Film:
Stranger than Fiction

Quick Summary: The Accidental Tourist with videographic steroids.

High Points: When Will sings the song and Ann Pascal jumps in his arms. When the writer Emma gets the phone call from Harold as soon as she types it on the page. When the bulldozer suddenly chomps into his room. There are at least a dozen more.

Filmic Notes: The computer-laced graphic overlays done very well and not overdone. The plot/writing great. Casting near perfect. Queen Latifah not the best choice, but probably an industry payola part. But better her than Whoopi Goldberg.


Film:
Venus

Quick Summary: Cinematographically beautiful artistic rendition of the dying sentimental foray by an old man into the flower of youth he is losing.

High Points: When O'Toole speaks with Jodie Whittaker alone about what he likes about her and becomes completely transparent. When Jessie/Venus (Whittaker) is in the bath and she relays her sad story, the truth, and OToole quotes poetry through the door while she listens on. When the old farts get in a fight in the restaurant. When O'Toole delivers his goodbye speech to Vanessa Redgrave at the dinner table.

Haven't published for some time. My time has been devoted to writing a novel. I've decided to put some small segments here for a "taste". I truly hope this is a success. I'm not E-ven going to try to explain this. The novel will likely end up around 6-700 pages. These are just tiny, random tidbits that I like. I simply hope that the teaser of the words will bring about their own world in your head when you least expect it, and some of you who read this will unexplainably awaken in the night and get the urge to get out of bed, find my post, and read it again. Then you'll have to go back to bed and wonder..."Will this man ever publish this thing he's writing?".

The Blue Prophet of Gingham

_____________________

On the shelves were pictures in small frames. One was of himself, big and bright in the center of two other men, all dressed in Army greens with no hats on. They had taken them off and were holding them for the picture that someone else was taking for them, perhaps a passing native of the land they were in. But it was an excellent picture, blue skies and a sandy and palmy town in the background, and very blue water just off to the left in the corner of the frame. His army buddies’ smiles were so large it seemed they would hurt themselves. Korea was golden and green. Their youth then was still evident and glowing from them, and must have been impressive even to the photographer, three troubadours on a sabbath, the day belonging to them, so far from home and so much water in the way, but for the moment triuphant. This was as far south in Korea as you could be in that time, the north taken, the starched olive and red army erecting barriers, walling others out, or was it walling themselves in? And Oholibamah then, not having his new name yet, was free as the wind at that time, his discharge up any day, papers to go home, having now learned of the local world across the great sea, having met the enemy face to face in combat and won, having kept his integrity of mind and heart. Oholibamah knew his work there was finished, and his life was uncertain on coming back weather he would get in the school of his choice, or if there was a school of his choice, as had been advertised. He wanted to become an engineer then, and rank amongst those building up America, building highways, bridges, dams, and even more difficult projects. He knew where the money was, and the jobs were, and he thought maybe he knew how to get one for himself. He was full of hope, the picture radiating, the buddies holding on to each other, ready to take a life raft back home if their big transport plane didn’t leave soon, the sun belonging to them, as well as the wind. They had to believe in something, they’d seen so much in the north, and had failed. They’d shot, and rescued, and burned, and saw burning, and faced an invisible enemy, and an enemy that was so very different than they themselves knew of, and they longed for home and the moist dirt and the corn-fed girls and the smell of perfume and lavender toilet water and a movie and a chance at creating something instead of destroying it. Their homesickness was not seen in the picture because they were already home in their hearts and minds, their air lift just being a shuttle really, gifts already wrapped and token of their trip packed, but not much thought of, only home mattered. Oholibamah didn’t know exactly what home would be like when he got there as momma had not written for a month. He figured that since she knew that her boy was coming back and he would not get his mail anyhow she had ceased writing because it would likely be lost in transit or get to the wrong place, and that trouble with daddy had been taken care of that she mentioned, just another one of his failures that they would have to overcome, but maybe…maybe in time he would make good yet. Her last letter seemed broken.

