OK, It's been a while. I got interrupted while writing my last review by a trip to Marseille (more on that later).
But first let me write about the movie that I saw over two weeks ago at the Mega CGR.
The first thing that surprised me was how well I could follow the story, given that the dialogue was in French. I had really worried that I wouldn't be able to understand anything the characters were saying, but I estimated I could understand about eighty percent.
A lot of it was simply context. I'd seen the trailer to Drag Me to Hell at least six times while in the U.S., so I knew the basic outline of the plot. More importantly the idea that a movie is a story told in pictures shone through quite well. If you really need to understand the dialogue to know what is going on, to understand the story on a basic level, it is probably a mark that the movie has failed on some level. In this case, Sam Raimi succeeded quite well.
Certainly the horror genre lends itself to visual storytelling perhaps more than other genres, but I think the principle still holds.
That being said, there was just so much about this movie that felt so ho-hum with me. It was about as good as you can get while being a completely formulaic movie on its basic level.
How was it formulaic? Well for starters, it starts with the first principle of modern horror: assume that all psychic medium powers are actually really. By corollary, all those palm readers that you see advertising on billboards actually are the real deal. That's the world of modern horror---the world of pure hokum.
The second formulaic premise of modern horror is to take some well-known or imagined supernatural legend (something you'd find written about in an ancient text with walking goats and pentagrams) and to assume that it is, in fact, real. This is essentially the premise that came out of The Exorcist (1973) (the template for half of modern horror), but in that original we were left with the doubt of what had actually happened, and with the naturalistic cover that maybe it was all in the heads of the people who had died by the end of the film. Modern horror takes no such precautions.
I don't mind this second premise (the reality of a supernatural legend) so much. It makes me remember some of my favorite camp horror flicks from my teenage years, such as Deadly Blessing (1981). But when it is coupled with the first premise (the ubiquitous reality of the power of petty psychic mediums), I find it barely watchable. This is not the universe I live in.
By far the more interesting part of Drag Me to Hell was the examination of postmodern sexual relations, which provides the actual source of the horror. The reason that the young heroine falls into the horror situation to begin with is her denial of her essential feminine priciple of mercy (by turning her back on the plight of an old woman about to lose her home).
Why does she do this? Because she is attempting to compete by the masculine rules of cutthroat competition in a dysfunctional bank. The story does an excellent job of establishing her motivations for doing this. The fatal moment of truth, when she denies the principle of mercy, is built in impeccable fashion.
The source of her motivations is essentially the corresponding weakness of her boyfriend (perfectly cast as Justin Long, the guy from the "I'm a Mac" commercials), who is unable to stand on his own, against his own mother. By extension, this mother in law is utterly stripped of all feminine qualities. Her only desire for her son is that he marry a high-powered career woman.
Thus we have the complete denial of the feminine life principle of reproduction in favor of sterile masculine competitive achievement. The mother-in-law contaminates her son, who is rendered impotent, and by extension contaminates his girlfriend who absorbs these values as the ones she must follow (against her own character nature) and winds up, in true tragic fashion, being dragged to, well, you get the picture.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Mega CGR, Claira
It took about twenty minutes to get to the theater from La Maison de Verotte. The one-lane road, completely flat, wound through green vineyards with the Pyrenees looming in the distance, looking much like the familiar Rockies.
The theater is in the midst of a recent big box shopping center just off the highway. I'd scoped it out while coming in by car. As I walked amidst the businesses, picking my way through traffic, I was struck by how similar it seemed to an American big box complex. There was an electronics outlet, a "Home Depot" type place, a baby store, a pet store, and a large Carrefour, which is the French equivalent to a Wal-Mart. There were also fast-food outlets and family chain restaurants, including a Buffalo Grill, and one with a pirate theme.
The most noticeable thing about the Mega CGR is that the building is decorated by huge outlines of Charlie Chaplin, or "Charlot," as the French call him.
I got there about fifteen minutes before the 13:45 showing, which I'd found using the amazing Google Movies tool, which has yet to let me down. The times were exactly right (see listings here).
Of course I was fascinated by the design of the lobby. On the one hand, it looked very different from the typical American multiplex, with little island ticket booths. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of American multiplexes that didn't look typical to me either, so what do I know? I couldn't get any good shots inside, but maybe I'll find some later.
I did, however, catch a lucky break in that on Mondays, the usual ticket price was reduced from almost nine euros to only five euros and forty cents. It is part of general trend I've noticed, that prices in France (in euros) are almost the same as in the U.S., but in dollars. Of course that means you get screwed here, but what the hell, it's France!
There were twelve auditoriums in the multiplex, with the doors arranged in a great big semicircle around the lobby. The auditorium where my film was showing was nearly empty. It was almost like my usual ventures back in the states. The seats were very cushy with straight backs.
The trailers and ads started at the advertised time, and ran about twenty minutes until the actual feature. This part was familiar. The difference was that there were many more ads and fewer trailers, and the trailers themselves were only about thirty seconds in length. While the ads were running, I remembered that this situation (of too many ads before French movies) is actually parodied in an episode of French in Action, which is familiar to anyone who attempted to learn French in the 199os. Suddenly I was hearing Pierre Capretz's voice again, after many years, and thinking of Mireille. Ah, Mireille...
La Maison de Verotte
Vero's place, officially called La Maison de Verotte, is about ten miles outside Perpignan, and at least a mile from the nearest town of any size. To get to it, you have to get off the main highway, then travel down a narrow country road, winding through vineyards until you get to the small settlement of Mas Rovira.
Before I arrived, I pictured that it would be hilly, but it turns out to be very flat, since it is located on the seaside plain next to the Mediterranean, at the base of the Pyrenees. The mountains are very close nearby. On the afternoon of the party, Vero led a group (including me) to go swimming in a prehistoric grotto called La Caune d'Arago, where some early paleolithic remains were discovered. It was pouring rain, and freezing, but it was exhilirating.
