Tis the season for ... best and worst lists

Tis the season to be bombarded with lists of best and worst of this and that.

Here's an addendum to those lists ...

The film on many worst lists that simply doesn't belong ...

and the film that ought to be very high on the stinker list that gets overlooked.

John Carter ... on any number of worst lists ... bombed at the box office. Cutting of Mars from the title couldn't have helped. Which is too bad. Because it wasn't a bad movie at all. In fact, it was pretty good ... not a masterpiece ... but pretty good. The goodness is all due to old-fashioned charisma.

Taylor Kitsch is fine in the lead role. Lynn Collins is better than fine as Martian princess Dejah Thoris ... who is by turns tomboy, scientist and only occasionally distressed. I buy their romance. Supporting performances by various Martians are also spot on.

The biggest bummer of this film: It's set up nicely for a sequel. It could really use a sequel. And this one time, we won't get it.

You'd think with budgets in the tens (or hundreds) of millions, you'd get actors and scripts that click.

Alas, even when budgets are flush, the charisma fund can be sorely lacking.

Witness Snow White and the Huntsman. Twi-fans ensured that the film did okay box office. I was looking forward to seeing it. The Twilight films are a guilty pleasure after all.

But there's a rotten core in this apple. Kristen Stewart simply can't act ... at least not much.

Scene after scene goes by, characters around her talk, emote, do stuff. And you wait for the heroine to have something to say. To no avail. Toward the end, she gives a Henry V inspired speech, but it half misfires and comes off as more shrill than inspiring. And chemistry, well there is none. Huntsman Chris Helmsworth tries mightily, but it's as if he's chopping wood with a butter knife. Even he can't spark any passion in this soggy mess.

And the scenes ... visually interesting individually ... but the film has no idea what it want's to be. There's a particularly ridiculous and incongruous scene where a white stag bows to Snow in an enchanted part of the forest. An epic like Lord of the Rings, a bit of whimsy like Princess Bride, a dark cynical work like Brothers Grimm? Brother's Grimm covers much of the same ground ... and covers it much better.  Plus it has Monica Bellucci, what else needs to be said.

Bonus comment: This year's Mirror Mirror took a different take on the Snow White story ... it's as light as cotton candy and very stagey ... but for watching with kids strikes a tone very much like Princess Bride. That one works.

Movie critic Peter Travers at Rolling Stone generally agrees with my take on John Carter, but we're opposite on the Snow films.

Quick Tips

This is all subjective of course:

Strap locks on guitars: Sorta specialized comment here. Straplocks are aftermarket buttons you use to replace the buttons already on your guitar. They cost like $20 and they are plain stupid. Some strap buttons are fine to start with. A few ... Fender style buttons in particular ... in prone to letting the strap slip off. Instead of buying a $20 strap lock for your guitar, just do this:

Pick up two ten cent plastic washers, sized just smaller than the outside of the strap button, but bigger than the inside ...
Take off your strap button and put the washer on it, then the strap, then reattach the button to the guitar.
Voila. The strap will not come off.

The downside: The strap is on there somewhat permanently. 

So what. Buy a strap for each guitar. They are hardly more expensive ($30ish) than the strap locks ($20ish). And a lot cheaper than a guitar.

Wine: Skip the inexpensive pinot noir. It's never really very good (relearned the lesson tonight yet again at dinner). Don't get me wrong. I like pinot noir. But in the $12 to $15 a bottle range it just doesn't cut it. Spanish reds in that price range however, can be very fine. 

A side kick against cinema mediocrity

Cue movie preview announcer man ...

In a world in which movie theaters have been invaded by remakes, reboots, sequels ... one man stands up for originality ... for movies with vision. That man is Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Yeah. I said Jean-Claud Van Damme. And yep, I'm being deliberately hyperbolic. But he deserves some respect for this: JCVD. It's not a new film, dating to 2008. My wife stumbled across references to the film while reviewing a peculiar Belgian novel that liberally quoted the film and Van Damme.

Van Damme plays himself. And in playing himself, ironically becomes a pretty good actor. The plot in a nutshell, Van Damme, in the midst of a child custody battle, returns to Brussels and goes to the post office to get some money. The office is being robbed. And then it's completely unlike any Van Damme film you've seen. Hint: Don't hold your breath for the side kick.

Perfect film. No. Interesting film. Hell yes.

I don't bother heading to the movies much anymore, because I'm tired of remakes, reboots and sequels. (Though I will watch the last Twilight film with my wife because the novelist has such as awful style that the movies are actually much better.)

Big Thinkers

I design print publications for Bloomsburg University. A lot of stuff crosses my desk and email. Things designed in MS Word, in Publisher, with lousy clipart, with ugly fonts, with type that glows, has been twisted or just plain looks silly.

I walked into work last week and this was taped to the door in all of it's black and white glory. I stopped dead in my tracks and read it, right then, right there.