One other picture in particular stood out amongst all others, the picture of the virgin Mary. But this was no ordinary picture. This Mary was quite dark, and beautiful yes, but not slender like so many of the white Marys he had seen, and full in the features, hinting at Africa, but somehow not all African, not all American negro either, but something hybrid, something south across the Mediterranean, and universal about her. After all, Mother Mary was mother to God, and like Eve a new mother, primal and a bit of us all. Maybe she was from Mesopotamia, the birthbed. Yet Oholibamah liked the picture for many reasons, not the least of which was his belief in the Mother, but that is it also reminded him of Her, his own Mother, just more rounded, his mother being more slender, and actually more beautiful he thought. When he thought hard about it, he could see her above him over his bed, the clean white shirts she would wear making her more brown than she was really, there in the reflected light of the doorway, the smell of her perfect skin close to him, the laundry folded in her lap where she left off doing it for a minute to check on him, she folding what came in from the line, her smile perfect somehow, white, not a gap anywhere, the eyes clean like white fire around the greenish deep brown in the center, sometimes reflecting golden in the right light when they were outside, sometimes almost black in light like that by his bed or in the evening half-light. He worshipped her. He did not understand how it was that daddy did not seem to worship her in the same way. Daddy was another story. He was also a beautiful man in his own way, but very sad to Oholibamah’s memory. He seemed always to be striving, unlike the picture there of Mary, holding the little dark child, the same color as she, there in the bundle, only a small speck of his face showing, one closed eye, the virgin Mary looking out and away, not at anything in particular, but the gaze that went beyond the picture frame, beyond you, beyond the horizon, and you knew, out, out beyond the now the here and the real and through all, a lightning strike that seems like an x-ray it’s so brilliant that it pierces things and you can see the inner workings right down to the center of a cell and the mitochondria swimming around in the cell, and right through your heart. She saw God the Father. There wherever that stare went was God the Father, and her even and calm stare said, “I will always take care of this one, hide him until his time comes, hold him and cherish the brief touch of him in this life, keep the bond between us special, even more so because you told me so yourself and kept your unusual promise, and keep my virgin secret, the miracle child here in my arms. I will watch, and wait.” There was no doubt in the picture, or fear.

____________________

It was just Saturday night and all this had accumulated from the settling dust of the night before. Friday had brought the great cloud of accumulation and fear and trembling and joy and unspeakable truths, and Sat. looked like regular lawn mowing day, there in April, like a regular day just to relax and let out a few bars of a favorite song and then go to work on something on the house and catch a glimpse of regular season baseball as it opens up and trim the hedge and call a friend or their family up about the possibility of a barbeque and leaving the kids with a teen so that you can all go out to the drive-in and watch a race movie or hey, the Green Berets was playing last you heard. But that was not what Friday left on the doorstep really. It had pulled in something entirely different other than this snapshot of postwar booming reality. It had dropped off a negative from the photo shop for examination by the photographer to see if he wanted prints, but the negative was much closer to reality than the white picket fence and the clipped grass and American Beauty roses and new storefronts and the polished chrome rims and comparing war tattoos. It had dropped off something that was a cure for the itch that Saundra of the library could not scratch. Whether it was the cure for the thing that she wanted or not, she would not be sure.

The cloud had brought with it a stranger in paradise that hid within him the hard hurt of a personal reality that defied paradise. He had a microscope in his pocket and was taking slides of every soul around him in vain hopes of a cure for a disease he felt that only he had.

The quiet storm had also dropped a blue bomb in the midst of Missouri. He came with paint and words and a quarrel with normal.

