Category: Little Big Screen

This morning’s news that North American Box Office sales were way down was no surprise. The Little Theatre is always fun but we hadn’t been to a chain theater in ages. We did “Get On Up” last night for the James Brown movie in hopes that it would at the least be fun. The armed security guards were showing up for work as we walked toward the door, a reminder of the youth unrest that has plagued the sixteen screen Regal Theater at Culver Ridge.

James Brown’s music is so good, so powerful, so dynamic that Hollywood could only fuck it up. A better tribute to his musical contribution would be the re-release of his 1964 T.A.M.I Show. We saw him at Red Creek and the Auditorium Theater and we heard he was still sensational at the Jazz Fest before he died. This Mick Jagger financed biopic is not the bomb.

Let’s hope Martin Scorsese doesn’t blunt the Ramones with his 2016 biopic.

We’ve been gearing up for the World Cup for four years now. Once the US gets knocked out of their really tough preliminary round we’ll be rooting (in America it means cheering, in Australia it means fucking) for Spain again and yesterday’s match, the Champion’s League Final, was the perfect opportunity to wear the national colors. For the first time ever the two finalists were from the same city, Madrid.

Why a big game like this, the culmination of inter league playoffs between all of Europe’s pro teams, the best players in the world, was so hard to find on tv in the US is a mystery to me. Last year 360 million watched the game. We emailed Matthew for help and he invited us over to their place to watch the game. He streamed a subscription feed from his laptop to the big screen. I’m afraid I wasn’t very sociable for 90 minutes and stoppage time, of course, where Real, clearly the better team here, tied the match in the final minutes and then those two grueling overtime periods where Real walked way with it. We were rooting for Ateletico but it is still a victory for Spain.

Breaking Bad went through a few rather bleak periods and we hung in there. House of Cards is no substitute but it has us pretty wrapped up. Good thing it’s streamable because we keep having to back up to catch the dialog. It is dense and twisted with everyone playing everyone big time. We’re on episode 22 and all of the main characters are so soiled our sympathies are now with the born again prostitute, Rachel Posner, and the creepy photographer, Adam Galloway.

Although it’s set in the White House with a hapless president, the politics take a backseat to the lobbyists and business interests. The only defense against these forces is the naked quest for power. Good thing it is only a tv show.

It is worth watching the show though just to be able to enjoy Vulture’s coverage of it.

The grey skies of Rochester got to our neighbor. It’s her first Winter here and she was ok until March when she expected a change. We walked up to the lake with her and I tried to cheer her up by pointing out the snowdrops that were blossoming off to our left but it was a bright sunny day and that’s all it took. She told us she always feels like she’s high when she gets near the lake but only when she is alone so we missed out on that one. On the way back she asked if we wanted anything from the new Trader Joes. We told we hadn’t been there yet and then we made plans to go today.

We filled up our little red buggy with fun stuff and then got on the wrong side of the check out lane so we were invading the cashier’s space. She told us to get on the other side and relax and asked if we’d seen any good movies lately. We said, “Yeah, we just watched the Jean Luc Goddard’ Contempt last night with Bridget Bardot” but we got kind of a blank look so we dropped it. Goddard movies make sense on a higher plane than plot.

Jerry Prokosch (played by by Jack Palance): “I like gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel – exactly.”
Fritz Lang (playing himself): “Jerry, don’t forget. The gods have not created man. Man has created gods.”

Peggi is reading Neil Young’s book now and she tells me Jean Luc Goddard is his favorite director. Somehow I missed that.

Paradise Lost is the name of an epic poem by John Milton, a dark rock band from the UK and three documentaries made by HBO in 1996, 2000 and 2011 about the three teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas who were convicted of the grisly murders of three young boys. The title doesn’t fit the documentary but neither do the charges. West Memphis is sub culture plunge, so deep the real life characters tend to overwhelm the details of the story. After watching the first episode I couldn’t get the accent and presence of the key players out of my head. Maybe it’s because I lived in a trailer (pronounced “tray-ler”) in southern Indiana for a few years. They smoke and pull their teeth out on camera. The accused teenagers dressed in black and liked Metallica whose music is used to great effect throughout the three films. The small town cops and judge saw Satanism and railroaded the jury into convicting.

Three documentaries on the same subject seems excessive. They wander and tug you crazy directions. When I saw the third installment sitting next to our tv I thought what more could they possibly add to this story but it keeps digging deeper and getting better. The clumsy movie making is somehow a virtue. The big budget “West of Memphis” movie by Amy Berg and Peter Jackson is in our queue but I expect it to be heavy handed by comparison.

The Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, defines filmmaking as sculpting In time. “The Sacrifice” is a magnificent sculpture. We spent three nights with the movie, watching it and the extras a few times. Tarkovsky says an artist doesn’t look for a subject, “the subject grows within the artist.” This film is so beautiful that it hardly matters that the story is about Armageddon.

When our Netflix queue ran dry we put out the word and loaded it up with recommendations from friends. We lost track of who recommended what but I’m pretty sure our friends A & R pointed us toward “Momma’s Man“.

We watched the movie a couple nights ago and were transfixed by it. A low budget movie with the director’s parents ((avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo Jacobs, shown third and second from the right in this photo) playing versions of themselves in the fourth floor Manhattan walkup he grew up in. The director, in the form of Mickie, comes home and wallows in his adolescence. We saved the extras for the next night and the movie only got better. Instead of the director talking over the movie he dispensed with a rerun of the visuals and recorded a conversation with his parents about the movie, a minimal masterpiece, that deepens the movie’s impact.