Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

I put off seeing "Precious", even with its good reviews, because I was afraid it would be very depressing or, as I used to say in my salad days, "a gratuitous bummer". It's not that, even though the main character's life is harrowing. The reason we can endure watching the details of Precious' miserable existence is that the director, Lee Daniels, and the editor, Joe Klotz,  have done a clever thing. The first part of the film, where everything is introduced, is cut in a rapid, almost music video style. This artistic choice has the effect of partially insulating the viewer from the horrors. The second half of the film, where the possibility of hope appears, is shot and edited in a slower, more conventional style. It works. It's a good film.

The Many Functions of the Bureau

In addition to bird watching, we can do fire spotting. These pictures are from December 20, 2009.

The pictures are out of order, to tell a better story.

The fire was actually across the street and behind the building that looks to be burning.

It was a 12 unit apartment building. No one was hurt. At first glance I thought that an image of Jesus was on the billboard hovering above the flames. That would have been perfect but when I zoomed in, it did not seem to be the deity. Alas.

The Hurt Locker

Virtually no one watched the Hollywood films that were made about the war in Iraq up till now, certainly not the Bureau Chief. But a film about that war, “The Hurt Locker”, was just nominated for nine Academy Awards and its director, Katheryn Bigelow, won this year’s Directors Guild Award, which is often the precursor to the Directing Oscar. The film’s box office was only moderate but it was not expensive and should get a second run after the Oscar hoopla. Why is this film’s fate different from the others, most of which dealt with returning veterans?

First, it’s a very good film, well made and smart, but it also does a couple of things that none of the other films did (judging by their reviews).  It’s a procedural. The screenwriter, Mark Boal, was embedded with a U.S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit in Iraq and reported on it. People are fascinated by certain types of processes. “How do they do that?” I assume that is behind the success of the various “CSI” shows on TV, not that I’ve ever seen any. (Only a bureaucrat as amazing as The Chief could have insights into so many things he hasn’t actually seen.) And bomb disposal has an obvious aspect that crime scene investigation doesn’t have. AT ANY MOMENT THE BOMB MAY BLOW UP!

By concentrating on one small unit with a very specialized task, Bigelow allows the audience to experience the Iraq war in an intimate and believable way without having to deal directly with the overwhelming historical fact that the war is immoral, illegal and was launched on the basis of cynical lies. But at the same time she does not ignore the toll taken on the Iraqis and on the Americans. It’s very skillfully done.

It’s a truism that you can’t make an anti-war film by showing war because even if you follow a bunch of soldiers who are all eventually killed (this goes back to “All Quiet on the Western Front”) an 18 year old boy watching it will always say, “But I will be the one who survives and I will have passed my test”. And then he enlists.

Bigelow deals with this by not attempting to make an anti-war document but by examining the attraction of war. Clearly the main character, played by Jeremy Renner,   is addicted to the adrenaline rush. His fellow soldiers are not  and fear he will get them killed. We have to follow to find out. Kathryn Bigelow has been on the edge of making a totally successful film for her entire career and now she’s done it. Brava.

Avatar and District 9

There are several similarities between these two films. In both the villains are greedy, callous corporations and their mercenary armies. Both are tales of the meeting between humans and aliens. In both the main character eventually gets to see things from the aliens’ perspective. In both movies the main characters make video diaries. There’s even a similar war robot in both of them, that the operator rides inside of.

There are also big differences. What little humor there is in “Avatar” is feeble, whereas “District 9” is darkly hilarious. Since the plot of “Avatar” is completely predictable and the dialogue is the same macho banter that James Cameron has been recycling for over 25 years, the joy of the movie resides in the amazing planet that the advanced computer graphics have created. You must see it in 3D. When the aliens (the Na’vi) leap up onto their flying reptiles and soar through the vertical world of the forest, I felt a movie going exhilaration that gets harder to access with each passing year. “District 9” has no interest in visual beauty.

