OBLOMOV

I defied the forces of indolence and finished Oblomov in three weeks. More to come.

DELEUZE AND THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, US)
By Jerry White

Whoever thought that Gilles Deleuze and the Discovery Channel would come together to tell us something about the state of modern cinema? And yet here we are, presented with Werner Herzog’s newest film, the Discovery Channel-produced Encounters at the End of the World on our screens (well, some of our screens), and here I am, with Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image in my lap.

Here’s Deleuze on Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972): “There is thus both a hallucinatory element, where the acting spirit raises itself to boundlessness in nature, and a hypnotic dimension where the spirit runs up against the limits which Nature opposes to it.” This is both preceded and followed by formulations of utterly stultifying density, which are, of course, Deleuze’s stock in trade. Nevertheless, he’s on to something here, and that something is visible even in so ostensibly conventional a work as Encounters at the End of the World. It would be easy to read this film as late, benign Herzog, a soft work from a mellowing figure, the New German Cinema made safe for American cablevision at last. I don’t think so.

Herzog travelled to Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Antarctic Artists and Writer’s Program, staying at the NSF’s McMurdo station on Ross Island. This connection reminds me somewhat of Laurie Anderson’s short video Hidden Inside Mountains (2005), commissioned for the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, which followed closely on the heels of her 2002-03 stint as NASA’s first artist-in-residence (an experience that her performance piece The End of the Moon is directly based on). Encounters, like Hidden Inside Mountains, is an elliptical meditation on landscape made by someone who has spent a long period in the company of scientists and engineers, people whose personal formations have led them to a very different relationship with technology and nature than most artists tend to (or even can) have. While Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982) and the unbalanced, protracted fever dream that is Fitzcarraldo (1982) itself, suggest that Herzog was in well over his head in confronting the Amazon’s alien landscape, even with a wealth of engineering expertise at his disposal, there is no such comparable feeling in Encounters, which evinces a smoothness, a confidence in its technological mastery that is almost hypnotic; following the Deleuzian formulation, that sense of smoothness serves to cover over the hallucinatory elements that lie just beneath it, those elements which are thoroughly beyond its grasp.
This smoothness cannot simply be read as wisdom bred of age—indeed, what is startling in Herzog’s later films is how the most definitively Herzogian moments arise from his collaboration with experts and technicians. Encounters’ underwater footage, shot beneath the Antarctic ice (which also served as the location for the distant liquid planet in Herzog’s 2005 The Wild Blue Yonder), provides some of the film’s most indelible images. The bluish-greenish hue of the water and the gravity-defying ice-stalactites emphasize the otherworldly quality of the southernmost continent, which is only accentuated by the clinical detachment of the cinematography, shot with minimal movement and largely in extreme long shot. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that this footage was shot neither by Herzog nor his intrepid cameraman Peter Zeitlinger. (When asked at the 2007 Telluride Film Festival what it was like being underwater to shoot that material, he chuckled and said that he wasn’t qualified to do that sort of diving.) While the underwater sequences clearly descend from the hypnotic side of Herzog’s sensibility established over so many films, it also bespeaks the logistical expertise of the divers, a rigourously trained awareness of the enormous resources and skill that it takes to (briefly) master nature in order to capture it on film.
A more hallucinatory side of the film emerges as well, often via a form of oddball comedy—though with a rather hollow laugh at its centre. In one extreme long shot, while Herzog makes dryly sarcastic voiceover jokes about a certain much-loved nature documentary, a disoriented penguin marches off into the empty landscape to die —a singularly peculiar image, at once absurd and ominous, which wouldn’t be out of place in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1968) or even Aguirre, as a meditation on the way in which a harsh, unforgiving landscape can so casually destroy the bewildered beings wandering through it. Herzog works throughout the film to join the dangerous and the lovely, and clearly sees the sort of ecstatic trembling this inspires as one of the characterising elements of Antarctica. He thus has little interest in the tendency of conventional nature docs to find the gentle, the wondrous, or the exciting in open spaces.
In any event, Herzog is not only interested in open spaces. Even in the blank vastness of Antarctica, insides abound—both the natural and the manmade. Herzog spends significant time inside the McMurdo base, acquainting himself with the people who have chosen to inhabit the last continent. These include not only the requisite super-geek scientists and eccentric loners, whom Herzog treats with a combination of sympathetic attentiveness and slightly disdainful bemusement (“Her story was endless,” Herzog deadpans in voiceover as one of the inhabitants details her long life’s journey to Antarctica), but also such unexpected figures as an Eastern European refugee with painful memories of political repression which, in a seemingly uncharacteristic moment of sympathy, Herzog doesn’t push him to explore on camera (“That’s okay,” we hear Herzog quietly say offscreen as the man haltingly and reluctantly tries to put his torturous experiences into words).
Herzog’s conviction that one must travel inside if one really wants to touch upon the depthless mysteries of nature, and the place of humans within it, is crucial to his vision of Antarctica. Indeed, one of the film’s hallucinatory highlights comes when Herzog has to crawl through a set of dark, narrow tunnels that have been cut through the ice and rock—the camera as low to the ground as it can be, the soundtrack full of mumbling and huffing as everyone makes their way through the cramped passages. It’s a surprisingly resonant image, the struggle and difficulty of humanity’s basic existence as it attempts to navigate its fascinating and ultimately unconcerned habitat; and it’s a resonance that emerges not from grand allegorical imposition, but from the supposedly neutral process of observation and documentation.
This obsession with the interaction between humanity and nature, between technology and landscape, is the stuff of high Romanticism, and its inheritance is something that Herzog, good German that he is, has been decisively formed by, however sardonic his own brand of it is and however seemingly conventional its packaging. Encounters at the End of the World exemplifies how a typically pedestrian mandate such as that of the Discovery Channel can be transformed by subtle shifts in emphasis, by unexpected prolongations and ruminations and sharp, striking insights. Some TV viewers may tune in expecting more penguins; what they get instead is a portrait of people in search of the sublime.