You'd think that this location would not be convenient to see movies, but you'd be wrong. It turns out one of the few multiplexes in the Perpignan area is located just a mile or so from here. Yesterday (as I write this) I made my first outing...
Before I arrived, I pictured that it would be hilly, but it turns out to be very flat, since it is located on the seaside plain next to the Mediterranean, at the base of the Pyrenees. The mountains are very close nearby. On the afternoon of the party, Vero led a group (including me) to go swimming in a prehistoric grotto called La Caune d'Arago, where some early paleolithic remains were discovered. It was pouring rain, and freezing, but it was exhilirating.
You'd think that this location would not be convenient to see movies, but you'd be wrong. It turns out one of the few multiplexes in the Perpignan area is located just a mile or so from here. Yesterday (as I write this) I made my first outing...
Catalunya, on both sides of the border
After a nice full day in Barcelona, I took the metro back to the train station, where I retrieved my bag from the locker, bought yet another bocadillo, then boarded the train northward along the Mediterranean coast.
The train was jammed with passengers. By the early evening we'd crossed the frontier into France, and a half hour later the train arrived in Perpignan, which according to the words painted onto the train platform, is the "Centre du Monde." Who knew?
After buying a seven euro phone card, and having to have someone instruct me how to use it, I made a brief phone call to my old friend Jean, who came to the train station to pick me up. We had a beer at an outdoor cafe, caught up on old times, picked up a few other passengers for the big party, then headed out into the countryside to Vero's place.
On the way there in the car, I joked with Jean that we should speak Provencal now. But he corrected me. I turns out that Perpignan is not in Provence, but rather in Catalunya, which extends northward across the French border. So the local language is actually still Catalan. At that point I figured it was necessary to start learning a little bit of it during my stay here.
Vero's place was already crammed full of guests, with more arriving by the hour. She gave me a great big hug when she saw me, as it had been fifteen years since I was last in France. She introduced me to her friends and family, including several sons which were born since I last saw her and who are now teenagers.
She also gave me a tour of the massive hotel she runs, which was financed by fellow go players in France, and which she maintains partly as a retreat for them. It turns out that I got to stay in the Mongolian yurt, which I recognized from her web site. It smelled of yak, which was actually quite nice and relaxing. I felt lucky.
Jean counseled me that I would have to meet many people, so I made a point of trying to remember all the names of the people I met, repeating them over and over. But at some point, the number of guests arriving overwhelmed me and I more or less gave up.
The next night, Saturday night, was the big party. I hadn't even known the purpose when I arrived, but it turned out to be a double 50th birthday party for two of Vero's female friends, one of whom recognized me from my last visit in 1994. Time sure flies.
On Saturday night, the party went to past dawn, although I had long since conked out from exhaustion in the yurt. Most folk hung around an extra day, and then started trickling away by Sunday evening---back to Marseilles, Lyon, Amsterdam, Paris, and the other places from which they'd arrived.
For me, however, it was just the beginning of the visit. Vero was delighted that I was going to stay a while. For some reason, she likes me a lot. I'm not accustomed to being liked so much, so it's almost a little awkward. But I like it.
The train was jammed with passengers. By the early evening we'd crossed the frontier into France, and a half hour later the train arrived in Perpignan, which according to the words painted onto the train platform, is the "Centre du Monde." Who knew?
After buying a seven euro phone card, and having to have someone instruct me how to use it, I made a brief phone call to my old friend Jean, who came to the train station to pick me up. We had a beer at an outdoor cafe, caught up on old times, picked up a few other passengers for the big party, then headed out into the countryside to Vero's place.
On the way there in the car, I joked with Jean that we should speak Provencal now. But he corrected me. I turns out that Perpignan is not in Provence, but rather in Catalunya, which extends northward across the French border. So the local language is actually still Catalan. At that point I figured it was necessary to start learning a little bit of it during my stay here.
Vero's place was already crammed full of guests, with more arriving by the hour. She gave me a great big hug when she saw me, as it had been fifteen years since I was last in France. She introduced me to her friends and family, including several sons which were born since I last saw her and who are now teenagers.
She also gave me a tour of the massive hotel she runs, which was financed by fellow go players in France, and which she maintains partly as a retreat for them. It turns out that I got to stay in the Mongolian yurt, which I recognized from her web site. It smelled of yak, which was actually quite nice and relaxing. I felt lucky.
Jean counseled me that I would have to meet many people, so I made a point of trying to remember all the names of the people I met, repeating them over and over. But at some point, the number of guests arriving overwhelmed me and I more or less gave up.
The next night, Saturday night, was the big party. I hadn't even known the purpose when I arrived, but it turned out to be a double 50th birthday party for two of Vero's female friends, one of whom recognized me from my last visit in 1994. Time sure flies.
On Saturday night, the party went to past dawn, although I had long since conked out from exhaustion in the yurt. Most folk hung around an extra day, and then started trickling away by Sunday evening---back to Marseilles, Lyon, Amsterdam, Paris, and the other places from which they'd arrived.
For me, however, it was just the beginning of the visit. Vero was delighted that I was going to stay a while. For some reason, she likes me a lot. I'm not accustomed to being liked so much, so it's almost a little awkward. But I like it.
Across Spain to Barcelona
On the morning of the 4th, I had a specific task ahead of me: to get to Perpignan in southeastern France in time for a big party at my friend Vero's place. I'd promised to attend. Using the web in the hostel in Porto, I'd pieced together train schedules that would get me there in time. Basically I first had to go up to Vigo in Spain. I got up at the crack of dawn, slipping out while my roommates were still asleep, and taking the Porto metro to the main station, where I bought a ticket to Vigo.