But Friday did not indeed just dole out evil without providing the scale equivalent of the cure, and the possibility of grasping at it, and even went so far as to place it carefully within arm’s reach of Sunday morning. Friday wanted it’s own cure worse than Saturday ever knew. Saturday is always oblivious to Friday’s whoredom and willfully ignorant of Sunday’s repentance, being instead the dancing nephew and niece of imprudence and licentiousness, the dazed, heat-of-the-moment reveler at Carnival not knowing where the bottom of the pocket is really whilst playing the games of chance that inevitably empties it.

Saturday was a five aspirin day. A day to sleep in and let the breeze through the window wake you. Children crept up early on Saturday because they knew they could watch cartoons without getting caught because mom and dad were most likely asleep late and didn’t care if Tom and Jerry killed each other or not. Flash Gordon almost always got lazered, even though the evil dominion never really won completely and Roy Rogers was old and boring.

Friday and Sunday were fighting.

____________________

The cloud went East, but moved back over Washington, D.C., and over Chicago, and over the Mississippi to Kansas City, the center of the country, and thought that quite interesting. It had a mind to settle down in one place all of the hard interests that had come it’s way. There were those, like Jerry Rubin, who thought that freedom would be best served in such a way that it meant freedom from restraint. This was certainly a welcome message to the latest and greatest generation, or so they thought themselves, and fed their appetite with freedom of the flesh and freedom of the mind, and mostly, freedom from the rules. If you wore a tie to work you were a rule-maker. The tie was a rope that tethered you to The Man and all of The Man was tied together, so to speak, in one giant boardroom. So the Cloud would be plopping down distinctive tie-cutters and putting them at the doorsteps of the tie-makers. The confrontations were inevitable. It’s just like dust settling in a corner. The question was just which corner would they all find a swirling eddy in which to mix.

Across the land in 1968 all things were breaking. Nothing was working right. Airplanes began to fall from the sky. Baggage for your flight didn’t end up in the right places. Technology was not in place yet to control all of the vast and quickly growing systems that were already in operation. Mail got routed to the wrong addresses, and plain old delivery of packages was becoming a joke. For the first time in North American history there were massive sit-outs, as opposed to sit-ins, of government workers like the US Postal Service, the garbage men of New York, and air and freight unions. They began to expect something back from their America. The cloud brought with it a range of emotions and sentiments that went beyond feeling and catapulted whole people groups into action. But it was 1968 when all the shit hit the fan.

A young man named Hunter began writing about it all on the road and taking it all in; a young man with a pen and a typewriter, and another named Jack.

And there was another strange older young man who’s sentiments ran after all the rest of the young flesh. He was also a writer, but mostly a physical observer of those who wrote and sang and sat-in, and popped pills and shot things in their veins and threw off their clothing in public and piled on each other in orgiastic glee. He did it all too, but not necessarily with deep abandon, but rather with curious observation, and then wrote it all down; a scientist making notes. William dug himself deep enough into the culture to not get out again. He would write about people hanging themselves and the dark side of the 50s and 60s.

The cloud had already picked up and swept up another young man and a young woman at about the same time, almost straight from the beaches of the California coast. The young woman smoked quite a bit of pot, and she had quite a bit of pot to smoke as she lived and breathed amongst the glitterati of Hollywood and Beverly Hills houses during the day and ran off in a (car description) at night to be amongst the thrilling and adventurous and dangerous lives on the strip, daddy and mummy bankrolling her right up until she had enough of her own notoriety and wanted revolution. Jane would have painted herself blue and invaded a small town as well if she had thought of the idea first. But she was off to foreign shores and marches and colleges, believing that her mind and the power of her persuasion and her position as a woman, and a good looking woman at that, had persuasive power in the shifting tide of cultural opinion and direction, the direction that the cloud moved. And they did. Jane was a freedom junkie; freedom from restraint. Everywhere else she touched down freedom from restraint at home led her to hand out freedom from restraint like candy with a spirit of aplomb and a great degree of persuasive politicking.