—Jerry White

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

FROM LA TIMES
BOOK REVIEW
‘Inherent Vice’ by Thomas Pynchon
Southern California’s 1960s past reemerges from the haze in this Chandler-like tale, set in the age of cannabis.
By Carolyn Kellogg >>>
August 2, 2009
“Inherent Vice” is Thomas Pynchon doing Raymond Chandler through a Jim Rockford looking glass, starring Cheech Marin (or maybe Tommy Chong). What could easily be mistaken as a paean to 1960s Southern California is also a sly herald of that era’s end. This, of course, is exactly the kind of layered meaning that readers expect of Pynchon.

His fans tend to be drawn to either his massive, bafflingly complex efforts — the iconic, National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “Mason & Dixon” and “Against the Day” — or to the more constrained, plot-driven narratives of “Vineland” or “The Crying of Lot 49.” It is the big books, with their parades of gloriously obtuse set pieces, full of slapstick and conspiracy and minutely researched ephemera, that established Pynchon as a writer worthy of intense inquiry. Yet having a plot doesn’t make his work any less brilliant, any less Pynchonian. “Inherent Vice” is a perfect case in point. It has a plot. It has a main character. This clear structure will, no doubt, disappoint the big-book boosters, the obsessives who began contributing to the online wiki annotation of “Against the Day” before finishing its 1,085 pages. But maybe we should all take a hit off a fat spliff and enjoy the dirty, brainy achievement of Pynchon’s “Vice.”

At the center of “Inherent Vice” is Doc Sportello, a low-key private investigator living in a dingy bachelor pad in Gordita, a beach community with Venice’s grit and Malibu’s surfers and hills. He has little affection for nonhippie flatlanders and a love of good weed. But Doc is more law and order than his indica might indicate: His occasional girlfriend is an assistant district attorney, and he’s got an enduring across-the-divide, almost-friendship with Bigfoot Bjornsen, an LAPD detective who does Cal Worthington-like TV spots on the side. It’s these straight-world connections that bring Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth to his doorstep asking for help.

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In a detective fiction setup worthy of Chandler, Shasta — a minor actress and mistress of real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann — tells Doc that her lover’s wife, who has a lover of her own, is trying to ship Mickey off to an insane asylum so she can take control of his fortune. Doc takes the case, but before his investigation can get off the ground, he’s accused of murder, picked up and released by the cops and the FBI and discovers that both Shasta and Mickey have gone missing. No client, no money, but a mystery to solve.