It got my attention. I got the message. I loved the snarky edge.

Sometimes, all you need is simple black and white, simple words, and a little attitude to make something really cool.

If Stradivarius had an iPhone would he make violins?

If Stradivarius had Facebook or an iPhone or Twitter, would he have made violins?

Would he have found the time?

I use the internet every day. But I have a love hate relationship with it. I'm in my 40s. We are in the digital age, but I'm not entirely a digital native. There are things I miss about the machine age. I use a digital camera every day, but there's something magical about holding an old Canon F1 or a  Canonet rangefinder. Both are also immensely impractical. Besides shooting film, which is a pain to process, they weigh a ton.

So I satisfy my craving for the mechanical by using fountain pens (the Aurora Optima and Lamy 2000 are favs) and wearing a mechanical automatice watch (it winds by the normal movement of your arm) ... like the Seiko 5, above.

Back to the internet.

If we are constantly Tweeting, or on Facebook, can we produce anything of lasting value? I'm not convinced that we can. Though I use the two services in conjunction with my blog www.bloomsburgarts.com, I'm really only using them as a news feed so people to conveniently access the blog.

I especially dislike Twitter. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that Twitter contains the word "twit." But I work in publications and public relations and social media is related to my job. So I subscribe to several blogs related to social media. In one blog, a writer took a break from social media in February and bemoaned the fact that without twitter he learned of Whitney Houston's death hours after every one else. And I think: "So what. Was he going to bring her back?"

I think that we are confusing information, which the internet has aplenty, with knowledge and understanding. Yes, information is important. The internet, Twitter included, is really good at delivering information.

But knowledge, and more importantly, understanding takes time and reflection to acquire. In short. Work.

Making a violin, composing a symphony, writing a (good) book, creating anything of lasting value takes time. And not just any time. Stradivarius wasn't checking status updates between carving. It takes focused time and attention. The internet is a wonderful tool — even Facebook and Twitter. But I think the balance is getting out of whack. Perhaps the internet has robbed us of some of our capacity to pay attention.

The way that the internet changes our ability to focus attention has a civic dimension as well. If as a society, we think that it's important to know exactly when Whitney Houston died, but we don't know if lowering tax rates really leads to a long-term increase in tax revenue, then we have a problem. If we don't understand why it's important to know, we have a big problem.

PS:  Obviously, I do think that blogs and web pages can have some value. I think they are a convenient way to express reasoned, thoughtful, sometimes flippant and silly, and sometimes really informative things. Check out this staggeringly detailed analysis of the movement in a Seiko 5. BTW: Many Seiko 5's allow you to set the day in Spanish. My wife is a language professor, hence the red "Dom" for Sunday in the image.

Because evil is a bad career choice

Christopher Walken visits Scotland Pa. 

But Christopher Walken is awesome.

MacBeth is not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I always felt it was a little linear ... no real surprises. I recall my college final on the play started like this:

The point of MacBeth is that evil is a bad career choice. Advancement opportunities are limited and the retirement benefits are very bad.

I wrote just a little more after that ... another hundred words tops, maybe just 50. But I doubled down on the Hamlet essay and did alright in the class.

Over the years ... MacBeth has been adapted to film many times ... Throne of Blood stands out in my memory.

Scotland Pa. may supplant that memory. Set in a burger joint in nowheresville, the film is a winner for sheer weirdness and, surprising faithfulness to the original paly. Yeah, it's got problems ... mainly you're never quite sure to take it as tragedy or camp, or a bit of both.

But the acting is all top notch ... lady, eh, Mrs. McBeth is particularly good. And then there's Christopher Walken, as wacked vegetarian detective Lt. McDuff. Proving once again that anything with Christopher Walken in it can only be so bad ... because let's face it, he's awesome. Weird and awesome.

Happy Purim

Happy Purim.  Lucky me. We celebrate Purim in my house, which is a very cool holiday (I'm agnostic, but Nathalie, my wife, is Jewish) that celebrates feminine heroism. The holiday, from the Biblical book of Esther,  celebrates Queen Esther, the queen of Persia who convinces the king not to persecute the Jews as urged by his villainous adviser, Haman. A signature of the holiday are these unique cookies in the shape of Haman's hat. In our house, the cookies are filled with poppy seed paste, but other fillings are also used.

This year, 2012, Purim is March 7-8.

Cookies by Nathalie.

Do artists ever really get better?

My wife and I were talking one night and I'm struggling to recall who exactly prompted this, but it was an actor, and not a very good one. And one of us asked, "Do artists ever really get better?"

I could write thousands of words, but I've sketched out some thoughts here. (An explanation about the drawings is at the end.)

*****

Do artists get better?

Now, I'm not talking about an incremental refinement in craft that we expect ... but fundamentally better. Mozart. Childhood prodigy. Beethoven. Ditto. Samuel Barber wrote his famous adagio fairly early in his career.

