Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Movie Roundup: Gran Torino, Frozen River, Coraline, Happy-Go-Lucky

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We went to see Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino and rented Frozen River (the indie movie for which Melissa Leo got a surprise nomination for Best Actress) soon after. Both are Obama-moment films, I thought, with a narrative drive towards an ethnically-diverse/ multi-racial family, and a repudiation of old-style (racist) whiteness or white Americanness.  In both, that white American identity is shown to be limited or obsolete and is redeemed only by a reaching-out to others.  Gran Torino is entertaining; as everyone has said it’s a sort of ironic rewriting of the old Eastwood Dirty Harry script revolving around Eastwood’s character Walt’s discovery that he has less in common with his own spoiled suburban grandchildren that with the striving Hmong immigrant kids who’ve moved into his neighborhood.  What we found disconcerting were the belly laughs in the theater that greeted all of Walt’s racist tirades in the first half of the movie; people seemed just a little too delighted by these… Frozen River is more of a gripping thriller than I’d expected and Melissa Leo is really great… you’re there with her the whole time in her desperate quest to come up with the $1500 to make the final payment on the Double-Wide trailer she wants for her two sons.

Two movies that kind of blew me away: Coraline and Happy-Go-Lucky.  I’m pissed b/c the theater had to use the 3D technology for the Jonas Brothers movie (!) and now they seem to have put Coraline back on 3D, but I missed it.  I thought it was one of the greatest animated movies ever.  Obviously influenced by avant-garde handmade animation by the Svankmajers and others; in fact it made me think of the Svankmajers’ version of Alice in Wonderland which I once showed to a freshman class who found it scary and creepy.  “Mothers don’t eat their children, do they?”: it’s a very frightening fairy tale (also very funny) that draws on Alice, surrealist art, and psychoanalytic nightmare imagery (buttons sewn into eyes, a mother who become a wire spider) among other sources.  I found it visually gorgeous and transporting — am very glad I saw it in a theater.

And Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky.  I am a devoted Mike Leigh fan.  Have probably seen at least a dozen of his movies and love or like a lot just about all of them, with the possible exception of Bleak Moments which I remember as just being too purely and bleaky minimalist and depressing.  Watching the dvd commentary interviews reminded me of how unique Leigh’s methods are.  The actors explained how Leigh talked them through the entire life stories of their characters, from birth on, before they knew anything about the plot of the movie.  So by the time they got to the actual story and the beginning of the filming, they knew their character to the bones and could simply improvise in character.  All of this occurs behind the scenes and sets up a method in which you feel the characters as deep, three-dimensional and as possessing histories and personalities that go way beyond what you seen or hear on screen.

The movie feels a bit like some kind of experiment in representing “goodness” and happiness in narrative, which is tricky to do.  Poppy has her problems but she’s basically just fundamentally happy and a very loving/generous/warm-hearted person.  Such a character could easily be cloying or boring as a protagonist in a movie without all that much of a plot, but I found it riveting and entertaining.  In the scenes where’s she’s getting to know the potential boyfriend, you almost expected him to turn out to have something terribly wrong with him; everything seemed to be going too well; there was almost something experimental in not introducing any twists to that first impression.

It has two main metaphorical/symbolic lines of imagery.  First and most simply, transportation: the movie begins with Poppy’s bike getting stolen, it revolves around her weekly auto driving lessons, and ends with she and her friend Zoe rowing aimlessly in a lake.  The other more interesting imagery source has to do with education and teaching.  Poppy is a school teacher, she’s taking her driving lessons (from an embittered, slightly psychotic instructor), she goes to a Flamenco dancing class, and in all these situations the movie thinks/talks about what it means to teach effectively, to give up on a student or to refuse to do so, to learn, and so on.

