Check out all the pictures here.

I don’t know how it is that Mr. Lumet came to direct the script by Paddy Chayefsky, but the script is a gem of no-holds-barred, damn-the-audience writing.  It is filled with the argot of television, but doesn’t give a damn if you understand it or not.  Mr. Chayefsky foresaw the world of television in which we live, to our detriment.  Just about the only thing that television has not put on the air in the form of reality television is a planned, live assassination.  But that is available on YouTube.

Some people remember this scene as the most important.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other people remember this scene.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I like those, but the one that had me rolling on the floor on first viewing was the one where the radicals and the lawyers are negotiating contracts.  That clip is not available.

The movie starred Faye Dunaway.  She won the Oscar and she should have.  Robert Duvall inhabits his character in a way that only he can.  I think that Mr. Lumet probably turned the camera on and let the actors work; the script seems clear enough, the characters well-formed, direction was not needed to find the beats in the scene.  There are long speeches, which are normally death for a movie, but I liked them.

What Mr. Chayefsky doesn’t say is that the thing that draws our attention is spectacle.  He was railing against spectacle and the use of it to delude and mislead people.  But that is how it ever was.  One step on that path was the gladiatorial games.  Pure spectacle.  Against the backdrop of spectacle, we then try to identify the elements of narrative that will inform our lives.  Such is as it ever was.  Sophocles wrote about a king who bedded his mother and fathered his own half-siblings.  Think that wasn’t spectacle?

There are two kinds of spectacle: sex and violence.  One is the embodiment of the greatest form of intimacy we humans possess, the other is the played as if it is.  Our mores don’t allow us to explore sexual relations between consenting adults in a way that seeks to understand and communicate, so our storytellers turn to violence or violent sex.

I’m not a fan of reality television.  I don’t watch that much television any more and I must confess to a certain element of pride of ignorance when references to reality television are made in the popular media.  Mr. Chayefsky recognized the speed of communication and what it could do for mankind, and I think he also recognized that we would not use it well.  The Everyman television, YouTube, can be used as a tool of democratization, but it can only act as a solvent, stripping away the chimera of respectability that repressive regimes use.  It can not teach mutual respect for others nor direct us away from our inborn tendency toward clanism.

But here we are and it is our planet, or rather, the planet of our children.  I hope they don’t damn us in our graves.

The story is as old as time, and parallels the story of Jonathan Wild, except that Fergie isn’t a Thief Taker.  There were very few beats to this story that I didn’t see coming.  There is an air of realism to it that has a cinematic quality, which means that it isn’t really realistic, it only appears so for the purposes of cinema.  There were times when the movie could have been speeded up with no real loss of story, and Affleck love of the two shot close up pulled me out of the movie and left me wondering about how else it could have been staged.

The story doesn’t lend itself to nuanced story telling.  This is a movie where the only color of character is in the primary range.  Bold is the starting point and over-the-top is about medium.  The women are the only characters who show any vulnerability.  Claire had fewer opportunites, but Blake Lively as Krista has more and delivers when she can.

Jeremy Renner got good reviews, but his is pretty much a one note character, and Renner plays it like it is a gong.  Some people like that sort of character in a movie.  There were a few changes I would have made to the story to provide it with a bit more moral grounding.  Doug has an existentialist journey, but that isn’t made clear.  Claire has a decision that will illuminate her sense of morality, but we don’t really see it.  Agent Frawley is not really explored to provide a clear moral picture of who he is and why he does what he does.  Many of these quibbles could have been covered easily, but the movie doesn’t do it.

It was an enjoyable action picture and speaks to Ben Affleck’s organizational skills.  Running a movie shoot requires a tremendous amount of attention to detail before one even tries to deliver on the art that one is attempting.  Affleck has that skill.

“Gommorah” is a movie based on the book of the same name by Roberto Saviano.  That book is about the crime families of Naples called the Cammora.  Saviano has had to leave Italy because of death threats on his life by members of the Cammora.

The movie uses interconnected stories and a large cast to tell several stories about the Cammora.  This movie has a more realistic feel than “The Town”.  It has a gritty look of deep focus and what we can see in the deep focus isn’t pretty.  Aging apartment buildings, abandoned buildings, rust everywhere.

The movie has no heroes.  But maybe that is the way things are for people engaged in criminal activity in Naples.  I have seen a viral video (available on Youtube) of a man being shot in Naples.  It is the surveillance footage from a corner shop.  The gunman nonchalantly walks up in back of the victim, shoots him in the head, and nonchalantly walks away.  Many people saw the killer’s face, but no one was willing to speak.

