A New Classic...

Tonight is the second installment of PBS's Masterpiece Theater's Birdsong, based on the 1993 novel by Sebastian Faulks, about an impossible love during the First World War. The story, centered around Stephen Wraysford, a young English officer, losing men and digging trenches to nowhere under the battlezone known as "No Man's Land"...

Flashback tell us the story of his lost love and the reason for the added anguish he feels now. The modern story has a classic feel to it, more like Hemingway's Farewell To Arms...

Eddie Redmayne, his name fitting, with a blaze of red hair and freckles, you might of seen in a recent Burberry fashion spread plays Stephen in the movie. The actor hasn't had a lot of starring roles yet, but amazingly he has comeback from the dead twice already, not too much of a spoiler for Birdsong, which includes the mircle in the trailer, but amazingly, he was also almost buried alive in his other well known role, that of Jack, the young apprentice to Tom Builder in Pillar's of the Earth...

At the moment you can see Birdsong- here on pbs.org and Pillars of the Earth is available to rent on Netflix.

A Weekend of "Horror" in Denver...

Jon had to be up in Denver, meeting with the legislature, so I tagged along to plop down in coffee shops during the day and get some work done while he had his meetings. Then come the weekend, before we headed home, we took a few days of R and R and stayed at the Curtis, a Retro Hotel with theme on every floor. We stayed on the 13th floor, the elevator announcing "Here's Johnny!" as the door opened to a lovely blown up illustration of Jack Nicholson coming through the door with the hachet- but I digress....

The view from our room was very "voyeuristic" and I enjoyed keeping an eye on this lovely circa turn of the 20th century apartment building that with further studied revealed wonderful details like the "Romanesque" arches with the trade off of white and red bricks....

And on the very top a "penthouse?" or ""commons room" surrounded by gargoyles. They don't make them like this anymore do they, sadly!
For our whole stay, I kept an eye on the windows, which appeared to be framing the front living rooms, some with the shades pulled down, some dark, but some illuminated and revealing just the edge of a couch, or a painting on the wall, or the view blocked by flowers in a window box.
While I watched in the morning, as the city came awake, a shade went up and a blond haired lady replaced the pillows on the window seat and then disappeared. From below, many residence came out  of the double wide doors, bracing for the cold and headed to work or to walk their dogs. I watched as the street came alive with pedestrians, in long wool coats, scarves and messenger bags and I wondered where they were going, to what ugly high rise, which surrounded the red and white brick apartment on all sides, swallowing it?
Soon, even the blond haired lady exited the front door and headed down the street, but my attention was taken back to the door, where several ladies were returning with their dogs and as eached stopped at a keyed entry box,  my intentions to go down and try to peek in the lobby were dashed. Voyeurism was bad enough without adding stacking to get in behind someone who knew the  code to unlock the door.
But the view was so Rear Window- ish....

Hitchcock knew how to make a suspenseful movie!
We did go see a couple of movies while we were there. There is a huge United Artist 16 right down on the 16th street mall. I yielded to Jon's choice of The Women in Black ...

I think it was a good movie, for a "Horror" movie, but Ionly say the corner of it, or studied the lighting strips at my feet for 95% of it. It sounded scary...

To make up for it, the next night we went to a true chick flick....

Cute movie and inspire by a true story!

Movie Review: Warrior

yelp.com

Last weekend when we were in Aspen, see my Moonflower Musing Post,  to see the amazing aspens trees, oakbrush and cottonwoods ablaze, Daughter #1 and I went to the retro Isis Theater...

reviewed here on yelp.com

We saw Warrior, about two brother, separated by family troubles, but reunited by fate in a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighting ring...

Nick Nolte is their alcoholic father, who both gave them the gift of training them both to fight and the curse of a broken family and abuse...

This is both main actors, Joel Edgerton, ( minor roles in King Arthur and Ned Kelly) and Tom Hardy ( starring in TV adaption of Wuthering Heights and minor role in Inception) , first big role and neither has a MMA background and had to go through intense training for the roles and bulk up. Also neither actor is even American, let alone from the tough working class of Pennsylvania, where the movie was filmed and set. Edgerton is an Aussie and Hardy is English.

I wasn't expecting much out of a fight movie, but was pleasantly surprised. Warrior was very engaging and emotional in the story of the family as much as in the action packed fight scenes. A Rocky for the new millennium.