Speaking of handing out candy, the young man named Timothy practically threw new basement-manufactured pharmaceuticals at people, trying to hit them in the eyes with his little pills and blotters and pads of chemicals; trying desperately to change the face of the human earth with his “natural” science, telling old children that they needed to drop out of their normal day-jobs, tune in to whatever natural occurrences would happen after partaking of his wares, and turn on like some kind of switch which was basically the opposite of what people were in their ‘normal’ waking lives and become something else entirely. This was so appealing that quite a huge number from California to New York, and over the big pond where opium was already a fashion long-enjoyed, partook of his chemicals and did just as described. Many a chaotic moment came and went around this culture of opposites; living negatives walking the streets and lying on the beaches and surrounding the night clubs and some cutting themselves on the sharp edge of the living, and dying instead. Many took trips they would not return from. Timothy swore that his favorite trip was riding a motorcycle as fast as he could go and having a bunch of other motorcycles suddenly come up along side ridden by huge rats with machine guns and shooting at him.

Heroes, revisited...AGAIN.
OK,
I'm close, but I have to revise that last entry. Here it is:

I believe firmly that the W.H.O.-type organization that I spoke of is there. But I believe that there are TWO major groups, and one minor one.

ONE group of people represents the benevolent type, protecting the information about the genetic discovery. But the other is out to use it for personal gain, or world domination. HRG I believe, from what I can tell, is mixed up with the bad organization, and that organization included Mr. Nakamura at the top of it somewhere.

I do NOT believe that Hiro's dad, Mr. Nakamura, is together with Linderman. I believe that these 2 men are part of 2 different groups. At the moment though, there is no way to tell which one is really the benevolent one. It would seem that the one that HRG is mixed up with are bad guys, and now that he knows this, or senses this, he wants out. He did not know who Linderman was! That was key to me that his group is separate. This would also make Linderman's group the so-called "good" guys. However, just because Linderman healed a plant doesn't mean that he's a good guy. It would seem that my tables from my last entry could be completely turned, and that Linderman could actually be a type of God. HRG is a sort of type of Godly man, or really good person. I'm convinced that he at least is virtuous.

As far as Syler is concerned, he is not a consequence of either group at all. He's just another person with the genetic anomaly, and his has manifested in a way that absorbs other's talents, like Peter Petrelli. However, what is being exhibited in Syler (which is of course simply the name of a watch company that made really good imitation watches in a Swiss style) is the very negative aspects of the human nature when allowed to run unchecked by morality and discipline. Do we honestly believe that if Suresh didn't pull the trigger on him he would have worked it out with him and became a real partner? 99.999 not.

About that 3rd "minor" group. It seems that there is a renegade group of people who have "defected" from the whole group of people "in the know" about the genetic anomaly. Mrs. Petrelli, who had the "superior say-so" in the matter of Claire and what happened to her, and who obviously commanded the Haitian all of the time, is part of this group. HRG knew this all of the time as well, and he purposefully sent Clair to that group of people when the chips were all the way down. This is all hidden from the Petrelli brothers, even after Nathan goes to kill Linderman in the hotel kitchen with the gun. Nathan and Peter knew nothing of him then.

Could it be that Mrs. Petrelli and Mr. Linderman were once married? I mean, we've met her as Clair's grandmother, but am I missing or just forgetting something in saying that we have have never met her mate, or have an idea of who he is? Who is the grandfather of them all in that group, and is he alive? Mr. Linderman is a good candidate.

As far as the actual plot, it could go in as many different ways as there are people posting theories online. Because you have a shape shifter, two people who absorb everyone else's talents, one who kills to get them, and the other who simply absorbs them, a guy who goes back in time, one who reads minds, a couple of them who can touch machinery like computers or telephones and manipulate them to their own ends, a nuclear guy, and a couple of fly boys - then shake and add the power to bodily regenerate - and you've got a huge amount of possibilities. Anything can happen here. I'm not even gonna try. I'm more interested in the stories' motives and underlying purposes, as usual. Besides the changes noted above, I'm still sticking with the same theory that I posted in my last post about why, as far as the genetic code. It's just that now, after the last show we have evidence that suggests that there are 2 different groups, like I did say, but that they are most likely mutually exclusive, and of course, at odds.

