammer released "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave" in 1968. I saw it when I was a little kid. This ending made an impression.

something about Roger Ebert's autobiography "Life Itself"

Roger Ebert was a talented, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and writer who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he and Gene Siskel, film critic for rival paper Chicago Tribune, began co-hosting a weekly movie review show in Chicago. The no-frills program was picked up for national syndication and eventually moved to commercial network television. The odd couple—plump, mop-haired Roger wearing glasses next to tall, thin Gene—having tense, insightful arguments and giving thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie reviews became a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1980s and 90s. After 53-year-old Siskel died in 1999, Ebert continued the show format with other critics.

Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands in 2002, and his treatment and surgeries later led to the removal of his lower jaw. Ebert, disfigured and no longer able to speak, continued to write, and his blog attracted a loyal audience. He reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and was on TV for 31. Ebert was 70 when he died.

His patient, careful autobiography, Life Itself, is traditional and lovely. Ebert describes his parents, his childhood (including Catholic school), his career, his alcoholism (and then his pain-killer addition during cancer treatments), and his relationships, including the close, competitive relationship he had with Siskel. Ebert's writing about his disfigurement and condition is touching. I also enjoyed reading his views on the evolution of film promotion over the years and his descriptions of his interviewing habits.

 

Read some of his interviews:

• "Who's gonna get me a beer?" An interview with Lee Marvin by Roger Ebert, October 10, 1970
• Interview with George Peppard by Roger Ebert, February 18, 1968
• Interview with John Wayne (1969) by Roger Ebert, June 29, 1969

And one passage early in the autobiography sneaks in this gut-punch.

The optometrist had me read the charts and slowly straightened up. "Has Roger ever worn glasses?" he asked my mother. "No. He hasn't needed them." The doctor said: "He's probably always needed them. He's very shortsighted." He wrote me out a prescription. "Wasn't he ever tested?" It had never occurred to anyone. My parents and my aunt Martha the nurse monitored my health, which was good; I was in the hospital only twice, to have my tonsils and appendix removed, and had monthly radiation treatments for ear infections (they were probably responsible for the salivary cancer I developed in my sixties.) I'd never complained about eyesight, and no one noticed any problems.

Life Itself was published in 2011.

something about "To Have and Have Not" by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, plays out the story of the destruction of Harry Morgan, an everyman fishing boat captain out of Key West, Florida. Harry, after being stiffed on a much-needed payment for chartering a private fishing cruise, finds himself with little choice but to recoup money through the black market, trafficking people and contraband between Cuba and Florida as opportunities to support his family dry up in the Great Depression Era.

I enjoyed parts of To Have and Have Not, but, most of the time, I was bored. That is probably ignorance, I know.

I did, however, enjoy a movie adaptation, "The Breaking Point," starring John Garfield and Patricia Neal. Ms. Neal, as she always did, stole the show, and the dialog at times was brilliant.

My favorite passage in Hemingway's text comes after a supporting character, American writer and expatriate, Richard Gordon, finds out his wife is cheating on him. Richard goes drinking. Here he is at the bar:

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

Note: I have not seen the other movie adaptations.

something about Richard Yates

This reading of The Collected Short Stories of Richard Yates was my first exposure to the author's writing. A few years ago, I saw and very much enjoyed the film adaptation of what is perhaps Yates' most famous work, "Revolutionary Road." Hard to believe and somewhat sad that I lived this long without reading this brilliant American writer.

Yates (1926–1992) masterfully crafts poignant stories in which personally profound events happen quietly. These are moments the characters will likely relive with feelings of melancholy or bitterness. This book includes stories from previous collections Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, plus several stories under a chapter heading named "The Uncollected Stories." Of these short stories, I loved "A Glutton for Punishment," a brilliant study of a pathological failure drawn to graceful defeat. I also loved "The B.A.R. Man," a story in which the tension rises until the last word. Yates' stories sometimes end with a feigned punch, and I flinch. "A Convalescent Ego," the last story in this anthology, does the opposite; I laughed as I read it on a plane, and the end warmed my toes.


Notes: Revolutionary Road, the 2008 movie directed by Sam Mendes, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; but Michael Shannon owns it, of course, with his performance.

something almost true

I was a member of a show-business family. We were in a movie that was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. I got blackout drunk at the awards ceremony. Early the next morning, I asked someone what happened. He answered, "You won!" I was disbelieving. He added, "Yeah, and you spoke! You gave a speech!" More disbelief; plus anxiety. He showed me a transcript of what I said, and, of course, it was incoherent. I felt ashamed; this would be my legacy.