Weirdness and obsession

Doc does true detective work — dressing up in disguises, following leads — yet he’s stoned most of the time and easily distracted. His world is full of Pynchonian weirdness: an ex-junkie sax player who has faked his own death and is living, unrecognized, with his band in Topanga Canyon; a surfer who ventures out too far to catch impossible waves; a lawyer fixated on the minutiae of “Gilligan’s Island” and other trash TV; and Mickey’s collection of pornographic ties, decorated with images of his lovers — although Shasta is conspicuously missing.

Nearly every character has an obsession or addiction. Doc’s almost constantly altered state allows the unreal to shimmer against reality like light on an ocean. Sentences appear and Doc wonders if he’s said them aloud; he never finds out, and we can’t be sure. A clue discovered on an acid trip is as valuable as anything learned while straight. And his cannabis-induced paranoia is only a quarter turn from his detective work — especially when he comes across references to the mysterious Golden Fang. Doc knows the Golden Fang is a boat with a mysterious, historic past. But it also seems to be a consortium of horny Silver Lake dentists, not to mention an Asian gang connected to drugs and money, Vietnam and China.

In classic Pynchon fashion, random incidents add up to conspiracy — maybe. Behind powerful figures loom shadowy, more powerful figures, and complex layers of knowledge lead to confusion as much as clarity. There is also a lot of sex (if little romance), many pop-culture allusions (one scene references at least two classic noir films), characters who cross over from Pynchon’s other work (“Vineland,” predominantly) and silly names galore.

It’s easy to forget, among all his games and puzzles, that Pynchon can write razor-sharp beauty with the best of them. A page-long description of the Santa Anas demands a place next to classic passages by Chandler and Joan Didion.

In Pynchon’s big books, these devastating descriptions, particularly of place, are often swept away in the tide of prose and characters. Here, in a novel that focuses on Los Angeles so sharply that Tommy’s is pinpointed by its cross streets, they shine.

L.A. on his mind

Pynchon, now 72, apparently lived in Southern California in the 1960s, and the attention to L.A.’s geography implies that the region has remained on his mind. Maybe he’s got a clear sense of recall — or maybe he comes back to visit or has devoted time to exploring Google Maps’ street views. Either way, his details of the city are precise.

The Internet does make an appearance in “Inherent Vice,” with a reference to the pre-Web ARPAnet and a prescient sense of future connection. “Someday,” a real estate agent says, “there will be computers for all this, all you’ll have to do’s type in what you’re looking for . . . and it’ll be right back at you with more information than you’d ever want to know, any lot in the L.A. Basin all the way back to the Spanish land grants — water rights, encumbrances, mortgage histories, whatever you want.” The idea reads as both hope and lament.

And yet, if “Inherent Vice” exhibits nostalgia, it is not for the Los Angeles of yesteryear but for the days when genuine mystery was possible, when Doc’s acid trip could be as relevant as Det. Bjornsen’s world, when complex layers could both contradict and coexist. It’s a love letter to a time when obsessives couldn’t get all the answers from computers, when we might embrace the unknowable.

Still, after getting pretty far out, “Inherent Vice” eventually circles back and ties up all its loose ends. It has a climactic moment, a cushiony denouement — by gum, closure. If this stands in counterpoint to Pynchon’s most acclaimed work, perhaps we should pay heed to the novel’s title: “Inherent Vice” refers to a hidden defect that undermines a property’s worth, a marine-legal term for a Shakespearean flaw. It could refer to Los Angeles; it could refer to the 1960s. Or it could refer to the author’s work itself: With Pynchon’s brilliance comes readability.

Kellogg is the lead blogger for Jacket Copy, The Times’ book blog.

MAMA neglecting her blog but not her books.

Busy busy, but trying to keep mind from completely shutting down. Books, films, art and ideas are huge luxuries for the overwhelmed and overworked. Still, I insist on piecemealing my luxuriation.

1) Recent fulfilling experiences: reading (still reading) Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz. Sure, you have to take your time with this one and ruminate on the ideas and connections that are so beautifully and intricately woven. This book is not just the story/history of Mexico, but the making of man. The writing, level of genius offers constant surprises as Paz pushes the envelope on his historical and humanistic research. Wonderful.