It was refreshing to see a realistic movie of how family battles can last past childhood and into adulthood and in divorce and abuse, the siblings might pull together the older children protecting the younger, more often than not, the siblings take a "everybody for themselves" survival stance and when they grow up, go their separate ways.

The break up of any family has long lasting ramifications and this movie did a wonderful job of showing that, how two brothers would find themselves on two totally different paths, Edgerton, a family man and high school teacher. Hardy, the younger brother, literally wandering the world and full of rage and hate for his father and his brother, but ultimately still coming back and asking his father to train him.

A child of two divorces, I so understand the back and forth pull of wanting to go back and make things right and also wanting to just say "to hell" with those you left behind and move forward. I don't know if we will ever take the time to tally up the damage broken homes are truly doing to this country, there seems to be more pressing problems and most don't realize how much the destruction of the "core family" is the start to such problems.  

MMA is not something most are familiar with, or has a "bad boy" reputation. But since both my daughters are trained in Kenpo Karate, I was trying to get them to do piano lessons, but they picked Karate and my oldest is a Third Degree Brown, one down from a Black, I am more familiar with it than I would have ever imaged!

A combination of traditional boxing and marital arts, where not only punches are thrown, but kicks, and ground work are also allowed. The sport, like all boxing and martial arts fighting is all about excitement so the bouts are fought inside a chain like fenced ring.

Of course there is a dark side to this sport, no argument, but what I have learned since we have do a bit of traveling to Sante Fe and Las Vegas, where  Kenpo  Black and Brown Belts converge every summer from all over the world..

 is most of these guys are huge teddy bears- I have never been around a more "huggy" bunch of men in my life, who could also rip your arm off, if they wanted to!

Telluride Film Festival #38: Devil Wears Prada For Real

Probably the most delightful and funny film I had an opportunity to see was Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, the iconic fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and designer for the Fashion Institute at the Metropolitan Modern Art.

The film was made by her granddaughter in law, Lisa Immordino-Vreeland, who also wrote a book on the iconic Fashion Editor. Immordino-Vreeland had no formal training in film but a good team behind her and her film was the best received by any audience at the festival I was a part of. It is a fun, honest look at a real women, which was refreshing since most of the women I was seeing on screen have only been  helpless and desperate.

The real Diana Vreeland has inspired many a fictitious fashion editor such as in The Devil Wears Prada...

Alli McGraw...

who was an assistant to Vreeland actually threw back the editor's coat when it was tossed at her and Vreeland proclaimed her, "Such a rude girl."

Aurdrey Hepburn dealt with a Vreeland inspired Editor in Funny Face...

By the way, Kay Thompson who played the Editor in Funny Face is also the author of...

Ahh the "connection" in Hollywood!



Diana Vreeland is as extravagant, off the wall as any of these characters. maybe more. One of her assistance saying that if she got a wild hair for orchids to be flown to the North Pole for a shoot, by gosh they were!

In the documentary, Vreeland...

critiqued Adolf Hitler's fashion sense, declaring the little black mustach was just not working,

said the best thing to come out of Wolrd War 2....

was the bikini, which she is credited with bringing to America...

She also popularized the jean, no joke.

Vreeland had two sons, who are interviewed in the documantary. One son said, "I wish I had any mother other than this one." if that is any indication where the sacrifices were made for a women who transformed our fashion and our culture in the mid decades of this century.

Telluride Film Festival #38 Review: The Artist

The second feature after Trip to the Moon, was the new silent film, The Artist . Yes you just read new and silent.

The movie is directed by Michel Hazanavicius, stars Jean Dujardin, who won best actor in Cannes and Be're'nice Bejo. In the strain of A Star is Born and Sunset Boulevard, one star is rising and one star is falling. American actors John Goodman and James Cromwell, along with the rest of the cast, really show their acting chops, with wonderful gestures and facial expression and the story is wonderfully played out across the scene, the use of sound and music, used ingeniously if not sparingly.

Telluride Film Festival #38: Trip to the Moon

Every night at the festival the best seat in town is under the red cliffs framing the ski resort and below a clear night sky in Elk Park, but you better bring your own camp chair, a jacket and rain gear just in case.

I have watched a movie there every night and it is the best reason for coming here, even if you can't afford a ticket, because the films at the little park right across from the courthouse are free!

The first night, before the main feature we got to see the newly restored and originally colored A Trip to the Moon

 Is that not the most wonderful Art Nouveau poster you ever saw!