It was a slow ride, taking several hours to crawl through the northernmost part of Portugal, and into Galicia. I turns out that Vigo is a dramatically beautiful city, as one could tell arriving in the train. The view out of the long inlet between the mountains seemed uncannily like the Pacific Northwest. It easily could have been in Washington State, except for the ubiquity of the red tiled roofs
Once in Vigo, I followed my plan by immediately buying a ticket on the night train to Barcelona. It was almost a hundred euros even without a berth. I would have only a first class seat. Part of me looked forward to the challenge, to see if I was still capable of sleeping on trains, like I used to so often. One night wouldn't kill me.
The departure time left me with almost six hours to kill in Vigo. Unfortunately there was no left luggage, and Vigo was a very hilly city. I wondered how the hell I was going to kill the time. After stalling for a while in the station, I put on my backpack and just started hiking up the hill outside the station, figuring a downward return trip would be better.
The sidewalk above the station offered magnificent sunny views of the harbor. To my surprise I immediately found a movie theater. What a perfect opportunity to catch a flick and kill some time!
Unfortunately the little multiplex was closed (shown in photo). The first showing wasn't until 5:45 in the afternoon, which was only a hour before my train was supposed to leave. So no movie in Vigo.
But I noticed that a few of the films had versions in the Galician language, which seemed to be everywhere in Vigo. I guess there is not universal agreement whether or not it is a language unto itself, or a dialect of Portuguese. It is somewhat a politically sensitive issue, as one might discern.
I thought I mind wind up hiking the entire afternoon, but I found an Internet cafe with cheap rates that also showed music videos. It was a nice way to catch up my blog. Some of the videos were ones I recognized from the Aer Lingus flight, including my new latest favorite, Never Miss a Beat by the Kaiser Chiefs, my latest favorite band.
The Internet is a great time chewer. In the late afternoon I hiked back to the station, caught some dinner in the form of a ham and cheese bocadillo (I could live off those in Spain), then boarded the train.
It turns out Spain is really paranoid about trains. You have to go through luggage screening like at the airport in order to get on the "Tren Hotel," as it is called.
Sleeping on the train wasn't so hard, once they turned the cabin lights off, which wasn't until after midnight. I managed to catch a few hours of downtime as the train rumbled on through the dark, and I was bright-eyed when we rolled into Barcelona Sants station in the morning.
Fortunately Barcelona, being a big city, had luggage lockers (you have to put your bags through a security screening). That left me free to roam around the city until the evening, although a blister on my foot from my still-not-broken-in boots kept me limping slowly.
I first headed over to the famous Sancta Familia cathedral designed by Gaudi. This turned out to be a dud, costing eleven euros to get inside, but being nearly completely under renovation. Mostly what I saw were other tourists (update: the exterior was awesome, see comments)
In the afternoon I explored the old city (which is very nice and flat), including the big indoor market. The Illa de Peixe (Island of Fish) was my favorite part of the latter. I capped off my visit by trip up the elevator of the Columbus monument on the waterfront.
The biggest surprise about Barcelona was the prevalance of the Catalan language, which seemed alive and well. It made me wish that I had at least learned the pleasantries before arriving, just for fun (even though Spanish always works too, of course).
But why travel, unless you're going to make it fun?
Northward through Portugal
My first stop after Lisbon was Fatima, the famous religious shrine where three girls supposedly received prophecies from the Virgin Mary. The best thing about Fatima was the cheap hotel room I'd booked over the web. For less than thirty euros, I got a private room (at last), located right across the street from the sanctuary.
It happened to be Whitsunday. In the evening, I strolled around town and wound up joining in a candlelight procession of a statue of the Blessed Virgin around the sanctuary plaza. It was quite moving.
The next day I packed up again. I had reservations in Coimbra, the university town, but I wanted to see the headquarters of the Knights Templar at nearby Tomar. This entailed a bus ride to Tomar, where I had to hike up the mountain and stow my pack in the woods again, and then back to Fatima. From there I caught an intercity bus to Coimbra, arriving late in the evening.
It was a short walk to the Hotel Oslo, where I got another private room for a nice cheap price over the web. In the evening I watched Fire Walk With Me on British television. While it was showing, I used my Asus Eee to facebook my friend David in California to tell him that I was listening to his movie soundtrack (he played marimba for it).
I stayed two nights in Coimbra, to give myself a little break, and also to allow myself to take the bus outside of town to visit the Roman ruins called Coninbriga, the largest such site in Portugal. I'm a big fan of classical ruins, so this was a must for me. The best part were the re-created atrium fountains.
After two nights in Coimbra, I caught the train to Porto, which I learned from the hostel keeper there considers itself a separate nation, more or less. The Poets Hostel was not easy to get to (a hike up a hill) but the view was magnificent over the city (photo shows the view from my room). In the evening there was a giant book fair, and I had fun perusing the scores of vendors selling their wares.
By the next morning I'd spent eight nights in Portugal. I was really beginning to like it. I'd gotten to use my Portuguese for the first time in real situations, and was pleased to be told on several occassions that I had a Brazilian accent.
Of course I got to see a movie too. Although I'd planned to see one at the AMC in Porto, my extra night in Lisbon cramped my schedule too much. So I wound up trading it for the Cinema City in Lisbon, which was fine by me.
Cinema City, Lisbon
I finally had a chance to sit down and upload some of the photos I took in Lisbon. These ones show the Cinema City theater where I saw Tyson. From the outside, it doesn't look like much, being located rather inconspicuously in a large concrete building in a modern section of Lisbon, along a rather busy street. You can see the poster for Angos e Demonicos beside the door.