2) Last week, I read Raymond Carver, the giant American minimalist of the 20th Century. Several of the stories appear in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Weather patterns, late 70’s archetypes and American realities spiked with gin and other spirits scratch the surface that coats a frail, frightening humanity.

3) Interesting article in The New Yorker about Edith Wharton’s newly discovered letters. I still don’t feel like reading her.

4) Watched “An Old Mistress.” It was the first time that I felt one could experience a book through film. The literary nuances are neither heavily literal nor obscured. The language is clean, so are the very natural scenes and sounds. Amazing. Here is a good review:

http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=cannes2007&jump=review&reviewid=VE1117933768

Geoff Achison–The Greatest

That Geoff Achison

Ongoing/Upcoming Film Festivals

 

For International films:

http://www.filmfestivals.com/index.shtml

 

Tribeca Film Festival

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-04-22/film/tribeca-film-festival-2009-guide/

Atlanta Film festival

http://atlantafilmfestival.com/index.php

 Palm Springs Film Festival

http://www.psfilmfest.org/index.aspx

 

CANNES LINE-UP

 

The Cannes Line up is revealed
April 23, 2009

Opening Film in 3D Stereo: Peter DOCTER – UP – Out of Comp.- 1h35 Pedro ALMODÓVAR – LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS (Broken Embraces) – 2h09 Andrea ARNOLD – FISH TANK – 2h02 Jacques AUDIARD – UN PROPHÈTE – 2h35 Marco BELLOCCHIO – VINCERE – 2h08 Jane CAMPION – BRIGHT STAR – 2h00 Isabel COIXET – MAP OF THE SOUNDS OF TOKYO -1h44 Xavier GIANNOLI – A L’ORIGINE – 2h30 Michael HANEKE – DAS WEISSE BAND (The White Ribbon) – 2h24 Ang LEE – TAKING WOODSTOCK -1h50 Ken LOACH – LOOKING FOR ERIC – 1h59 LOU Ye – CHUN FENG CHEN ZUI DE YE WAN (Spring Fever) – 1h55 Brillante MENDOZA – KINATAY – 1h45 Gaspar NOE – ENTER THE VOID – 2h30 PARK Chan-Wook – BAK-JWI – (Thirst) – 2h13 Alain RESNAIS – LES HERBES FOLLES – 1h36 Elia SULEIMAN – THE TIME THAT REMAINS – 1h45 Quentin TARANTINO – INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – 2h40 Johnnie TO – VENGEANCE – 1h48 TSAI Ming-liang – VISAGE (face)- 2h18 Lars VON TRIER – ANTICHRIST – 1h44 *** Closing Film : Jan KOUNEN – COCO CHANEL & IGOR STRAVINSKY – Out of Comp. – 2h00 UN CERTAIN REGARD BONG Joon Ho – MOTHER – 2h10 Alain CAVALIER – IRENE -1h23 Lee DANIELS – PRECIOUS – 1h49 Denis DERCOURT – DEMAIN DES L’AUBE – 1h36 Heitor DHALIA – À DERIVA (Adrift)- 1h43 Bahman GHOBADI – KASI AZ GORBEHAYE IRANI KHABAR NADAREH (Nobody Knows About The Persian Cats)- 1h06 Ciro GUERRA – LOS VIAJES DEL VIENTO (Les Voyages Du Vent) – 1h57 Mia HANSEN-LOVE – LE PÈRE DE MES ENFANTS – 2h00 Hanno HÖFER, Razvan MARCULESCU, Cristian MUNGIU, Constantin POPESCU, Ioana URICARU: AMINTIRI DIN EPOCA DE AUR (Tales from The Golden Age) – 2h18 Nikolay KHOMERIKI – SKAZKA PRO TEMNOTU (Tale In The Darkness)- 1h12 HIrokazu KORE-EDA – KUKI NINGYO (Air Doll)- 2h05 Yorgos LANTHIMOS – KYNODONTAS (Dogtooth) – 1h34 Pavel LOUNGUINE – TZAR (Le Tsar) – 1h56 Raya MARTIN – INDEPENDENCIA – (Independence) – 1h17 Corneliu PORUMBOIU – POLITIST, ADJECTIV (Policier, Adjectif) – 1h55 Pen-Ek RATANARUANG – NANG MAI (Nymph)- 1h49 João Pedro RODRIGUES – MORRER COMO UM HOMEM (Mourir Comme Un Homme) – 2h13 Haim TABAKMAN – EYES WIDE OPEN – 1er film -1h31 Warwick THORNTON – SAMSON AND DELILAH – 1er film – 1h41 Jean VAN DE VELDE – THE SILENT ARMY – 1h32 OUT OF COMPETITION: Alejandro AMENABAR – AGORA – 2h08 Terry GILLIAM – THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS – (L’imaginarium du Docteur Parnassus) – 2h02 Robert GUÉDIGUIAN – L’ARMÉE DU CRIME – 2h05 MIDNIGHT SREENINGS : Stéphane AUBIER, Vincent PATAR – A TOWN CALLED PANIC (Panique au village) -1er film – 1h15 Sam RAIMI – DRAG ME TO HELL (Jusqu’en enfer) – 1h39 Marina de VAN – NE TE RETOURNE PAS – 1h50

