but a hammer with which to shape it.-Bertolt Brecht
The NY premiere (well the release week premiere, NYFF) (dis dis piace: no differentiation of film festivals is there?-the video originates from a 5-year old rival of Andrew's;) - back to the future-it's a Film Society of Lincoln Center creche 'thing' - they get money from an alien source... guess that's why they wanted to get rid of a human like...) of Carol tonight at MoMA. (London) Remember the furor at Cannes this year? I guess our 'cafe' Phyllis when you first came to London served you well...or "were you JUST being kind..." was OK: so there is indeed a dress code tonight only this ‘code’ is one of the ‘mind’. Admittance to the after-party is valid only after correctly answering 3 questions on world cinema. Nothing too obscure…and nothing that crowd shouldn’t be able to easily handle:) Meremembers Sarah Pia Anderson (swho;) wanted to do a film of Carol many a moon ago....Remember? As Cole Porter thought about writing the future tonight:
I love New York’s global warming today, how about you?
Spending 6 hours with MoMA film today, how about you?
As Donald Trump will say, Global warming’s allllll in the mind,
His German though just ain’t so good: wie geht’s es du? Who?
Nitrate problems seemed to have inflicted/conflicted lyrics thereafter…schade
as an aside- Mr Trump was social media/Facebook before its time! Give him credit for demanding from his PR each morning EVERY over the years press mention. Sorry: just HOW is that different form most denizens of NY nowadays? Mi dispiace...
Mr Harvey Weinstein is a different kettle of croque monsieurs all together now! Yes indeed there is to be a segue...but you'll just have to wait- Twitter isn't really for me. Uccellacci e uccellini
Not yet having seen Carol may the segue be to Steven Spielberg’s latest Bridge of Spies (also opening this week in London). There are many films out there about cold war conspiracy that indeed may more enthrall in different ways than Bridge of Spies. What Spielberg offers in his consummate way is an unbeatable Hollywood director asking questions retrospectively that one feels he’s asking about the world today.
Unless you’ve lived in America you’d never comprehend the indoctrination of nationhood (is that jingoism) into the DNA of its citizens. There are passages in Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism that just can’t be true, but regrettably are indeed. You do not want to be an outsider in America. It is the golden land of the insider. Drink, drink and drink some more. Being rich in the prohibition days clearly had advantages. So much for ‘democracy’ and the ‘rule of law’. Irony (is that the word?) that many if not most of America's greatest most 'revered' movies are about outsiders...
James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) in Bridge of Spies is a typical rare breed of American who believes in the rule of law/justice. In 1957 he’s asked to defend Russian spy Rudolf Abel – rather a pat on the back assignment: do me a favor give him due legal process he’s guilty anyways but we need to be seen to be just. What Donovan’s peers don’t count on is that he takes his job just that bit too seriously- really trying to give Abel a fair trial. Nothing surprises in this consummately constructed movie. What Spielberg does (and oftentimes always has) is get the audience to surprise itself. To question where and who they are. Moreover what Spielberg really does well is cast actors- whether it is happenstance or premedicated, the result is always nothing short of brilliant. Here we have Tom Hanks giving one of his best performances (again perhaps like Spielberg Hanks is questioning where and what we all are nowadays). Like his client Abel (Mark Rylance) he doesn’t seem to sense fear. He’s way out of his depth with both the Russians and the CIA and yet he’s an fffing great swimmer- only he just didn’t know it. What he does know is that swimming is sort of his thing. Weirdly.
Mark Rylance’s dour non-descript Abel (though the paintings he does in his off-time as a spy are naturalistic) is something out of Francis Bacon’s ‘wheel of fire’ world: Shakespeare's King Lear : But I am bound upon a wheel of fire, / That mine own tears do scald like molten lead. Irony that Bacon’s Study for the Nurse in the Battleship Potemkin was painted also in 1957.
It is amazing (or perhaps not, if one knows America) that it took a British screenwriter and playwright Matt Charman to bring this story to the world’s attention (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen then honed the script with Chapman). It wasn’t until American families saw first-hand their sons and daughters come home in body bags during the last decade that anyone doubted what war America was fighting. Similarly, it’s hard to think that many smart folk wouldn’t see this movie and start thinking again about what the hell is going on around them in the world. Abel clearly is a “good soldier”- he is indeed fighting for a cause (as indeed were Americans) “стоящего, стоящего” the standing man. (Abel as a boy, saw a man beaten, but then the man stood up again. They hit him harder, but he stood up again. Finally, the leader called the beating off and called the man, Stoyashchego)
The unbearable sadness of it all is that while there are winners and losers to these ‘wars’ there will always be more victims. And more victims. And more. Just restored in a director's cut is a shining testament to ordinary people who end up on the wrong side of war Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother). (Russian site) Lene conquers every obstacle with her daughter before and through WW2 whilst her husband fights on the German front. The war ends and normal life fights on. He never ever cheated on her nor her ever on him but still he hits her in disbelief. And still she stands. In the film’s final scene Lene (her face having become half-paralysed in peace time-due to disbelief?) locks herself in the bathroom attempting suicide by gas; her daughter cries and beats incessantly on the door pleading for her to come out. Lene finally unlocks the door-voice-over: "It was a long time before Lene opened the door, and sometimes I think she is still behind it, and I am still standing in front of it, and that she will never come out again, and I have to be grown up and alone. But she is still here. Lene is still here."