The inside is quite nice. In the top shot, you can see the interior cafe, from the table where I was sitting. It's on par with the nicer arthouse theater cafes in the United States. Of course, I have no idea if this is typical for Portugal, but it was a verytheater nice first experience.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Tyson
Given that the last movie I saw before I left the States was a movie about European degradation, it seemed fitting that the first movie I saw over here was one about the seemier side of the American character.
For the first three days in Lisbon my task was mainly to recover from jet-lag. This was made extremely difficult by the fact that getting any sort of sleep at all in the Lisbon Lounge Hostel was a challenge. Don´t get me wrong, it was a great place to hang out and meet other travelers, many of them two decades younger than I was. My favorite thing about the stay was the in-house meals, prepared by one of the staff membes, which were darn cheap and absolutely delicious. Every night it was different group of people of different nationalities, talking over various and diverse subjects, and sharing stories.
The Australians were there in full force, as they were in Europe 25 years ago, and to my suprise I let myself be dragged out for a night of drinking and clubbing. In between all this madness and lack of sleep, I managed to do a fair bit of sightseeing and walking around the old quarter of the city. At every turn I kept having to fight the feeling that I was too old to be doing this.
After three days, I´d seen most of the tourist attractions on my list, and it suddenly occurred to me that for my last afternoon in the city, it might be nice to see a movie. I fired up the Google movie listings tool in the hostel and found that the pickings were slim.
My Portuguese isn´t good enough to allow me to see a local movie. Yes I could be brave, but I wanted a gentler start to my European movie-going experiences. In Portugal, the Hollywood movies are subtitled, so if I could find one I wanted, it would be just like a regular movie, if I could find one. But I´d seen everything that was out (because of the aforementioned release date lag), and I wasn´t in the mood to see Anjos e Demonicos again. Why the hell did it have to be that movie that movie was released in synch with the United States?
But fortunately there it was, an American movie I hadn´t seen. It was Tyson, the acclaimed documentary about the boxer. I disappointed at having missed it in Boston, but now I was glad I´d let it slip past.
It was showing at the Cinema City in the Alvalade district. My hostel was in the old Baixo district, so I walked up a few blocks to Rossio Square, dodged the cocaine dealers who approach you constantly there, and descended into the metro, where I caught the line northward. After a couple stops, I got off at Alvalade, which unlike the city center, is a modern district.
I´d given myself a couple hours headstart, and after checking the time to make sure it was correct, I killed some time walking around the nearby neighborhoods. Walking through European cities is something I´ve long enjoyed, and I consider it incumbent, if you´re going to get to know a place, to see both it´s old and new districts.
Unfortunately it was brutally sunny and hot, so mostly what I did was hide in the shade under the trees in the nearby Campo Grande until right below show time. On my way back to the theater, I managed to get caught in a wedding party on the sidewalk.
The Cinema City (I took some pictures, but they will have to wait until I can upload them) had a full-fledged cafe in the lobby. I bought a ticket for five euros seventy (a little over eight bucks), then bought a Pepsi, which I drank entirely before the show, since I was so thirsty. Just like in America, you pay a premium for soft drinks at the theater. In this case, it cost me almost three euros for a medium drink, which is normally absurdly expensive for Portugal.
I was definitely curious to experience the auditorium. It had about a hundred seats, on a stadium incline, with high backs that did not recline. I noticed there was a place number on my seat, but I ignored it in the sparse crowd and sat down in front. The one thing that leapt out a me as being not-American was that the screen itself had slightly rounded edges, something I´ve never seen in the United States.
There were ads and a few trailers before the movie---more ads but fewer trailers that I was used to.
When the movie started, I found it hard not to read the subtitles, even though the movie was in English and the words were in Portuguese. I suppose this is a common phenomenon. Among other things, it let me learn a few new Portuguese words and phrases.
As for the movie, I would not have expected to enjoy it, but for that fact that it got tremendous reviews. Almost immediately I could see why. It was shot in a way that made it very easy to follow the story of Tyson´s life as he narrated it.
There´s that magic word again---story. Does life really make a narrative? It seems that way if you let it. I think this is what I was trying to get at in my previous post about Casablanca. It´s why I write this blog, to attempt to understand life as a story, and to see story is manifest in the art of motion pictures. Those two things seem to go together with me, which is why I write this blog the way I do. I cannot separate out the experience of watching a movie from the experience of everything else in my life. In that respect, it makes perfect sense that the movie that prompted me to start writing this was Synecdoche, New York.
Hollywood motion pictures tell stories. Life makes a story. History, and in particular the history of America, makes a story. These are all woven together for me. I start out talking about one, and I slip into talking about another facet.
Sure I followed the story of Tyson´s career, out of the corner of my consciousness, while it was going on. I detested the guy. He was pure thug to me. I rejoiced at everything bad that happened to him, and especially when he was defeated in the ring.
What this movie did was make me ashamed of those feelings. It turns out I had simply fallen for the image of Mike Tyson as his promoters, and the media (and he himself) wanted to put forth. Watching this documentary I had a complete turnaround. I was rooting for the guy the entire way.
For one thing, you learn what was really driving Tyson the whole time: fear. The guy was simply afraid. As a kid he was beaten up, and he was terrified of anyone getting the best of him in that way, because it meant life or death on the streets. In this respect, Tyson is the perfect manifestation of the street gang culture that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
But it a broader sense, I found myself rooting for Tyson because of personal reasons. The guy was born in 1966, and it when I heard that in the movie, I realized that in the history of boxing, this is the guy from my cohort. All at once, I saw my entire life in his story, even as divergent as we were. What he did was a part of what I did.