The Telluride Film festival

http://telluridefilmfestival.org/

 

 

Los Angeles Film Festival

http://www.lafilmfest.com/

The Dames Watch German Films

“The year was 1929, Germany was undivided, although the real Germany, its schools and other places pictured in the film were not German and reality failed to interest me.”
Josef von Sternberg

I have seen a few German films lately. I rented Blue Angel a few weeks ago and watched Goodbye Lenin and The Lives of Others. Here is a quickie as I have to go to sleep…don’t expect some logical  thread here…

Blue Angel (1930):
The story of the precipitous fall of a prominent professor to the life of a vagrant  after succumbing to the charms of Lola, a cabaret dancer played by the great Marlene Dietrich.

The plot takes place during the late 20s Weimer period and is said–despite the director‘s denial– to be an allegory for pre-war Germany. The story was based on Heinrich Mann’s “Professor Unrat”. Given Mann’s humanistic interests and his mission to satirize Germany’s imperial aspirations, it’s hard not to read/hear some subversive tones in this black-and white gem.
In Blue Angel, Dietrich’s overexposed body and  sexual energy pays tribute to old notion  that  a woman mystique  can sink ships and ruin civilizations.

Spellbound, the professor loses himself, his reputation , his identity, his manlihood.  He is cindered, completely decimated  by this lusty life force called Lola, man of letters-turned- bitter bag of shredded rags. Much like Dresden in 1945.

The film was outlawed in Germany and heavily edited in the United States.  

I read that director Josef von Sternberg was a fascinating character. Of Jewish ancestry, his family didn;t fit the norms of any social group. Von Sternberg is  certainly one of the most important and underrated filmmakers of our time. Several examine his take on women … and like his Austrian psychoanalyst buddy, he just flaps his arms in exasperation when confronted with the subject.  (For more on…. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/sternberg.html).
I rented it on Netflix.

What else…

The Lives of Others (2006) is a gorgeous film. Let’s start with the style… it’s a film that breathes naturally with its exuberant simplicity. We travel through the opaque colors of East Berlin under Communism. The film’s subtle sounds and minimal street movement contrast the busy sceneries of the fast-moving , capitalist West. Clean walls, few people passing by, less cars (I remember that in Vietnam… you could actually hear the birds, the wind…Lenin said much about the proletariat and their ear drums).

The story involves a Stasi agent who spies on writers and artists. As a result, he is enlightened by what he hears and sees and becomes subversive himself (ok, this is a real shortcut). Art, the film seems to tell you, is impermeable to ideological authoritarianism. It needs room to breathe. And it does, at the end of the film, with the debut of the protagonist’s play in the West. Ironically, the Stasi agent is often having to save the protagonist from being told on by his lover, East Germany’s theatrical star who is threatened and violated by a high official.