The 1902 iconic silent film actually opened the Canne Film Festival this year and here at Telluride it was featured at the open air park and would later be part of a line up of the entertaining shorts from that era, all put to music by Serge Bromberg.

Here at the park, the film was introduced by it's restorers, Lobster Films. The restoration took a long process of sometimes letting the originally "munched" colored Spanish version sit in a basement with humidors for upwards of  two years before the fragile film strips could be laid flat and hi-def photographed.

They also told us about Nitrate film and how dangerous it was to actually be stuck in an old movie theater and even had a visually aid....

It took about 2 seconds for the film to go up in flames!

Unfortunately,  finiancing took some time and effort to bring together, but finally with the Technicolor Fountaion on board and new music by the French band  Air, new audience are seeing this amazing little picture in color, made in 1902 when the idea of space travel was already in our collective conscious.

George Me'lie'....

 was inspired by two popular Sci-Fi writers Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and Trip to the Moon is considered the first Sci-Fi movie ever, selling in both black and white version and colored.

During World War I, the French army actually seized most of Me'lie' 's film and melt them down for boot heels for the solidiers. With the power of the big studios in America and Thomas Edison basically pirating Melies work such as The Trip to the Moon, the French inovator in both animation and special effects actually went bankrupt.

But watching this amazing short, I started to think it had many parallels to a modern inovation in animation and special effect, Avatar (2009)....

brought out even more with the amazingly colored version of bright reds, pinks, blues, yellows and green. The moon tribal people, looking very Na'vi- ish.

I truly thought this was an odd thought, until I was reading the festival Film Watch newspaper and
Serge Bromberg was qouted as having the same idea.

The Trip to the Moon is not just similiar to Avatar in its story but to think that Me'lie' 's use of live action and cut outs, primitive animation techiniques is what filmmakers have been building on and was the beginings of even James Cameron's advancements of the computer generated animation of Avator that also mixed in live action. There truly are no new ideas!

And what an iconic image the moon with a red rocket in its eye....

has also become part of our collective conscious, one only needs to look up in a litttle mountain town like Telluride....

Since the film is over 100 years old, it is considered in the public domain so here it is for your enjoyment in black and white, though if you ever can, do see the newly restored version by Lobster Films.



Telluride Film Festival #38: Living in a Material World

I often wonder when I hear about the release of some celebrity's personnel but as yet unpublished material, be it a diary, a manuscript, a piece of art or just family pictures, it feels so voyeuristic to me, like we are being given access to something without getting permission.

I have had the opportunity to go deep in the basement of the the Anasazi Heritage Center research library here in Southwest Colorado, which holds the rights to the archives of the Wetherill brother's...

who were the first  Whites to climb through many of the ruins up at Mesa Verde and were the first to try and preserve them. Researching for a story of the first tourists of Mesa Verde, I sat down in the basement and flipped through their photo albums and read their diaries, some written in the margins of the Post Office ledgers, Al Wetherill used as a post master in his later life.  I felt like I was invading their privacy.

As an arist myself, I also wonder how accurate of a picture we can really get of anyone from what they leave behind?

Thinking of all the half manuscripts and art work I have stuffed in the back of a drawer for a reason good reason, not having the heart to throw them away but knowing they were really,really bad.
DiVinci, Hemmingway and even George Harrison probably have had more material that should not see the light of day, then did. All artist are like that.

With all these concerns it was wonderful in the Conversation with his wife, Olivia Harrison...

that the first thing she emphasized was how much a documentary was one of the many things Harrison very much wanted to do, but did not get to once he knew his time was short from lung cancer and how she knew she had to finish this for him.

That said it took a decade for Living in a Material World to be completed. At the conversation, Olivia Hamilton confessing that at first she could not bare to be apart from her husband's things, she would send a carrier with a few items and make them wait while Martin Scorsese and his team sifted through them.

Scorses, whose last documentary was about Bob Dyon No Direction Home (2005)...

is not at the festival but his editor, David Tedeschi is  and as is Living in a Material World producers Nigel Sinclair and Margaret Bodde are.

The collaboration that was need by all of Harrison friends including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and his good friend Eric Clapton was amazing...

but as a wife married to the same man for over twenty years,  my heart went out to Olivia Harrison, who simply was trying to preserve her husband's legacy before someone else did.