Thus I cringed at his self-inflicted downfall, and the injustices that befell him in the wake of the emergence of his tragic weaknesses. I rooted for him against Holyfield this time, and was sad when he lost. His retirement also became a personal transformation for me---the time at which boxers of my age pass from dominance in history.
And I couldn´t help thinking: my god, this guy was good. He should have been the best ever. Or was I talking about myself. I lose track sometimes.
For the first three days in Lisbon my task was mainly to recover from jet-lag. This was made extremely difficult by the fact that getting any sort of sleep at all in the Lisbon Lounge Hostel was a challenge. Don´t get me wrong, it was a great place to hang out and meet other travelers, many of them two decades younger than I was. My favorite thing about the stay was the in-house meals, prepared by one of the staff membes, which were darn cheap and absolutely delicious. Every night it was different group of people of different nationalities, talking over various and diverse subjects, and sharing stories.
The Australians were there in full force, as they were in Europe 25 years ago, and to my suprise I let myself be dragged out for a night of drinking and clubbing. In between all this madness and lack of sleep, I managed to do a fair bit of sightseeing and walking around the old quarter of the city. At every turn I kept having to fight the feeling that I was too old to be doing this.
After three days, I´d seen most of the tourist attractions on my list, and it suddenly occurred to me that for my last afternoon in the city, it might be nice to see a movie. I fired up the Google movie listings tool in the hostel and found that the pickings were slim.
My Portuguese isn´t good enough to allow me to see a local movie. Yes I could be brave, but I wanted a gentler start to my European movie-going experiences. In Portugal, the Hollywood movies are subtitled, so if I could find one I wanted, it would be just like a regular movie, if I could find one. But I´d seen everything that was out (because of the aforementioned release date lag), and I wasn´t in the mood to see Anjos e Demonicos again. Why the hell did it have to be that movie that movie was released in synch with the United States?
But fortunately there it was, an American movie I hadn´t seen. It was Tyson, the acclaimed documentary about the boxer. I disappointed at having missed it in Boston, but now I was glad I´d let it slip past.
It was showing at the Cinema City in the Alvalade district. My hostel was in the old Baixo district, so I walked up a few blocks to Rossio Square, dodged the cocaine dealers who approach you constantly there, and descended into the metro, where I caught the line northward. After a couple stops, I got off at Alvalade, which unlike the city center, is a modern district.
I´d given myself a couple hours headstart, and after checking the time to make sure it was correct, I killed some time walking around the nearby neighborhoods. Walking through European cities is something I´ve long enjoyed, and I consider it incumbent, if you´re going to get to know a place, to see both it´s old and new districts.
Unfortunately it was brutally sunny and hot, so mostly what I did was hide in the shade under the trees in the nearby Campo Grande until right below show time. On my way back to the theater, I managed to get caught in a wedding party on the sidewalk.
The Cinema City (I took some pictures, but they will have to wait until I can upload them) had a full-fledged cafe in the lobby. I bought a ticket for five euros seventy (a little over eight bucks), then bought a Pepsi, which I drank entirely before the show, since I was so thirsty. Just like in America, you pay a premium for soft drinks at the theater. In this case, it cost me almost three euros for a medium drink, which is normally absurdly expensive for Portugal.
I was definitely curious to experience the auditorium. It had about a hundred seats, on a stadium incline, with high backs that did not recline. I noticed there was a place number on my seat, but I ignored it in the sparse crowd and sat down in front. The one thing that leapt out a me as being not-American was that the screen itself had slightly rounded edges, something I´ve never seen in the United States.
There were ads and a few trailers before the movie---more ads but fewer trailers that I was used to.
When the movie started, I found it hard not to read the subtitles, even though the movie was in English and the words were in Portuguese. I suppose this is a common phenomenon. Among other things, it let me learn a few new Portuguese words and phrases.
As for the movie, I would not have expected to enjoy it, but for that fact that it got tremendous reviews. Almost immediately I could see why. It was shot in a way that made it very easy to follow the story of Tyson´s life as he narrated it.
There´s that magic word again---story. Does life really make a narrative? It seems that way if you let it. I think this is what I was trying to get at in my previous post about Casablanca. It´s why I write this blog, to attempt to understand life as a story, and to see story is manifest in the art of motion pictures. Those two things seem to go together with me, which is why I write this blog the way I do. I cannot separate out the experience of watching a movie from the experience of everything else in my life. In that respect, it makes perfect sense that the movie that prompted me to start writing this was Synecdoche, New York.
Hollywood motion pictures tell stories. Life makes a story. History, and in particular the history of America, makes a story. These are all woven together for me. I start out talking about one, and I slip into talking about another facet.
Sure I followed the story of Tyson´s career, out of the corner of my consciousness, while it was going on. I detested the guy. He was pure thug to me. I rejoiced at everything bad that happened to him, and especially when he was defeated in the ring.
What this movie did was make me ashamed of those feelings. It turns out I had simply fallen for the image of Mike Tyson as his promoters, and the media (and he himself) wanted to put forth. Watching this documentary I had a complete turnaround. I was rooting for the guy the entire way.
For one thing, you learn what was really driving Tyson the whole time: fear. The guy was simply afraid. As a kid he was beaten up, and he was terrified of anyone getting the best of him in that way, because it meant life or death on the streets. In this respect, Tyson is the perfect manifestation of the street gang culture that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
But it a broader sense, I found myself rooting for Tyson because of personal reasons. The guy was born in 1966, and it when I heard that in the movie, I realized that in the history of boxing, this is the guy from my cohort. All at once, I saw my entire life in his story, even as divergent as we were. What he did was a part of what I did.
Thus I cringed at his self-inflicted downfall, and the injustices that befell him in the wake of the emergence of his tragic weaknesses. I rooted for him against Holyfield this time, and was sad when he lost. His retirement also became a personal transformation for me---the time at which boxers of my age pass from dominance in history.
