Ross is love.

Typepad email

Sent from my iPhone

Short: Code Switch

Do you change up your game depending on the crowd? On this week's short, Heather and Ross address the tale of a woman who only talks about her marriage among particular types of people.

SoT_Short_CodeSwitch

 

The sentiment is right, but your history sucks

So I gets this email "Imagine what might happen if every Catholic in the world would pray a Rosary on the same day! We have an example in October of 1573, when Europe was saved from the invasion of the mighty Turkish fleet, by the praying of the Rosary by all Christians!"  REALLY?? Truth told is that the Christian rulers harassed the Turks to the point of War, and conceded when they lost and their income began to dry up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman%E2%80%93Venetian_War_%281570%E2%80%931573%29

All I'm saying, give peace a chance, be christian not a Christian, and share a little tolerance folks.
"He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it."

 

Dwayne McDuffie.

Dwayne McDuffie passed away unexpectedly today. A young guy, he wrote a ton of comic books, penned several feature-length animated movies and TV shows, and founded the Milestone imprint which published books with exclusively minority leads. Behind his fun and approachable writing style was a gentle (and sometimes less than gentle) conviction that minority characters continue to be underrepresented and underserved in the comic book and animation worlds.

Mostly, I'm sad because McDuffie's name was on many of my favorite things: his 'Static' character from the aforementioned Milestone venture was made into a deeply underrated animated series that ran on the WB from 2000 to 2004. With a canny touch, the show featured a rare black superhero character (who also faced the trials of teenage life) and also won awards for episodes dealing with gun violence and child abuse. The animated Justice League show, which crossed over with Static Shock here and there, is one of the best action cartoons of all time. McDuffie was story editor for the series and wrote an enormous number of episodes. Lastly, he wrote All-Star Superman which just came out today, and which I'm watching tonight. There may be crying. His name on something always stood for a quality and social conscience with a light touch.

 

The King's Speech.

In which we learn that confidence is borne of a way lot of swearing.

2010’s most likely (perhaps) Best Picture Oscar winner is also the year’s most obvious contender. World War II period drama? Got it. A passel of talented British acting talent? Done. As insurance, just in case the entire thing didn’t scream “classy, quirky Oscar drama,” they even threw in Miss Helena  Bonham Carter. Cinema’s youthful queen of the costume drama plays the queen of England, with award-winners Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush in the leads. If this thing doesn’t take home a small boatload of awards, it won’t be for lack of tryin’. Something funny happened on the way to awards season, though. Director Tom Hooper isn’t quite so cynical, and the tastes of movie-goers aren’t quite as jaded as all that. They’ve actually made a damned decent movie, even if not the year’s best. 

 The movie’s opening is nearly unbearable: Prince Albert, the Duke of York played by Colin Firth, has been tasked with giving the closing speech at the 1925 colonial exhibition in London. Before a packed Wembley Stadium, the future king stammers his way through the opening of his prepared remarks, evoking pity and veiled contempt before the film cuts away, mercifully. Fortunately, his brother is next in line to be king, so such public humiliations for Prince Albert will be rare. That is, of course, until his father George V (the ubiquitous and always welcome Michael Gambon) takes ill and his older brother Edward takes up with American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Albert’s prospects for a relatively quiet life as prince become increasingly precarious. With the coming of the age of radio, the royal family will no longer simply wave politely from ornate windows. What’s a maybe/doesn’t wanna be king to do? Albert undertakes an increasingly ridiculous series of speech therapies before finding his way to failed Australian actor Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). You’ll not be at all surprised that Lionel’s techniques are unconventional, and his insistence on dealing with the prince in a familiar and equal manner provides for a much of the film’s charm and a great deal of its humor. Lionel’s eccentricity is a little by-the-numbers, but it works. In addition to normal vocal exercises, Albert, or “Bertie” at Lionel’s insistence, is made to loosen up by swearing and singing his way through his diction problems (rumors are that the Weinsteins are currently at work on a re-edit that removes said swearing in order to secure a more family-friendly rating). As time passes, it becomes clear to both men that Bertie’s stammer is less the result of any physical deformity and more the product of a challenging and bullied childhood. Times are tough all over, it would seem, even for young princes.  

