(Jones 1975) A Boy and His Dog
(Muybridge / 1877–85 ) Homage To Eadweard Muybridge
(Edison 1894) Sandow [the Strong Man] Read more »
Category Archives: DM - Viewing 2009 - Page 2
FILMS JANUARY-MARCH 2009
(Tarsem 2006) The Fall
This interesting fantasy was filmed in India, Romania, Namibia, South Africa, Czech Republic, Indonesia, and other places. The cinematography is superb, reminding me of the crisp images of James Wong Howe. The director, Tarsem Singh, was trying for an adult approach to a psychological parable about suicide and death, illuminated by some of the most beautiful landscape and architecture in the world. It’s thick with cultural, scientific, and historical references best enjoyed by a well-read audience, though it can be enjoyed well enough without noticing them.
The story: in 1920’s Hollywood, a stuntman recovers from a serious injury, and rejection in love, in a hospital. Another patient is a young Romanian immigrant girl (perhaps ten years old). In order to bribe the child to get him morphine pills with which to commit suicide, the stuntman tells her a fantastic tale, with the flavour of the Masnavi or the Arabian Nights. The films intercuts to representations of this tale, which employ real landscapes and settings with fantastic costume and magical effects.
This film appeared and passed unnoticed in 2006.
(Verhaeghe 2006) Le Grand Meaulnes
If you have a certain frame of mind (which I have, and share with my friend William Breiding), you will naturally be drawn to the remarkable 1913 novel by Alain-Fournier [Henri Alban-Fournier, 1886–1914]. Le Grand Meaulnes is justly considered a masterpiece of French literature, and it captures the subtle tension between dream and reality, and between desire and fulfillment. The main character, Augustin Meaulnes, a seventeen-year-old student, gets lost and encounters a woman he falls in love with, then can’t find her, an event that determines the subsequent story. But the tale is told from the point of view of his fifteen-year-old friend François Seurel, and it’s this technique that makes the story brilliant, because the real point of the story is what it all means to Seurel. It’s an elegant, precisely written tale, and the author’s obvious genius was almost immediately extinguished on the battlefields of World War I. Read more »
(Jones 1975) A Boy and His Dog
Harlan Ellison’s post-apocalyptic black comedy was written in 1969, and filmed in 1975, at the tail end of the wave of Hollywood eccentric films that briefly came out of Hollywood (after which things went back to Business As Usual). It is reasonably faithful to the story, and apparently won Ellison’s approval, except for the last line spoken in the film. Ellison felt it this line was mysoginist, a criticism that had been unjustly made against the story. The kind of bitter, cynical humour that was commonplace at the time probably doesn’t sit will with the audiences of today. The satirical dystopia of white-face-painted oligarchs ruling a Walt Disneyish Topeka, Kansas in an underground refuge will probably just puzzle anyone under thirty. But this kind of humour, updated in imagery, might be on the verge of a come-back. The lead actor, Don Johnson, later went on to star in the television Miami Vice. Jason Robards, a veteran star from the 1950s, played the sinister ruler of the underground Topeka. Under-rated veteran actor Tim McIntyre provided the voice of Blood, the telepathic dog.