Genius of Mark Gormley

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Have recently discovered the amazing and certainly not gormless Pensacola, Florida sensation Mark Gormley, of the haunting falsetto, jutting hip stance, inexplicable video animation and mise en scene, and trademark pleated jeans, golf shirts (what does he have in the pocket?), and upper chest band-aid. Here’s a useful overview of the career that notes Gormley’s “ability to superimpose himself onto any image of his choosing” and his “resemblance to a computer composite of every sex offender in the national registry.” Somehow the effect is of the voice and mind of a brooding, mid-1970s Dewey Bunnell-esque singer-songwriter in the body of a recently laid off Circuit City salesman.

Ian Curtis/ Kurt Cobain

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Watched the Anton Corbijn biopic of Ian Curtis (Joy Division’s singer who committed suicide in 1980 at age 23), Control.  Enjoyed it a lot.  The musical performances, all recorded by the actors, are pretty uncannily good and Sam Riley is a dead ringer for Curtis.  If they toured as the Unknown Pleasures, a Joy Division cover band, I’d definitely go.

I had one thought about the parallel between Curtis and Kurt Cobain, probably a comparison drawn a million times before.  There are various links (beyond the fame and suicide), i.e. they both suffered from medical problems: Curtis’s epilepsy, the treatment of which was pretty hit or miss at that point, and Cobain’s chronic stomach problems, both of which contributed to abuse/misuse of prescription drugs.  But the movie left me with the sense that for Curtis as for Cobain, sudden fame led to a psychological crisis having to do with communication and self-expression.

I get the sense that for both men music was tied up in a fantasy of total transparency and connection with a listener/interlocutor.  They both had trouble communicating with real people, lovers and friends, but had an amazing power to speak to people through music.  It seems likely that for both men the desperation that preceded the suicide was tied up in part with a feeling that they now had a huge audience hanging on their every word that did not in fact understand them in the least.

Many of Joy Division and Nirvana’s signature songs are about the desire to be understood and the failure to communicate.  “When the people listen to you, don’t you know it means a lot?” (“Novelty”); “Walk in silence, Don’t turn away, in silence…. Don’t walk away” (“Atmosphere”); “He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs/ And he likes to sing along…/ But he knows not what it means/ Knows not what it means” (Nirvana, “In Bloom”).

Watching both men sing, you feel that part of their genius lay in a special talent for taking the basic technology of the microphone and recording technology and infusing it with a sense of complete intimacy.  They are whispering or screaming in your ear.  Control begins with a 17 year old Curtis lying on his bed listening to a David Bowie album; for kids like Cobain or Curtis, there is no voice they listen to more intently than the pop singer’s.

So my thought is that for Curtis and Cobain, this kind of mediated intimacy meant so much that when they became the star, Bowie (important for both of them), the voice that is in your ear as you fall asleep, it was hard to handle the crushing realization that this could feel false, not in fact linked to any true communication or insight, just showbiz.

Of course they both suffered from serious depression as well, so maybe this is all just unwarranted pop (literally) psychology.

Fatherhood in extremis: Laura Ingalls Wilder & Cormac McCarthy

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I finally read The Road — almost the whole thing in one sitting in bed and then finished it off the next day.  It’s pretty harrowing.  I’ve been haunted by that recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dystopians,” about ““back-to-the-land types,” “peak oilers,”… all-around Cassandras, or doomers,” and others who believe the U.S. and maybe the world economy are bankrupt and that we are headed for some more or less minimalist post-economic, post-oil future.  The Road jibes very well with with that ideology, on the more horrific, apocalyptic end of the spectrum (after all, few of the “dystopians” appear believe that we will descend into mass cannibalism).

I was struck by how much The Road has in common with Little House in the Big Woods.  Ingalls’ book looks back at nineteenth-century homesteaders with affectionate nostalgia; McCarthy looks ahead to a dystopian future; but in either case, the whole world focuses to a parent trying to provide for the family by eking out sustenance from the land.