And I couldn´t help thinking: my god, this guy was good. He should have been the best ever. Or was I talking about myself. I lose track sometimes.
Keeping up with current releases in Europe
O.K. this is going to be harder than I thought. What I didn´t realize before leaving was that the release dates for most Hollywood movies in Europe often lag weeks and even months behind the United States (I was reading a blog entry complaining that this blindness on the part of the Hollywood studios is a major factor in promoting piracy).
Even before leaving, I´d slipped slightly behind. Amidst all the hullabaloo of getting ready, I didn´t have the gumption to see Next Day Air. Moreover, I pooped out on the day before I left and canceled my trip to see The Soloist. This last one is ironic, since they have been showing the damn trailer to this for nigh onto a year, while repeatedly delaying the release until last month. Moreover, it was showing at the big auditorium in Wilton, giving me the chance to finally attend a screening there, instead of the tiny smaller room. Oh, well.
More dire is that Up, about which everyone is raving, isn´t going to be released in Europe until September (!). I expect that it will still be showing at the second run theaters, if not the first run houses, by the time I get back, which I think will be in July. Also Drag Me to Hell is not being released in this part of Europe until well in July.
So that´s the score right now. It makes me wonder if I´ll wind up getting caught in the squeeze with these movies, in that I´ll leave Europe before they come out, but will arrive come after they´ve left theaters. But I´ll have to cope with it, and use Redbox and Netflix to catch up once I get back, whenever that it. For all I know, I´ll be in Europe long enough to catch all of these.
In that regard, I´m going to have to adopt a very laid-back approach to all this. My goal will be to see movies whenever I can, and not worry about seeing all of them for now. It´s a damn tough adjustment, but I´ll have to make that sacrifice while I´m travelling in sunny Portugal. Alas.
As Hepburn said, "You can´t have it all, you know."
Even before leaving, I´d slipped slightly behind. Amidst all the hullabaloo of getting ready, I didn´t have the gumption to see Next Day Air. Moreover, I pooped out on the day before I left and canceled my trip to see The Soloist. This last one is ironic, since they have been showing the damn trailer to this for nigh onto a year, while repeatedly delaying the release until last month. Moreover, it was showing at the big auditorium in Wilton, giving me the chance to finally attend a screening there, instead of the tiny smaller room. Oh, well.
More dire is that Up, about which everyone is raving, isn´t going to be released in Europe until September (!). I expect that it will still be showing at the second run theaters, if not the first run houses, by the time I get back, which I think will be in July. Also Drag Me to Hell is not being released in this part of Europe until well in July.
So that´s the score right now. It makes me wonder if I´ll wind up getting caught in the squeeze with these movies, in that I´ll leave Europe before they come out, but will arrive come after they´ve left theaters. But I´ll have to cope with it, and use Redbox and Netflix to catch up once I get back, whenever that it. For all I know, I´ll be in Europe long enough to catch all of these.
In that regard, I´m going to have to adopt a very laid-back approach to all this. My goal will be to see movies whenever I can, and not worry about seeing all of them for now. It´s a damn tough adjustment, but I´ll have to make that sacrifice while I´m travelling in sunny Portugal. Alas.
As Hepburn said, "You can´t have it all, you know."
Letters of Transit
A couple days after I landed in Lisbon, I was thinking about the chain of events that led me to come to Portugal. Although there are many reasons, partly having to do with a cancelled trip from 2001, I realized that there were also little subtle clues.
These are the little coincidences that seem to be pointing somewhere, telling you which way to go. Since striking out on the road last year, I´ve gotten good as tuning into these clues. Maybe they are simply a reflection of some inner unacknowledged desire. Maybe there is something more spiritual to them. I don´t know. But I can tell you that when I follow them, my life comes much closer to telling a coherent story, which is what this blog is about, it seems.
One clue that sticks out to me is the photograph on the wall of my sister´s living room. I´ve been looking at it for the last six months, whenver I went in there to watch television. It´s a still from the movie Casablanca, specifically a shot on the tarmack at the end, showing a Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergmann, and Paul Henreid standing beside each other. At least I´m pretty sure it´s on the tarmack.
When I was in Lisbon, it suddenly hit me that Bergmann and Henreid´s characters are about to fly off to the very city I was in right then, into which I´d flown just a couple days before. It´s argubably the most famous plane flight in cinema. Lisbon is the city of escape from tyranny, and towards freedom.
So maybe looking at that still on the wall night after night for six months somehow sunk in. In any case, I knew it was the right thing to do.
These are the little coincidences that seem to be pointing somewhere, telling you which way to go. Since striking out on the road last year, I´ve gotten good as tuning into these clues. Maybe they are simply a reflection of some inner unacknowledged desire. Maybe there is something more spiritual to them. I don´t know. But I can tell you that when I follow them, my life comes much closer to telling a coherent story, which is what this blog is about, it seems.
One clue that sticks out to me is the photograph on the wall of my sister´s living room. I´ve been looking at it for the last six months, whenver I went in there to watch television. It´s a still from the movie Casablanca, specifically a shot on the tarmack at the end, showing a Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergmann, and Paul Henreid standing beside each other. At least I´m pretty sure it´s on the tarmack.
When I was in Lisbon, it suddenly hit me that Bergmann and Henreid´s characters are about to fly off to the very city I was in right then, into which I´d flown just a couple days before. It´s argubably the most famous plane flight in cinema. Lisbon is the city of escape from tyranny, and towards freedom.
So maybe looking at that still on the wall night after night for six months somehow sunk in. In any case, I knew it was the right thing to do.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Speaking of Europe...