I should mention that the Na’vi look like 8 foot tall, blue, fashion models with Bambi eyes. The aliens in “District 9” look like human-sized bipedal crustaceans with short, waving tentacles on their faces, The humans call them “prawns”. The aliens’ interplanetary ship has broken down over Johannesburg and more than a million aliens have been herded into a squalid, refugee camp where Nigerian gangsters prey upon them.

Whereas the hero of “Avatar” is a paraplegic marine veteran who eventually gets to show his courage and intelligence, the hero of “District 9” is a self-satisfied corporate imbecile whose only distinction is that he’s married to the boss’s daughter. Of course, like all heroes, he changes along the way.

“District 9” is a very smart movie with the transgressive power of such genre milestones as “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Re-Animator”. However, those movies’ shock and awe was concentrated in the realms of violence and sex, “District 9” has larger ambitions. It’s dark satire is aimed at the ongoing toxic relationship between the First World and the Third World, but having said that, it’s really entertaining.

Bird watching

The Bureau Chief can watch birds out his office windows without rising from his chair, which is lucky since, given his non-energetic ways, he otherwise wouldn’t do any bird watching at all. And we are not talking about sparrows on the lawn (there isn’t any lawn). We are talking about Red-tailed Hawks, flying in lazy circles on the thermals, looking for small mammals to eat and huge Ravens, doing aerobatics in pairs this time of year. Apparently it’s the start of mating season.

There are also exotic looking migratory birds during this time of short days. Our uphill neighbors have a fig tree which overhangs our fence a little. It’s a magnet for the traveling fliers. I’ve taken photos two years in a row now. Get out your bird books!

These two are from 2008:

These two are from this year:

The sky is gray and the figs are less plentiful this year but the birds are more colorful. I have decided that this is not a metaphor for anything.

A Wonderfully Odd Shaped Object

Marcel Carné’s “Drôle de drame ou L’étrange adventure du Docteur Molyneax” (1937) is very odd indeed. The great director (“Les enfants du paradis”) directs a script by the great poet and fine screenwriter Jacques Prévert, with some of the best French actors of the time. Michel Simon, Jean-Louis Barrault, Louis Jouvet, and Françoise Rosay play a bunch of daffy Edwardian English people, in a crazed farce set in London, in French!

Hollywood has a long standing convention of portraying stories set in other countries with American actors speaking English. I found it quite amusing to see the French version of this, particularly given the incestuously tangled millennium-long relationship between the French and the English.

It took me a minute or two to get in sync with this convention and with the frantic pace and broad style of the film but then I went with it. It’s strange and very funny and has a black heart filled with fine 1930’s contempt for the Bourgeoisie.

It has a murderer who only kills butchers, an imperturbable Chinese mugger who steals flowers, a singing milkman and a narcoleptic reporter. Louis Jouvet is particularly good as a hypocritical Anglican bishop. His finest moment involves Scottish attire. I will say no more except that the DVD is available on Netflix.

Richelieu

When Madame Le Chef and I were visiting friends in the Loire Valley in 2008, they suggested that we go see the town of Richelieu. Although I had heard of the famous Cardinal, I knew nothing about the town. Turns out the town was the ancestral home of the Cardinal and, at the height of his power, when he was running France for Louis XIII, he had a new town built on top of the old one. It was constructed between 1631 and 1642, which seems like pretty fast work for a whole town. It is walled, with a moat around it, and designed on a strict grid plan. Next to the town, Cardinal Richelieu built a huge palace, set in a correspondingly large park.

The town is still there and the park is still there but the palace was dismantled and sold off as building material in the 19th Century. Apparently it was not a political act. A real estate agent just wanted to make some money. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Except for cars and no merde in the streets, the town preserves its 17th Century appearance.



The Cardinal presides over the parking lot at the entrance to the park.



There are remaining outbuildings, gardens and canals but there does seem to be some huge thing missing.





The woods have vistas carved into them that are vaguely ominous.



The evidence of what was there.