Save the World

Affliction

This was one very disturbing film. Very disturbing.

03/22/07

The thing about Scorsese is that every picture is better than the last. I’m sitting here watching the Oscars after I just watched the Departed DVD last night until 3 AM. Ok, I got started too late. But yeah, about the Scorsese guy, you bet he gets the best director or I’m eating my last movie ticket stub. He looks rather cartoonish in the crowd, and when accosted with a script by Ellen Degeneres, laughs it up and promises to look at it later. I doubt if it’s a real script, and I doubt he would look at it later if it was. I don’t think he needs script submissions at this stage.

Marty takes the cake for best directors of all time so far. My top three are Martin Scorsese, reluctantly Alfred Hitchcock, and Benito Bertolucci. I say reluctantly about Alfred because, well simply he was so stinking weird. But I’m just talking about their directing ability, not their personal beliefs or their lives or legacy.

But I will also state this uncategorically that Marin Scorsese would not be the filmmaker that he is without Thelma Shoemacher. Their editing teamwork goes back to his first gangster film and they haven’t stopped since. It’s kind of like a marriage. But she is brilliant all by herself. I think there should be a film about HER actually. It would be a documentary that I would spend the time to watch. I would want to see Thelma put in the top all-time editors in the filmmaking hall of fame.

In The Departed the sequences of dual character development flow so smoothly that they are indistinguishable, and one character flows into the other without being so confusing as to be lost. The moment of the cutaways, the use of sound in the editing in the gun battles and subtle changes in the climate of sounds and atmosphere in cellphone conversations were very nicely cut, but the timing of how long to hang on a face, the conversations, the movement across the screen, etc., is all Thelma. Ok, it’s Marty that makes the actors do their thing, but the perfect timing, I mean flawless timing of the cut, to the frame, goes to Thelma. One can only hope to find a partner to work with and team with in life the same way that these two operate.

Ok, so it’s 11:40 PM EST and Thelma just won. I am so justified. So now I guess I’ll wait until the nominee for best director and watch Marty make his walk down there. It’s about time he did. I don’t know about best picture. It’ll be close, and The Departed may make it, but I have a feeling that it could be Blood Diamond, or the Queen, but since I haven’t yet seen either one yet, well…there’s Marty. I am typing this as the envelope is opened. And……yep, it’s Marty. I knew that. But that doesn’t make me smart, because it was a given this year. And best picture…yep, it’s The Departed. Ok, now I feel smarter. Maybe I’ll watch it again tomorrow and pay my extra dollar to Blockbuster.

Gnite.

I just figured out who HRG is in Heroes. I know it for sure.

[HRG, “Horned Rimmed Glasses” on Heroes, is really an employee of an organization that is much like WHO, the World Health Organization, but a branch that is much more like the CIA and very secretive, and they’ve branched off and made their own highly secret pact to control the whole genetic anomaly that is creating these presentations as extranormal human abilities.] They knew even before the older Dr. Suresh did that the human genome had this trait evident within it, as capable of producing these results, but here’s the kicker – they actually CAUSED this to happen on purpose, knowing also that the genome, while developing on it’s own had these capabilities, would not have presented in any form high-profile enough to find except in rare and sporadic cases without a “PUSH”, and so they experimented with large areas of the human population by releasing certain hormonal-laced inhalents as gasses (or as soluble liquids in water supplies – wait and see on that one – proteins are very difficult to manage as they are such large molecules – it’s been proven, like the new inhalable insulin that that only works as inhalant and not liquid, anyway…)over large population areas, and as such were harmless in and of themselves.