If this all sounds terribly inconsequential, it felt that way to me for early stretches as well. It doesn’t take long, though, to develop a strong sympathy with the earnest and upstanding Bertie. For those of us who think keenly and often about embarrassment, particularly of the public variety, and for whom disdain and disappointment seem to lurk around every corner waiting to pounce, there won’t be many higher stakes than those which Bertie faces. Each of Bertie’s halting and tortured attempts at speaking publicly is almost painful to watch. And, as the threat of Nazism gathers, the stakes become more than personal. It becomes clear that Bertie is far more capable of leading the British people than his spoiled and childish brother, even as he is less likely to be taken seriously. A few words from the King may make all the difference to a frightened people, and Bertie’s inability to provide them becomes dramatically consequential. The subtly washed-out, but highly textured cinematography provides a muted backdrop that stays out of the way of the performances.

Colin Firth always manages a boyish quality in defiance of his 50 years, and that dichotomy serves him well here. He’s every bit the loyal, responsible prince, even as his ticks and boyhood traumas threaten to constantly overwhelm him. Rush, meanwhile, is as capable as he is likeable, but his character here isn’t much of a stretch. It’s exactly the type of performance one expects out of Rush: knowing, quirky, and charmingly offbeat. It fits the part, but it’s impossible to forget that it’s Geoffrey Rush. The supporting cast puts in some fine work as well: Bonham Carter plays the future Queen Mum with a dry wit that feels just right, and Guy Pearce is rather brilliant as Prince Edward. It’s a selfish character that you really want to hate, but Pearce smartly plays him as every bit as damaged as Bertie. With all of the talk about The King’s Speech leading into awards season, I haven’t heard much about Pearce’s performance. That’s too bad—it’s a standout. Timothy Spall gives it a go, but falls victim to Winston Churchill. With that ruddy bulldog face, keen eyes, gnawed cigar, and enormous waistline (with a personality to match), Churchill lends himself readily to caricature. It’s not Spall’s fault, merely Churchill’s ability to confound actors decades post-mortem. Brendan Gleeson mostly avoids the trap in 2009’s Into the Storm (by the way), but it’s no mean feat. The King’s Speech is, ultimately, a film that manages to be fabulously entertaining without breaking any new ground. It’s sure-footed, confident, and personal. If you happen to share any of Bertie’s phobias, even in small part, it also happens to be scary as hell.

President Kennedy at 50.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on January 20th, 1961. Whatever you think or thought of Jack, it's one helluva speech. Strangely, and a bit sadly, there's almost nothing that doesn't remain relevant today.

True Grit (2010).

It may be blasphemous, but I have no great love for John Wayne as an actor (I rather doubt that I would have had great love for him as a person, either, though that's beside the point.) Like many of the great actors of Hollywood's early days, his larger-than-life presence is both striking and admirable. It's also, especially later in his career, distracting. It's true that many of his great films are great precisely because he's in them. It's also true that it's impossible to separate the characters which he's portrayed from the character that Wayne created. This is all a terribly long-winded way of getting around to the fact that I haven't seen the original True Grit, nor, incidentally, have I read the novel by Charles Portis. So I come at this one with fresh eyes.

Just as it is impossible to think of Henry Hathaway's 1969 film without thinking John Wayne, Jeff Bridges equally commands this one. He's that rarest of breeds among big stars--an actor almost entirely without ego, or at least a good enough actor that you don't notice or mind what ego is there. In this movie, he plays the seedy and perpetually unwashed character of Rooster Cogburn with no vanity except that little which it is believable that Cogburn has. Cogburn is an ornery (an old-fashioned western like this one practically begs for the use of that word) U.S. Marshall (more bounty hunter, really) of limited means and with limited scruples. When Maddie Ross, the daughter of an unjustly gunned-down prospector, rolls into town she chooses Cogburn to track down her father's killer. She has other choices, more thoughtful and just men, but she's not looking for justice. She's looking for vengeance, and Cogburn strikes her as the man to procure it for her in what to her has become a rather dark business deal. Cogburn's introductory scene is in an outhouse. Just a bit later, he's awakened from his perch at the back of a Chinese grocery. In his frayed and yellowed onesie, a button missing, his just-a-bit too large and sweaty gut hanging out, you can practically smell the stale whiskey, sweat, and old cigarettes on his breath. His clothes look like they haven't been washed in years. Bridges doesn't just carry around the trappings of a man with little social grace, he inhabits it. Mattie describes him as an eponymous man of 'true grit'. She could just as easily be referring to his hygiene as to his demeanor. Bridges has quietly made himself into America's indispensable actor, and his Cogburn is a joy to follow around, even when he's mumbling his way through stories of ex-wives and looking like the worst-smelling thing in a place full of stuff that probably smells mighty damn bad. Wayne won his sole Oscar for the original. Bridges could well win another.

