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Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Monday, October 30, 2023

A poster in my neighbourhood. KIDNAPPED, as opposed to MISSING. An old man (75), not a child. In the Middle East, not East Vancouver. As for the kidnappers, a militant, fundamentalist community-based group whose work is informed by religious law and is funded by those who seek to hold regional power, or at least wrestle it from those who take their "cues" from the West.

Would we be having this problem now had the CIA and MI6 not ousted Iran's democratically-elected poet Mosaddegh in 1953? Or was that ousting a condition laid out by the family that has the country named after them -- and a good part of the world's oil?

As for Israel, what was Mosaddegh's position on this newly-created U.N.-sanctioned state that took up roughly half of Palestine? Israel was way more socialist then than it is now. Same with Iran. Oh, what do I know? Well, I do know that the Jewish diaspora is thousands of years old, that it began roughly in the area where Israel is today, and not in some of NYC's non-Manhattan boroughs in the 1950s.

David Shalev has had a rotten October and his family and friends want him home. I hope that happens, just as I hope Palestinians can shake off the fundamentalists who insist on fighting in their name. For thousands of years Palestinians have been trod on, used, blamed. Why? Why is that? Maybe that's the basis of my poster. And yet who would my figurehead be?

Sunday, October 29, 2023

La Grande Bellezza (2013) aka The Great Beauty

Getting laughs at the expense of performance artists is low hanging fruit in popular film. In order to establish early on the wit and lovability of our well-groomed slacker hero Jep, we have to see what he sees too -- the performance before the interview. But the interview! Mama mia.

Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza is a funny movie for someone like me, someone approaching Jep's age. The last movie I saw where I felt a similar connection to the lead was Alex Payne's Sideways (2004), though the better double-feature would be LGB and The Big Lebowski (1998), which also features a performance artist.

I mentioned to my friend Christine, a veteran film and TV producer, that I had just started watching LGB while recovering from the flu, and that it was not making me forget Fellini. She texted to say that LGB was among her all-time Top-10, and that she watches it at least once a year. Twenty minutes later I texted back that this is indeed a very funny film, verging on wise, and that despite certain reservations, it is growing on me.

One of those reservations, shared with her at the 1hr 50 min mark of this 2hr 22 min film, is Jep's relationship with women -- that the only women spared his acid tongue are a dwarf and an exotic dancer. That the dwarf supplies him his income (his editor) and the dancer companionship (a platonic love interest) is telling, but of course subject to change in these final 32 minutes, which I intend to get to -- tonight!