On the other hand, the Cheerleader, Clair along with the entire Petrelli gang, and mother, and Clair’s mother who lives in the trailer park, and who knows how many others, is a direct responsibility of a mating of people who actually AGREED to be part of an experiment early on in the Human Genome project, and the whole family has these miraculous abilities because of the direct genetic manipulation of the PARENTS of the politician and his brother, and the mother who lives in the trailer, etc. So that all leads back to some very tricky manipulation on the part of the parents of the Petreilli brothers (the mother sat at lunch with the press person who gave them such a hard time) and the elusive Mr. Linderman, and HRG.

I believe that Linderman is basically just a bad guy after a lot of money that happened to “horn in” on the action of the whole WHO-type organization and his funds are involved, trying to develop the heroes to do the bidding of a personal organization like that, and hence the “control devices” that they are all being outfitted with. As such, it could be that Linderman is NOT associated with HRG at all now and they’ve broken off, and that’s why HRG is trying to be so secretive and keep the information out of the open so that Linderman does not find out how they are operating. So basically here’s how that scenario would work out: Linderman is a type of the Devil (and you’ll see later in my paragraph below, Nazi), and HRG is a type of God.

I’ve personally seen HRG as a type of God since the beginning anyway, and have made my bets that he is really a very good guy. But he’s very much like the Judeo-Christian god as seen by the larger culture and not a central figure in how this all shakes out. As such, Clair represents a type of the church catholic, and/or/also a type of innocence, beauty, and goodness at the very least, in mankind, and also because she is “blonde, American, a Cheerleader, a virile teen woman” she also represents a current social ideal (and maybe someone who is a screenwriter’s ideal) of what genetic evolution on this side of the pond would be.

So besides the jabs at what the subtext is all about, let’s get back to the science of it and why it’s all so important anyway. The story is definitely heading for a moral point, and I’m seeing it as only coming out one way, that’s the way that Jewish-controlled media has been attempting to shape public consciousness for the last 3 decades. It’s all about the evil direction that genetic manipulation and human intervention in human design can take, and a cautionary tale about our dangerous manhandling of such a volatile substance as genetic material. You may ask how I know this about the Jewish media and why it’s such a hot issue. If you just consider their history…and then consider the history in Hollywood. Let’s look at the Alien series as an example. That whole series was nothing if not a giant cautionary tale about the future of people using genetics to completely wipe out another race of people, or gain mass-amounts of planetary resources. 3 decades you say, just what exactly was happening in the 80s? Look back at a series on television then called “V – The Final Battle”. There was nothing more Judeo-paranoid than that series.

Anyhow, that’s the bottom line – the so-called “Heroes” are our genetically manipulated future, and the world can easily turn into a “freak show” if not handled correctly. The believers in this are not strictly Jewish by faith you probably understand, but the highly secularized version of their religious cousins. As such they have inherited/gained a cultural zeitgeist that refuses to be whitewashed under watered-down Americanism or post Cold-War euphoria. They see the world as amalgamated, treated by very ethnic-conscious individuals, secular humanists, not Christian humanists, and groups that shun, no, fear such things as ethnic cleansing. They have every right, you know, to have such a fear, having had the experiences that they have had as a community. Consider this last “little” thought if you will – the name “Linderman”.

And I am not saying that I disagree with them. I am only stating the facts as best I can see them. “The science could be good if tightly controlled and used for the right reasons, but given greed, and the evil bias of certain men who would feel that they are created a bit higher than other men, and also human fallibility and a record of not controlling ourselves, you will have a deadly combination that creates havoc rather than good.”

I’m counting on this show actually demonstrating a way out of that ultimate destruction, and I’m betting it has much to do with the idea, not so much of leaving genetic manipulation alone, but rather controlling it correctly and not allowing it’s misuse. They are trying to create an opinion here that is not highly skeptical of the science itself, but rather highly cautious, and will try to prove that this type of science not only needs to be taken very seriously and cautiously, but also controlled and in the right hands.