In the realm of film, we thought about the iconic stars and in our memory they were always great. 

Rock and Roll ... Paul McCartney comes to mind as the jaw-dropping prodigy from the start. Prince too.

Visual arts gave us more trouble as we, as just ordinary people, can't recall any artist's history in any detail. But there definitely seemed to be a trend. The artists that we recalled seemed to be something extraordinary right out of the gate. 

I came up with a partial exception in Frank Zappa. I used to have a lot of his discs, from the 60s on. In the 60s, he was a conceptual weirdo, but not a great guitar player. By the mid 70s though, something had changed. He put out a three-disc set of guitar solos and let's just say, somebody had been practicing. A lot.  In the mid 80s, Zappa released Guitar, a two-disc set, and his chops, both as a composer and an instrumentalist, had taken another jump.

But Zappa feels like the exception that proves the rule. And even as an exception, it's limited, because there was still something fundamentally Zappa about his work at the start. In his case, the skill level simply increased dramatically.

For actors, I can't help but think of Cary Grant. For one thing, he worked for so long and he worked so much from the 30s through the 60s. Comedies, romance, suspense. He was very much a professional. The common thing is to dismiss Cary Grant as always playing Cary Grant.

And yet there is something more to his work than that. Grant, who portrayed the suave lady's man, was by all accounts, dedicated and smart. And not afraid of doing some slapstick that made him look silly. (I love the Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer.) There's a story about the train station scene in North by Northwest when he stops in the middle of a take and asks about an extra carrying a red suitcase in the background. He knew that the red case would distract the eye. I remember that lesson every time I photoshop out some incidental, and distracting (often red), object from a photo.

Who else comes to mind? Jean Reno. Toshiro Mifune. Helen Mirren. Clint Eastwood. Johnny Depp. A new fav is Yves Attal (Anthony Zimmer). All of them seem to be playing themselves in one way or another. Reno and Mifune (France, Japan) are famous for playing tough guys, but they bring something very human and dignified to the scene each time out ... even the fairly slight films. And Reno has got considerable talent for playing comedy with a straight face.

Aficionados talk of the wonders of actors losing themselves in the role. But I wonder if those actors who seem to iconically play themselves don't have more to teach us. They certainly seem to hold our affections better. Perhaps their careers are a process of becoming more of who they are. Or at least, more of who we would like to project ourselves onto.

Grant was quoted: "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point." There's a kind of art in that life, and humor in Grant's telling of it.

*****

Zappa though, still inspires. He really did become that much better through work.

And despite being such a prodigy, McCartney inspires as well because he also worked very hard. The best book I read last year was Here, There and Everywhere by Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick. He recalls the Sgt. Pepper's sessions ... late at night and the others had gone home. McCartney remained, recording and rerecording the bass line for "With a Little Help From My Friends" until is was perfect.

I don't know that artists fundamentally change. But work still does matter.

*****

I'm an okay sketcher, but not good enough to make a career of it. But drawing has been something I've done to greater (in the past) and lesser (recently) degrees for years. I pulled out some old sketchbooks and my drawings, whenever they were done, look like they came from me. From top to bottom: Dave Janoski from the Times Leader in 1989, one of the smartest men I ever met; Gail Schecter, a girl who visited her mom in the office from 1991; an unknown person from the Station bar in Wilkes-Barre from 1996; a fast sketch of my wife in 2011. I think that if my drawing had been more regular, it would certainly have become more refined, but they would still be recognizably mine.

I think writing is something different altogether. Drawing for me has been an exercise in seeing, Writing is an exercise in interpreting and understanding. I couldn't have written this in 1989. I didn't have the perspective. Progress is possible after all. Hope lives. Hooray.


17 Jan. 2012: PS: I'd love to be wrong, to have examples of artists who did get better. If you think of any, leave a comment.

Poetry for peanuts

File this idea under awesome.

A few day's ago, our seven-year-old daughter got a letter from the mother of a school friend. An invitation to join a poetry club. How it works: Write a poem and send it back. We should get a copied collection of works in a week or two.

Now it's pretty inspirational to see the passion that a child can have for language and for learning in general. In Sofie's case, it's almost competitive. For example, she's been asking for weeks to play the online typing game (we did say yes). I think that for her typing represents maturity, sophistication, independence. Shoes that click are another powerful symbol for this girl. At the shoe store she invariably wants some pumps with heels. Off she goes to the front of the store where there's tile ... she needs to make sure they have the "power click." No click, no sale.

The desire to write may fade sometime, but for now, writing is a big deal. This is Sofie's (pictured in an ink sketch) poem for the collection:

Friends  

by Sofie 

Sweet as candy
fun as snow
pretty as a diamond
as glittery as a star
when they smile
for awhile
it brings back memories
like when they make me smile
and laugh and cry
but I'll never wave goodbye