So here I am. I finally got wireless working with this Asus Eee PC. It's not that it was malfunctioning, but rather that I hadn't tried to use it until I got to this hotel in Coimbra.
After a too-short red-eye, I cleared passport control in Dublin, fulfilling a long-time insane ambition to carry on the entire conversation (at least my part of it) in Irish Gaelic. A couple hours later, woozy from lack of sleep, I was on my connecting flight, and a few hours later I was landing in Lisbon.
I've been here in Portugal for a week now. After four nights staying in hostels in Lisbon, I headed up to Fatima, then Tomar, and am now in Coimbra, where I have wireless here in the Hotel Oslo. As I type this, I am lazily recovering in my room from a day exploring the Roman ruins at Coninbriga.
I've had the chance to see a movie already, and hopefully will post about it later today. Also I'm already chafing at the bit because I'm falling behind the movie releases back home. It turns out that Up isn't opening in Europe until September (!). Yesterday I was reading a blog post about how this simply encourages piracy.
Tomorrow I'm leaving here for Porto, where I may see another movie, at the AMC there!
After a too-short red-eye, I cleared passport control in Dublin, fulfilling a long-time insane ambition to carry on the entire conversation (at least my part of it) in Irish Gaelic. A couple hours later, woozy from lack of sleep, I was on my connecting flight, and a few hours later I was landing in Lisbon.
I've been here in Portugal for a week now. After four nights staying in hostels in Lisbon, I headed up to Fatima, then Tomar, and am now in Coimbra, where I have wireless here in the Hotel Oslo. As I type this, I am lazily recovering in my room from a day exploring the Roman ruins at Coninbriga.
I've had the chance to see a movie already, and hopefully will post about it later today. Also I'm already chafing at the bit because I'm falling behind the movie releases back home. It turns out that Up isn't opening in Europe until September (!). Yesterday I was reading a blog post about how this simply encourages piracy.
Tomorrow I'm leaving here for Porto, where I may see another movie, at the AMC there!
Gomorra
Sometimes you get lucky.
A couple weeks back, by some stupid error, I let Gomorra slip out of the theaters in Boston without seeing it. It had been my own darn fault. After having just missed it in New York in February, I anticipated its arrival in Boston with great eagerness, only to lackadaisically let it meander from one indie theater to another, until in wound up at the Capitol, which seems to be the last on the food chain. Somehow I had I misread the Google movie listings, on what I thought what the last Thursday to see it, I found it already gone. It had already come and gone out of the Red River in Concord, New Hampshire. That left one last hope: my old stand-by, the Wilton Town Theater.
The listings in Wilton confirmed it was on their schedule, but when? It didn't say. It was far down on the list, and so I didn't expect to have a chance to see it before I left for overseas. But by some act of grace, when I checked the listings last Wednesday, for what would be my final days during this stay in the Boston area, there it was.
It was a double joy, since it gave me once last chance to go back to Wilton. I had been up there four times in the last six months, but not at since February, since I had caught up on all the smaller independent films. But Gomorra came me one last opportunity, at least until I return.
I took off on the backroads on late Saturday afternoon. On all my previous trips, the short winter days had meant I had made the trip in total darkness. The beautiful May sun of New England gave me a chance to see what I was missing. The green rolling hills and orchards up along the border reminded me of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. I already learned that Silver Lake State Park actually has a huge lake right beside the road.
I rolled onto Main Street with about forty minutes to spare, and as had become my custom, I had dinner at the homespun Greek diner across from the theater. The television was showing a minor league baseball game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. The brilliant sun gave me a chance to take a few shots of the hulking town hall. It turns out they have been showing movies there since 1912.
From the photo, you can see the entrance on street level. You have to climb the stairs to the second story, where you buy a ticket at the concession stand.
Gomorrah was showing in the smaller of the two auditoriums, which is where I've seen every movie that I've seen there. The larger auditorium, which has a stage and big velvet curtain, always shows curtain releases, which I usually have seen already.
There were less than ten people in the small auditorium and its plain-brown-wrapper wooden fold-up seats that sit flat on the floor. I always sit in the same place, in the third row, for some reason. It's one of my quirks, that I usually sit in the same seat when going back to the same place.
As I like to do lately, I recently read the book upon which the movie is based. Robert Soviano's non-fiction action of the seedy underbelly of Naples strikes one as nearly impossible to capture on screen, for the fact that it contains some many, many little vignettes. They could literally make dozens of movies out of it, even though its less than three hundred pages long.
In this case, they made five separate but overlapping stories, which they follow in linear fashion. All five of the stories essentially have the same theme, which is the devil's bargain of being involved in the underworld depicted. Each of the protagonists, either before the beginning of the story, or during the course of it, has made some kind of personal deal, to obtain money or other rewards by getting involved in this world, at least on some level. That each story winds up showing the price for this bargain inevitably makes this movie in the tradition of the Italian medieval stories, such as Boccaccio, or more recently, Italo Calvino.
What eventually struck me about the movie, as opposed to the book, was that the structure of the narrative was inverted. Although the book is billed as an expose of the Naples organized crime, it opens not with the street-level gang wars but with the macro picture of globalism. We learn that Naples is to Europe what Long Beach is to the West Coast of the United States---the funnel through which the mind-boggling and endless stream of cheap goods from China enters the continent. This towering fact is the one that supports all other activities in Soviano's expose, and it is why the crime of the Naples suburbs is woven into the highest levels of globalist trade. Only after the midpoint of the book do we finally get to the street-level Cammora gang wars, when the killinugs of 2004, largely done by kids on mopeds, arrive with numbing succession.
But the movie takes an inverted structure. We start with street wars, and then move on to the global picture only in the midpoint of the movie. Even then, we get only a glimpse of the influence of global trade on Naples. This was somewhat disappointing to me, because the street-level violence, althoug easily romanticized, is really no different from the violence we have seen over and over again in movies.