Interesting things I learned about this film:

+++First time director Henckel von Donnersmarck won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards – including best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best supporting actor – after having set a new record with 11 nominations. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Golden Globe Awards. The Lives of Others cost US$2 million[1] and grossed more than $77 million worldwide as of November 2007[update].[4] Prior to his death, Sydney Pollack was said to be directing a possible Hollywood remake of the film.
++The film was released in Germany on March 23, 2006. At the same time, the screenplay was published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Henckel von Donnersmarck and Ulrich Mühe were successfully sued for libel for an interview in which Mühe asserted that his former wife informed on him while they were East German citizens[1] through the six years of their marriage.[2] In the film’s publicity material, Henckel von Donnersmarck says that Mühe’s former wife denied the claims, although 254 pages’ worth of government records detailed her activities.[3] The film succeeded in Germany despite a widespread contemporary reluctance in the country, particularly in its films,[1] to confront the totalitarian excesses of the East German state.[2]

Goodbye Lenin

Hmmm… a decorative tour of East Germany’s vintage goodies filled with untranslatable German jokes? Ok, not too crazy about the film but don’t have the time or inclination to diss it. So, I’ll leave you with some real critics who have something to say about it. It was a bit cute to me, but I know I’m no fun.

New York Times:

A softhearted tribute to — of all things — Communism, ”Good Bye, Lenin!,” the German director Wolfgang Becker’s social satire, has a knobby tone that somewhat mutes its crowd-pleasing ambitions and keeps it from becoming ”My Big, Fat Life Is Beautiful.”

The film captures the struggle of the devoted Alex (Daniel Brühl) as he fights to keep up his mother’s failing health. In 1989, just before the fall of the German Democratic Republic, Christiane (Katrin Sass) sees her son beaten by police during a riot. She falls into a coma, and then the Berlin Wall — and all it stands for — collapses. ”Mother slept through the relentless triumph of capitalism,” Alex notes. Any sudden shock could kill Christiane, a committed woman of the left, so Alex contrives to keep her convinced that things are still the same.
Mr. Becker wryly uses Alex’s scramble to refit the apartment with castoff tacky Communist-era décor to tweak the heedless encroachment of capitalism. Alex has to rescue the pasteboard furniture that he and his sister, Ariane (Maria Simon), were happy to heave onto a junk heap. The furniture’s utilitarian design seems to inform us that East Berlin might have been where Ikea got its ideas from.
The opening-credit sequence, a flashback to Alex’s childhood, details his mother’s emotional fragility. His father runs off to frolic with, as Alex puts it, ”his enemy-of-the-state girlfriend.” Afterward Alex observes that his mother married the fatherland and ‘’since the relationship was not sexual, she had a lot of energy for us kids.” Part of Christiane’s commitment involves hurling herself into Communism.
And part of Alex’s commitment — keeping his mother in the dark — involves flinging himself into locating all of the horrible groceries Christiane craves when she regains consciousness eight months after the fall of the East German Communist regime. Neighbors shake their heads sadly after he’s caught digging through the garbage looking for empty jars with the original labels. We catch Mr. Becker and his co-screenwriter, Bernd Lichtenberg, rummaging through other stories, like Washington Irving’s ”Rip Van Winkle,” as well as Emir Kusturica’s ”Underground” (1995) and ”Situation Hopeless but Not Serious,” a 1965 comedy with Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Sundance Kid and Mannix (Alec Guinness, Robert Redford and Mike Connors). In ”Serious,” an old German doesn’t tell the American soldiers hiding in his basement that World War II has ended.
There are a few bright jokes and sharp observations in the sentimental ”Lenin!,” which opens today in New York and Los Angeles. Alex’s determination eventually pulls in everyone he knows; instead of paying off East German officials for better supplies, he’s now giving money to kids to dress as Young Pioneers — the left-thinking G.D.R. equivalent of Boy Scouts — to serenade his mother. Alex’s boyhood idol, a cosmonaut who now occupies a reduced station in life, becomes part of the imposture. And his best friend and fellow satellite television installer, who recuts wedding videos to match up with sequences from ”2001: A Space Odyssey,” recreates old-school newscasts.
The laughs grow out of the elaborate lies they have to construct when Christiane inadvertently glimpses the new world. ”My mother’s bedroom resounded with the melody of yesterday,” Alex says, and he and his pals become the kind of propagandists that disappeared when the Berlin Wall came down. It is not until the film’s denouement that the repercussions of the Communist regime’s campaign of disinformation aimed at the family adds a harsh, melodramatic tinge to the climax.
Alex’s efforts to surround his mother with a Potemkin village adds direction to his existence. ”Somehow my scheme took on a life of its own,” he says. One of the funniest scenes in the movie comes when Alex finds a way to make his mother’s dream come true. ”Our Trabant is here!” he announces, informing her of the arrival of the legendary Eastern European auto so shoddy in manufacture it could have had a wood-burning engine. ”And after only three years waiting,” Christiane responds, glee adding a tremble to her voice.
But despite their sting, the movie’s laughs don’t keep ”Lenin!” breathless enough. Although Mr. Becker can generate tension when necessary, he doesn’t flex that muscle enough. Despite his ability — and affinity — for recreating the physical details of the early 1990’s, ”Good Bye, Lenin!” is much too long. It starts to feel like a flabby, dramatic version of the first ”Austin Powers” movie, another exercise in living anachronism as a storytelling device. By the time the picture’s final note about German reunification is struck, ”Lenin!” has raised a wall of indifference for the audience.
”Good Bye, Lenin!” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has Communist rioting and violence and post-Communist nudity, strong language and alcohol consumption.