Italy has a plunging birth rate.  Society can become unstable with an aging population and an influx of immigrants who don’t speak the language and don’t know the customs.  The government is the problem in that government corruption hinders efforts to establish and enforce the rule of law.

The movie is interesting, if only for a voyeuristic view of rampant pathology.

For example, Mr. Will, blind, comes storming into the kitchen to complain about the children.  Sally Field as Edna Spaulding, is naked in the bath tub.  She starts to get out, but then stays in the tub.  The tension between them, the vulnerability of each of them, is wholly captured.  It was written that way; it was shot that way.

His directing credits:

Year	Film
1972	Bad Company
1977	The Late Show
1979	Kramer vs. Kramer
1982	Still of the Night
1984	Places in the Heart
1987	Nadine
1991	Billy Bathgate
1994	Nobody’s Fool
1998	Twilight
2003	The Human Stain
2007	Feast of Love

Find a bad movie in them.

Wynton Marsalis, Yesterdays, Standard Time, Volume 3

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh, here it comes and there it goes
The unbearable sound of the earth making men out of boys
First you learn and then you’ll teach
About that bright, bright light

Making its way
On up the mountain night and day
And you’ll get tired and you’ll get weak
But you won’t abandon your masterpiece

Now there’s a light making its way
On up the mountain night and day
And you’ll go down and you’ll go deep
But you won’t surrender your masterpiece

You won’t surrender your masterpiece
You will deliver your masterpiece

It can be heard on line at Rhapsody, iLife and other places.

Jakob Dylan and Jack Johnson speak to me more than most song writers.  They are fathers and I think they get it.  I’m listening to the secret song that was on The Wallflowers album, Breach.

Come back babybird/ With your dirty wings in tatters/ Come home where you belong/ Nobody knows you better/ Now bring back your velvet heart/ And we’ll make you brand new feathers/ Sleep through the morning light/ With your arms around your brother

Now outside faces cry/ With the tears of lonesome orphans/ And behind every mask/ is the face of another/ Wherever you have been/ wherever you took cover/ No arms that pulled you in/ could hold you like your mother

When all my colors fade/ And my wings, they’ve turned to leather/ I’ll know the reasons why/ God let me get older/ When all my days are through/ And I fly these hills no longer/ I’ll lay beneath the stars/ And I’ll watch you flying over

Jakob Dylan gets it.

After leaving the theater, I wanted to talk about the movie alot. Not that there is a lot to talk about. The plot is pretty predictable. But the visuals are stunning. I saw it in 3D. Sometimes in 3D movies, the light from the screen will reflect off the front of the glasses of the people behind me and then into my glasses. It appears as a flicker in my peripheral vision. We sat in the back row of the theater and there was no flicker.

A run time of 2.40, plus trailers is a long time. I don’t think that there was two hours and forty minutes of narrative to be had in the movie.

But it was a visual treat.

The drug raids were based on the testimony of a single informant.  The criminal case fell apart and one woman, at the behest of the ACLU, sued the district attorney.  The case was settled out of court and the law in Texas was changed so that indictments could not be issued on the testimony of a single informant.

Bookzilla and JMan were very uncomfortable while watching this movie.  The movie is not one sided.  Some of the characters are too neatly drawn.

We talked about the movie and much of the discussion was about the powers of the district attorney.  The kids seemed to think that district attorneys had too much power.  I didn’t lead, or at least I didn’t try to lead them, to this position.

This movie isn’t a bad movie.  But I’ll never get those two hours back.

Mr. Chesnutt had a cracked, small voice but sang with disarming candor about a struggle for peace in a life filled with pain. A car crash at age 18 left him partly paralyzed, and he performed in a wheelchair.

The accident, he has said, focused him as a songwriter, and it became the subject of some of his earliest recordings. “I’m not a victim/Oh, I am an atheist,” Mr. Chesnutt sang in “Speed Racer,” from his first album, “Little,” produced by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and released in 1990.

A documentary, “Speed Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt,” was released in 1993, and in 1996 his songs were performed by Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M. and others for “Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation,” an album that benefited the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit group that offers musicians medical support.

I saw that documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994.  I thought that his music did all that art was supposed to do.  It provided a connection to things that I had not experienced, a context for understanding things that I sometimes see and a picture of a person who was trying to understand life and covey that understanding to others.  There are people who call themselves ‘artists’, but they are just so many narcissistic breathers, for whom art functions as a way of drawing attention to themselves so that they may further the goal of  participation in sensate ritual.

He sings about suicide in “Flirted With You All My Life,” from his recent album “At the Cut,” describing death as a lover he must break up with because his accomplishments in life are incomplete:

When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind

But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death

Oh death, I’m really not ready.

I think that maybe life just became too much for him.