Note: The ceremony included a great live performance of scenes from the movie version of Pink Floyd's The Wall.

a hasty and uninvestigated thought on "The Hunger Games"

In the the movie, "The Hunger Games" (the first in the series), the worst violence does not happen during the games. The movie is half over before the games even begin. The worst violence occurs with the social destruction caused by commercial exploitation—the tearing apart of families and friends and the compromising of values for money.

something about the film "Interstellar"

Ah, the human spirit. Interstellar is cinematic and features a brilliant score composed by Hans Zimmer (video of him below). The film juxtaposes space with Earth, engineers with farmers, and the metaphysical with the physical. Christopher Nolan's film, screenwritten by his brother Jonathan, is a science-fiction journey to the limits of knowledge wherein we see the spiritual world married with the scientific one.

Note:
Budgets reflect priorities. A budget is a moral document.

"Smashed"

I can't be sober and be with you-

"The Lost Boys"

 
You'll never grow old, Michael. And you'll never die.

about being recognized

A lot of super hero movies have hit the screens in the last 12 years or so. Most of these super hero actors will be defined by these roles from here on out, especially among younger generations, and the actors will probably never be in a film that sells more tickets.

something about the movie "Gravity"

The film "Gravity" offers a movie-going experience. Yes, the visuals stun and inspire. But it's more than beauty that makes us submit. The story is simple but the action engrossing; and the protagonist is uncomplicated--a supple mirror in which we replace the image with ourselves. So we fret and ease along with her as the film creates the illusion of time alternately speeding up and then crawling; it does so with the sounds of breathing, of heartbeats, of blinking lights, watches, and faceless monitors that beep out the pace, switching from measured rhythms to urgent, pleading buzzes. And when we finally reach the moment when we can pause and consider all that just happened, we're left with a sense of wonder--not just of the vastness of the universe, but the resilience of the human spirit. Now, this human spirit stuff is a sort of hackneyed theme and an easy payoff for the writers but it works okay here.


Notes:

• Highly recommend seeing this in 3D.
• In an academic setting, one could argue that this movie conveys Heideggerian themes. 
• This does not say anything to spoil.

something about the movie "Lincoln"

"Lincoln" focuses on the President's efforts to pass the Thirteenth Amendment while negotiating the end of the Civil War. A superb Daniel Day-Lewis evokes a gifted but earthen man veiled in melancholy, defending the bloody and nightmarish warring to save the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation, and his push to eradicate slavery via the Constitution immediately, while the battle still rages. All of the supporting players more than hold their own--Sally Field included.

In all that's already been written about this film, only one point could still be made: this entry from The New Yorker--one of a couple excellent comments on the film found there--claims

It can’t be said too often, or too clearly, that the whole point of Lincoln is that he—and the Republican Party he then represented—marked the end of the policy of conciliation and compromise and cosseting that had been the general approach of Northern Presidents to the Southern slavery problem throughout the decades before. When the South seceded, Lincoln chose war—an all-out, brutal, bitter war of a kind that had never been fought until then.

According to the film, Lincoln felt the 13th Amendment was a compromise. Had they not compromised, the radical faction of the Republican Party (and their abolitionist constituents) would have enfranchised black men immediately, given them the vote, legalized interracial marriage, etc. A huge portion of the film is dedicated to Lincoln's pissing off those radicals. (But this "compromise" means little when it obliterates an entire region's economic way of life, which is probably The New Yorker writer's point.)

About the the film "Aguirre: The Wrath of God"

We pick up as Pizarro leads his Spanish conquistadors, their attachés and family, holy men, and slaves out of the Andes into the Amazon in search of cities of gold. When the jungle gets too rough, the respected leader sends a detachment ahead. Second-in-command of that group is the ferociously intense Lope de Aguirre, who quickly takes over when obstacles mount. Pushing into a land that's already hostile and serene, beautiful and unforgiving, Aguirre's disturbed mannerisms and incommunicable disposition renders the journey all the more oppressive and surreal; Aguirre, reanimated through actor Klaus Kinski, lopes and lunges, all fragmented postures and twisted body, never moving in a straight line, physically impending on his surroundings from round about.

Kinski, who was actually mad by most accounts, really is fascinating to watch. This film is an artistic success and widely considered one of the best ever, with lots of credit going to director Werner Herzog. The opening scenes of the expedition sneaking through the Andes are some of the most awesome I've seen on film. The end is pretty stunning, too.

About "Rampart"

Woody Harrelson exudes simmering, desperate rage as David Brown, a formidably intelligent but sparsely controlled bad cop living and working and risking and cratering in 1999. Our window into this volatile character's folding life rattles in the wake of the abuse and corruption scandals that shook the real LAPD at the time. When not in pursuit, Brown is at the ready because he knows he and conflict are joined at the hip. He welcomes it, he's a risk-taker. But when he unravels and we see him cracking and haunted, it's still tragic.

Notes:

• Woody Harrelson is why I saw this.
• I saw "Rampart" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" the same day. Both these movies show an investigation, a quest for the truth. Both have characters whose quest arises from suspicion, and whose suspicions cause others to doubt the sanity of the quest.