No movie can ever capture everything in a novel, but I couldn't help feel that many, if not most, of my favorite episodes from the book were missing. I was sure the cell phone ringing in the coffin would make it in. Also the story of Pasquale the Tailor really lacked something that gave the book its globalist punch, especially the story of Angelina Jolie's dress. Anyone who read the book will understand why Jolie was kept a low profile at this year's Oscars.
I've heard so many raves about this movie that I couldn't help feeling a bit let-down. I had expected a full-throated expose of globalism, but what I got was more of a post-millenial neo-realist updating of traditional mafia movies. It certainly is a very good movie, but not quite the one I was expecting.
All right. That will have to do for commentary. I'm sitting in the Aer Lingus lounge in Boston Airport, and they have just called boarding for my flight to Dublin. The adventure begins...
note I wrote this a week ago. I'm finally getting around to uploading it, now that I have wireless working.
A couple weeks back, by some stupid error, I let Gomorra slip out of the theaters in Boston without seeing it. It had been my own darn fault. After having just missed it in New York in February, I anticipated its arrival in Boston with great eagerness, only to lackadaisically let it meander from one indie theater to another, until in wound up at the Capitol, which seems to be the last on the food chain. Somehow I had I misread the Google movie listings, on what I thought what the last Thursday to see it, I found it already gone. It had already come and gone out of the Red River in Concord, New Hampshire. That left one last hope: my old stand-by, the Wilton Town Theater.
The listings in Wilton confirmed it was on their schedule, but when? It didn't say. It was far down on the list, and so I didn't expect to have a chance to see it before I left for overseas. But by some act of grace, when I checked the listings last Wednesday, for what would be my final days during this stay in the Boston area, there it was.
It was a double joy, since it gave me once last chance to go back to Wilton. I had been up there four times in the last six months, but not at since February, since I had caught up on all the smaller independent films. But Gomorra came me one last opportunity, at least until I return.
I took off on the backroads on late Saturday afternoon. On all my previous trips, the short winter days had meant I had made the trip in total darkness. The beautiful May sun of New England gave me a chance to see what I was missing. The green rolling hills and orchards up along the border reminded me of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. I already learned that Silver Lake State Park actually has a huge lake right beside the road.
I rolled onto Main Street with about forty minutes to spare, and as had become my custom, I had dinner at the homespun Greek diner across from the theater. The television was showing a minor league baseball game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. The brilliant sun gave me a chance to take a few shots of the hulking town hall. It turns out they have been showing movies there since 1912.
From the photo, you can see the entrance on street level. You have to climb the stairs to the second story, where you buy a ticket at the concession stand.
Gomorrah was showing in the smaller of the two auditoriums, which is where I've seen every movie that I've seen there. The larger auditorium, which has a stage and big velvet curtain, always shows curtain releases, which I usually have seen already.
There were less than ten people in the small auditorium and its plain-brown-wrapper wooden fold-up seats that sit flat on the floor. I always sit in the same place, in the third row, for some reason. It's one of my quirks, that I usually sit in the same seat when going back to the same place.
As I like to do lately, I recently read the book upon which the movie is based. Robert Soviano's non-fiction action of the seedy underbelly of Naples strikes one as nearly impossible to capture on screen, for the fact that it contains some many, many little vignettes. They could literally make dozens of movies out of it, even though its less than three hundred pages long.
In this case, they made five separate but overlapping stories, which they follow in linear fashion. All five of the stories essentially have the same theme, which is the devil's bargain of being involved in the underworld depicted. Each of the protagonists, either before the beginning of the story, or during the course of it, has made some kind of personal deal, to obtain money or other rewards by getting involved in this world, at least on some level. That each story winds up showing the price for this bargain inevitably makes this movie in the tradition of the Italian medieval stories, such as Boccaccio, or more recently, Italo Calvino.
What eventually struck me about the movie, as opposed to the book, was that the structure of the narrative was inverted. Although the book is billed as an expose of the Naples organized crime, it opens not with the street-level gang wars but with the macro picture of globalism. We learn that Naples is to Europe what Long Beach is to the West Coast of the United States---the funnel through which the mind-boggling and endless stream of cheap goods from China enters the continent. This towering fact is the one that supports all other activities in Soviano's expose, and it is why the crime of the Naples suburbs is woven into the highest levels of globalist trade. Only after the midpoint of the book do we finally get to the street-level Cammora gang wars, when the killinugs of 2004, largely done by kids on mopeds, arrive with numbing succession.
But the movie takes an inverted structure. We start with street wars, and then move on to the global picture only in the midpoint of the movie. Even then, we get only a glimpse of the influence of global trade on Naples. This was somewhat disappointing to me, because the street-level violence, althoug easily romanticized, is really no different from the violence we have seen over and over again in movies.
No movie can ever capture everything in a novel, but I couldn't help feel that many, if not most, of my favorite episodes from the book were missing. I was sure the cell phone ringing in the coffin would make it in. Also the story of Pasquale the Tailor really lacked something that gave the book its globalist punch, especially the story of Angelina Jolie's dress. Anyone who read the book will understand why Jolie was kept a low profile at this year's Oscars.
I've heard so many raves about this movie that I couldn't help feeling a bit let-down. I had expected a full-throated expose of globalism, but what I got was more of a post-millenial neo-realist updating of traditional mafia movies. It certainly is a very good movie, but not quite the one I was expecting.
All right. That will have to do for commentary. I'm sitting in the Aer Lingus lounge in Boston Airport, and they have just called boarding for my flight to Dublin. The adventure begins...
note I wrote this a week ago. I'm finally getting around to uploading it, now that I have wireless working.
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