So, Ingalls’ Pa kills bear and deer, harvests wheat, carves wood, builds the cabin and insulates it; McCormac’s father rigs up the cart, makes a tent out of a tarp, kills a threatening vagrant, scavenges food, makes a lantern out of a can of gasoline.  It’s all about survival skills and protecting and getting food and shelter for the kid(s).  (Admittedly, Ma is just as important in Little House as Pa. There is a wife in The Road, but she only appears in one retrospective memory: she tells the dad “They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it,” and then she goes off and apparently kills herself with a sharp flake of obsidian.  Of course nothing at all like this happens to Ma in Little House.)

Basically, for me the narcissistic takeaway of both books was this: If the apocalypse comes, your fatherhood-in-extremis skills are crap and you will not be able to take care of your family. We don’t even have a working flashlight (the girls always leave it on and run out the batteries) or jugs of water in the basement.  God help us if I’m called upon to do something like this on no sleep:

He unscrewed the bottom panel and he removed the burner assembly and disconnected the two burners with a small crescent wrench.  He tipped out the plastic jar of hardware and sorted out a bolt to thread into the fitting of the junction and then tightened it down.  He connected the hose from the tank and held the little potmetal burner up in his hand, small and light-weight.

And no way would I have been able to use that map ripped into little pieces to navigate past the cannibal compound all the way to the sea.

I did get one good tip from The Road: when you first hear the bombs or whatever, immediately turn the bathtub on since the water supply will run out momentarily.  I’m all over that one, am excellent at taking baths.

Another unrelated thought I had about The Road: it winds up with what struck me as a Robinson Crusoe reference, as the father swims out to an abandoned boat and strips it for useful supplies, very much like Crusoe at the beginning of Defoe’s novel; perhaps a little joke or conceit on McCarthy’s part about going back to origins of the novel form.

It could be fun to do a Little House on the Road mashup along the lines of that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies paperback that’s all the rage.

A really good read, for sure, but for 21st-century apocalyptic fiction I’d still give the nod to Jose Saramago’s amazing Blindness (1998, actually; don’t be put off by the movie version which is supposed to be lousy).

Recycling the World of Interiors

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Sarah was coveting Matt and Miranda’s subscription to The World of Interiors.  This is a high-end, expensive (at least $100 for the year’s subscription) British design/decoration/architecture magazine.  The photography is beautiful and they somehow seem to avoid the typical design-porn cliches — it’s not just a sequence of rich person after rich person’s predictable homes.

Some articles:

BREAKING THE WAVES
His studio a fisherman’s carrelet on a jetty by the Aquitaine coast, artist Richard Texier draws inspiration from the ceaseless roll of the ocean. Catherine de Montalembert reports

EXCESS ALL AREAS
The Spanish legation once used mirrors to signal the mainland from this Tangerine dream house now owned by a bohemian design duo. Marie-France Boyer enters their prism

PARADISE RECLAIMED
Combining architectural salvage with subtle erotic details – from carnal curtain rails to titillating toile – Sam Roddick’s Hampstead home sins with originality

BOMBAY MIX
Sixteen scruffy sketchbooks filled with keenly observed watercolours of Indian life shed light on a widowed Edwardian adventurer – and the colonial mindset, say Annabel Freyberg

The magazine seems to take its name seriously in that it really does focus on “interiors,” rather broadly understood, including quirky spaces like the artist’s houseboat-studio.  Not really my thing, but I can appreciate it to a degree.  Anyway, the reason I’m blogging about it is Sarah’s innovatively thrifty means of consuming it.  Miranda mailed her the entire 2008 run, all twelve issues.  She allowed herself to read January and put the rest of the top of a high shelf.  On Feb. 1 she took down February 2008.  So, barring weakness of will, she’ll go through the year like that.  Pretty clever, although these magazines are heavy so it was probably somewhat expensive for Miranda to mail them (but hey, that was on her dime — just kidding, Miranda, we appreciate it).

Of course, Sarah’s design schemes for our house will be a year out of date, but I suspect that for us that would be a big step up.

Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder

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I’ve been reading C&I The Little House in the Big Woods.  The Laura Ingalls Wilder books were a big deal in my family.  My cousin Laura was named after her; I read the books at least as much/often as I did the Lord of the Rings saga, in a somewhat similar pattern, too: probably read The Hobbit and The Little House in the Big Woods the most, those two classics of coziness, and trailed off towards the end of the two series as the scope widened to an increasingly larger and more adult world.   I think as a boy reader I found more to relate to in the earlier books with all the bears and hunting and boy-scoutish activities.  Sarah commented to me that Pa is a somewhat risky model of fatherhood for me to expose to the girls.  “I mean, he hunts, builds houses, smokes meat, carves wooden toys, rides horses…” “Yes, but does he blog cleverly???” I responded not at all defensively.  I don’t see Sarah churning butter or sewing all the family’s clothes, anyway (although admittedly she’d be much more likely to do that than I would be to build my own meat smoker in the backyard).

C&I love the book.  They’re especially interested in the Mary/Laura dynamic: Laura’s the younger one with brown hair who is jealous of her sister’s golden curls.  (This led to a discussion of hair color in which Iris declared that “mommy’s hair is brickish red.”)  And of course they’re fascinated by life in a cabin with nearly everything you use something you make yourself, and with bears and panthers prowling around.  It’s a very appealing depiction of an entirely self-sufficient, self-enclosed family life, although I keep thinking that one winter like that in the one-room cabin (with a baby and two young girls) would drive me screaming to the town (pop. 150 at most?) by the lake in Pepin, Michigan.

The other night we read one chapter, and also read Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Fur Family, which we own in a tiny, faux-fur-covered edition.  As we read it I suddenly realized that the illustrations were by Garth Williams, who also illustrated The Little House in the Big Woods, and that they’re very similar stories, all about hunkering down in your cozy home for the winter, but from the bears’ point of view!  (Assuming the little fur people are bears, I guess it’s more ambiguous.)  Just look — Pa practically is a member of the Little Fur Family on a larger scale:

littlehousecoverfur

Lux Interior R.I.P.

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Lux Interior (born Erick Lee Purkhiser), who formed the “psychobilly” combo the Cramps with his wife Poison Ivy in 1973, is dead at age 62.

I didn’t know that he grew up on Akron, OH. Were the Cramps at all part of the whole 70s Akron scene (with Devo, the Bizarros, Rubber City Rebels), or did they split for California and NYC too soon to participate?

I stole this clip from the 33 1/3 books blog: mesmerizing footage of the Cramps performing “The Way I Walk” at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978.

“Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not so sure about that.  You seem to be all right to me.”

The lyrics seem appropriate to the audience (and their approach to dancing to a rock song): “The way I walk is just the way I walk/ The way I talk is just the way i talk/ The way I smile is just the way I smile.”  Lots of great moments; I love the guy with the tie pretending to sing into an imaginary mike.

Neko Case “People Got a Lotta Nerve”

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Neko Case is offering a free download of the first single, “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” from her new album (Middle Cyclone, due out March 3), and her record label is donating $5 to Best Friends Animal Society for every blog that re-posts it.  So, I am doing so: you can download the song here.  Here’s the explanation of the deal.  I love Neko Case, can’t get enough of her spooky, haunting voice.
The song features an elephant in a zoo, an Orca in a tank, and maybe a man-eating tiger? It’s about carnivorous animals and the way human beings try to control them and contain their instinctive violence.  “I’m a man-eater, but still you’re surprised when I eat you…. It will end again in bullets fired.”  Makes me think of Rilke’s “The Panther” and John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals.”  Also of the tiger that an archaeologist friend of ours had in her lab for her students to dissect; it had escaped from its owner at a highway rest stop in Illinois, and was shot to death by state troopers (and then made its way to the lab).
I like the song a lot, but hope Neko can live with the inevitable Hall & Oates references.