GOOD BYE, LENIN!

Directed by Wolfgang Becker; written (in German, with English subtitles) by Bernd Lichtenberg and Mr. Becker; director of photography, Martin Kukula; edited by Katja De Bock and Andreas Schreitmüller; music by Yann Tiersen; produced by Stefan Arndt; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Daniel Brühl (Alex), Katrin Sass (Christiane Kerner), Chulpan Khamatova (Lara), Maria Simon (Ariane), Florian Lukas (Denis) and Alexander Beyer (Rainer).

Drew Barrymore–Grey Gardens

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103063394&ps=cprs

In a film and TV career that started when she was just 3 years old, she’s played everything from one of Charlie’s Angels to Olive, the Other Reindeer. Now, Drew Barrymore takes on one of film’s legendary eccentrics: “Little Edie” Beale, a down-at-heel blue-blood made famous in the Maysles Brothers documentary Grey Gardens.

HBO’s new dramatization — based on the 1975 original, and premiering April 18 — co-stars Jessica Lange as Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale. “Big Edie,” as she was known, was the aunt of one Jacqueline Bouvier, who went on to marry a Kennedy, and then an Onassis. “Little Edie” was Jackie’s cousin — and sometime rival.

After their fortunes flagged — a divorce for Big Edie, an halting quest for fame as a model, or maybe as a wife, for Little Edie — the two women chose to seclude themselves in Big Edie’s East Hampton house, a dilapidated manse called Grey Gardens.

The Beales’ story gained attention when health inspectors raided the home, finding a long list of health- and building-code violations. It burst into the public consciousness again with the Maysles Brothers’ film, which documented the ladies’ living conditions: “The once-elegant grounds were a tangled jungle,” as The New York Times recalled on the occasion of Little Edie’s death; “25 rooms were unused, and the fleas were so thick that the filmmakers wore flea collars around their ankles during the filming.”

HBO’s dramatization, like the Broadway musical that was also inspired by the documentary, looks beyond the moment captured in the Maysles Brothers film, spanning more than four decades in the women’s lives and exploring how the Beales came to withdraw so completely from the world. The movie’s scope required both Barrymore and Lange to perform some scenes in heavy age makeup and prosthetics that took hours to apply.

Barrymore appeared in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster E.T. when she was 7 years old. After a troubled adolescence, the actress has gone on to appear in many films including The Wedding Singer, Charlie’s Angels, Donnie Darko and 50 First Dates.

She makes her directorial debut later this year with Whip It!, a coming-of-age comedy based on the Shauna Cross novel Derby Girl.

Midnight’s Children

Sir Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children has been named the greatest Booker-prize winner of all time.

“ [I think of] how astonished my younger self writing Midnight’s Children in the late-1970s would have been about this. It was written with such hope but not with the expectation that this book would still be interesting and relevant to people who were not even born when it was written.” Rushdie, 2008 Booker Prize Ward.