Hailee Steinfeld as 14-year-old Mattie similarly gives a great performance as the tough-as-can-be daughter hell-bent on vengeance. Her character gets all of the best lines (meaning the funniest) and as an actress she holds her own with not only Bridges, but Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, as well as a few of the requisite Coen brothers weirdoes. The general lack of Coen-ness of this film, with its straightforward plot and almost-old-fashioned cadences has been much remarked upon. And not without cause: there are moments here, many of them, that would not be put of place in a film of the sixties or seventies. In a different time, John Wayne probably would fit in here just about as well as he did in the original.

It all proceeds calmly apace, free of discernable moral or lesson. That makes it a rare breed, and that's where the Coens come in. Westerns, old and new, tend to fall into one of two categories: the rollicking, if world-weary adventure type (think A Fistful of Dollars) or the hard-earned-lesson type: High Noon, or Unforgiven as a more recent exemplar. Even if the hero never quite learns it, there's often a lesson: in High Noon, it's all about standing up for what's right. In Unforgiven, it's all about the soul-destroying nature of vengeance. The Coen Brothers films often have a kind of ambiguous morality, which, combined with their trademark quirky side-characters and dark senses of humor can make the least of their films, and sometimes the best of them, off-puttingly cold. We tend to expect a tidy moral with our films, and a lack thereof can feel sometimes feel alarmingly like pointlessness. It's the same here. There are no real lessons to be learned in the story of a young girl on a mission of vengeance. There is a price to be paid for her revenge, but it's not clear that anyone comes out the wiser. A beautiful, hallucinatory midnight ride comes at the films climax, and it's a deeply well-earned bit of sentiment in a thoroughly unsentimental film. It all comes down to the relationship between Rooster and Mattie, and the Coens were smart enough to leave the material to their actors, and minimize their well-known flourishes. In doing so, they've created a film that may not be their greatest, but is certainly their most human.

 Photo Credits here.

Luise Rainer 101.

"The secret of a long life is to never trust a doctor."

 On Jaunary 12th, Luise Rainer will be celebrating her 101st birthday. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it's  likely because she left Hollywood behind roughly seventy years ago, after winning back-to-back Best Actress Academy Awards. That Oscar feat had never happened before, and has happened only once since. In celebration, TCM will be airing her appearance at this past April's TCM classic film festival.

 Her first Oscar (in only her second American film) was as the high-strung first wife of William Powell's eponymous lead in The Great Ziegfeld. It's not really a great or particularly brilliant film, but it's a great product of the 1930s Hollywood studio system. One of those big prestige biopics with solid performances and an abundance of musical numbers. It's the type of movie that's carefully calibrated to entertain a wide audience while also grabbing awards. It ain't art, exactly, but it's certainly high-class entertainment, and took home the Best Picture Oscar for that year. Not for nothing, it was also 1936's second biggest box office draw. Luise, with her sad eyes and distinctive Austrian accent, makes an indelible impression. The part of Flo Ziegfeld's first wife Anna Held is essentially a light comedy role, but she plays it with a vulnerability that borders on tragic.

 

Her next film, for which she won her next award, was the adaption of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. The young, German-born, Austria-raised actress played Chinese peasant O-Lan, the soft-spoken female lead. Star Anna May Wong was considered for the role, but anti-race-mixing provisions of the Hays production code made it impossible to cast an Asian-American actor as the wife when thoroughly caucasian Paul Muni had been cast as the male lead. The casting, naturally, seems silly given intervening decades demonstrating that not only white people can be actors, but there you have it. Muni's performance never really breaks through the white-dude-in-makeup thing,  but Luise plays the role with the same vulnerability that won her acclaim the year before, and with even greater subtlety given The Good Earth's notable lack of comedy and musical interlude. In any event, it's a way more convincing portrayal of a Chinese peasent than the one that Katherine Hepburn gives in Dragon Seed, a later Buck book to be adapted and caucasianated. The Ain't-I-Chinese? makeup in either case is pretty awful, but Luise gives it her all.

 

 

Following The Good Earth, Luise moved away from Hollywood film acting after a few more films. The move was generally of her own accord, but the result of a studio system that didn't allow its stars a lot of creative or financial control. In the years since, she's gone to med school and done a lot of work on the stage, in addition to some sporadic appearances in movies and on television. She's had a pretty interesting life, and there aren't a lot of voices from H-wood's golden age still around. Good genes or good habits? Either way, Happy 101.