I (finally) just finished reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I am a busy Mother/professional, not enough time to read all the great literature that is out there. But the need, the desire to read these stories is so strong, like a craving that never ends. Most of the time, I like to hear about what people are reading, seeing, experiencing in the arts, so I can take some of the knowledge and not feel like the life of ideas is wasting away in the mundane day-to-day life of a housewife in America. I digress. And I like my mundane life. Anyway… hope I don’t sound like I am inhaling too many cleaning products.
My impressions: Midnight’s Children is a huge book. It is dense yet delightfully entertaining, successfully ambitious. Genius, it reaches and attains the impossible: it tries to define India, its birth and its Indianess. Through the story of children with telepathic powers born at midnight on Independence day, Rushdie tells the history of this new, independent nation, a modern geographical invention of sorts, a linguistic quagmire, a nation of disparate cultures and languages, strung together as an ideal or an idea.
Saleem, the protagonist , like his new India, is fragmented as an individual, a million pieces put together as an invention. Empowered and yet imprisoned by his olfactory powers (he can smell concepts, colors, special relations, emotions); by his telepathic powers (he hears the voices of thousands of children with superpowers); by his relgion( a Muslim in a Hindu nation). Swapped at birth, he is raised by a family that is not his own, creating a domino effect of ironies and tragedies, much like the history of his beloved nation.
And through the intensity of the protagonists’ physical senses, Rushdie weaves the reader into great India and Pakistan. Retaining the idea of a national identity, this nation is enveloped in a complex, colorful web of of a mythological panoply, a melting pot as rich, savory and complex as the chutneys he creates. This is a book worthy of a dissertation, but it leaves a residue, a taste. I want this book to stay with me forever. And by the way, it’s a really funny book too.
Interesting facts about the book:
 Has been compared in its scope and execution to works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Like them, Rushdie’s novel presents an encyclopaedic exploration of an entire society through the story of a single person. It is able to do this, in part, by merging with the novel form a number of non-Western texts such as the Sanskrit epics, The Ramayana, The Mahabharata and, most consciously One Thousand and One Nights.

++++The novel ran into some controversy for its open criticism of Indira Gandhi, India’s then prime minister, and the Emergency that she imposed on the country.

What knowledgeable people say…

In Midnight’s Children, the narrative comprises and compresses Indian cultural history. ‘Once upon a time,’ Saleem muses, ‘there were Radna and Krisna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not affected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn’ (259). At this point Hutcheon’s post-modern perspective can be discerned: characters from Indian cultural history are chronologically intertwined with characters from Western culture, and the devices that they signify — Indian culture, religion and storytelling, Western drama and cinema — are presented in Rushdie’s text with post-colonial Indian history to examine both the effect of these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures on the Indian mind and in the light of Indian independence. It is in this sense, which blends with Loomba’s theory as quoted above, that Midnight’s Childrenis a post-colonial text, via its presentation and examination of the temporal and cultural status of India as an independent nation. This, as Edward W. Said writes, has been initiated in the text to portray the ‘conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories….[This] is of particular interest in Rushdie’s work’ (260).

Salman Rushdie-Film on Satanic The Verses Affair -watch online

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j6bnt

Twenty years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was a wanted man with a million pound bounty on his head. His novel, The Satanic Verses, had sparked riots across the Muslim world. The ailing religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had invoked a little-known religious opinion – a fatwa – and effectively sentenced Rushdie to death. Never before had a novel created an international diplomatic crisis on such a scale, and never before had a foreign Government publicly called for the killing of a private citizen of another country.

This film looks back on the extraordinary events which followed the publication of the book and the ten year campaign to get the fatwa lifted. Interviews with Rushdie’s friends and family and testimony from leaders of Britain’s Muslim community and the Government reveal the inside story of the affair. Rushdie himself was forced into hiding for nearly ten years. Arguably this was the moment when religious identities, in Britain and abroad, became more important than ethnic and cultural belonging.

Broadcasts
Sat 7 Mar 200921:00BBC TwoMon 30 Mar 200900:40BBC One (except Northern Ireland, Wales)Wed 1 Apr 200900:20BBC One (Northern Ireland only)