The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo
PBS broadcasted today for the first time a documentary on the painter Frida Kahlo If you have not seen the Hollywood motion picture Frida with Selma Hayek in the role of Frida, you will find the documentary very stimulating. But if you have seen Selma Hayek’s marvelous Frida, you realize just how accurately the Hollywood film captured the life of this pioneering Mexican woman. The problem for this documentary is that there was nothing left out in the Hollywood picture. Hats of to Selma Hayek and the people who made the Hollywood motion picture about Frida.
(Here you find a schedule of future broadcasts of the documentary.)
Some of Frida’s paintings trying to express her inner turmoil are the most arresting paintaings I have ever seen expressing humon emotion. There is a wonderful website in Italy that provides links to many of her paintaings.
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Bowling for Columbine
My expectations were only moderately high after having been disappointed by Moore’s under-researched Fahrenheit 9/11. Already during the first couple of minutes, you get the sense that Bowling for Columbine is a superbly crafted film. The symbol of guns is so deeply embedded in the American psyche and the facts about gun violence in America are so well documented that Moore can use a simple technique: Let people from all walks of life talk about their views on the issue and what emerges is the material for an amazing picture of American society. Moore in the best sense of the word directs peoples’ statements into a gripping tale about contemporary America. You are shocked, you learn, and you laugh. The Oscar 2003 Oscar for best documentary is well-deserved. The film is a masterpiece.
As an aside: I watched this movie late at night at the gym on the Stairmaster. Toward the middle of the film a particularly funny scene made me laugh out loud. Not far from me an employee was cleaning up the gym. The five-foot one slender blond girl seemed to tell me something but I couldn’t hear what she was saying with my headphone on. I took them off and now could understand her words. “I thought you were laughing about me,” she says. “No, I am laughing about a scene in Bowling for Columbine. It is really funny,” I reply. “I hear that it is good but I don’t like its message,” she adds. “I grew up in Michigan with guns and I believe that everyone has a right to wear them.” Over the next minutes, she utters the same justifications for guns that Moore captured on his film. “Everyone has a right to defend oneself. It is in the constitution. I am small 5 foot 1 woman. If someone tries to rob me in my car, I can only defend myself with a gun. And when people attack someone, they deserve to be shot.” I objected that shooting someone because they want to take $20 out of your wallet is perhaps a bit extreme. “ “No, I am allowed to defend myself with a gun.” Michael Moore pointed his finger on why so many people pay dues to the National Rifle Association. They feel insecure and believe that a loaded gun in the house or the car is going to make them safer. But what I also realized in this conversation is that people are socialized into the belief that guns are an American right enshrined in the constitution. Gunn ownership forms part of their self-identity. I presented the obvious objection to the belief that the constitution allows everyone to bear arms for self-defense (rather than to form a militia to protect the commonwealth): “So, you think I can bring into this gym my personal nuclear weapon in case some of the big guys over there try to beat me up or take my DVD player?” Then she said, “No, that would be too extreme.” What I realized at this moment is that when people like her insist on the constitutional right to bear arms, they insist on being able to do what they grew up with. Since they did not grow up in a society in which everyone brought his or her little nuclear weapon to the gym, they don’t have difficulty prohibiting the right to bear nuclear arms. But since they are guided by emotions and not logic, they don’t understand that logically speaking this makes no sense. The parents of the children who were killed at the Columbine High School believe that it is simply too extreme in an urban and modern society to allow kids to get easily get their hands on guns.
What George F. Kennan might have written about the thread of Al Queida
I read for the first time today what Kennan wrote in 1946. I replaced in my mind the words “Soviet Union” with “Al Queida” and “communism” with “terrorism.” From this vantage point, the last paragraph becomes particularly insightful into our current situation.
WORD FOR WORD | COLD WARRIOR
The Man Who Took the Measure of the Communist Threat
By PETER EDIDIN in NY Times:
GEORGE F. KENNAN, who died Thursday at 101, was “the nearest thing to a legend that this country’s diplomatic service has ever produced,” the historian Ronald Steel has said. He was the man who proposed “containment,” the cornerstone of the cold war, as a way to oppose the Soviet Union.
Continue ReadingGuide to The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made
Putting in a plug for the competition, here you can find a directory of the 1000 best movies according to the film critics of the New York Times. NY Times Guide
Napoleon Dynamite
The typical high school movie has a plot line that goes like this: Students collectively arrive at standards for deciding a status order for the group. Good looks, athleticism, and social skills typically form the standards by which each student is ranked. The high-status people form an in-group with a very strict social social boundary, keeping the majority of lower status students in the out-group. The cool people constantly pick on the nerds and remind the latter that they would like to join the in-group, but will never be allowed to do so. After considerable abuse, the nerds commiserate with one another and form a mutual support group. As the drama unfolds, the cool people turn out to be shallow and not very intelligent. The nerds, by contrast, reveal themselves to be deep, authentic, capable of true friendship, and above all intelligent. These qualities allow them to defeat the cool people at their own game (revenge of the nerds).
Why It Often Rains in the Movies
A few days ago, I read this wonderful short piece by Lawrence Raab in a book entitled “The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms” (p. 260).
Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad wheather. It’s true
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
If you are flying to the West Coast this month with United Airlines, you are presented with the Briget Jones sequel. Just like the first film, it is a light romantic comedy. Competent writers were hired to put together a script that delivers the same kind of effects as the first movie. It is not profound in any sense of the word. The film feels over-engineered, except with regard to Bridget’s boyfriend Mark. The writers left him without any trace of character. You forget Bridge Jones II the moment you step out of the plane. If you are looking for a playful light romantic comedy, bring your DVD player on board and watch Renée Zellweger in Down with Love. If you want to see how good an actress Zwellweger you might want to watch her in the marvelous film Cold Mountain, which I reviewed on this page early last year.
Man on Fire
Men on Fire is the most fantastic thriller in years. It pulls off what most films of this genre lack: Emotional depth in the midst of an action-driven plot. Denzel Washington plays John Creasy, a retired CIA operative/contract killer whose conscience has got the better of him and led him to the whiskey bottle. Visiting a former comrade in Mexico, the old friend (Christopher Wallken) ropes him into the job of protecting the young daughter of a Mexican industrialist Samuel Ramires (Marc Anthony) whose American jet-set wife Lisa fears for the life of their daughter after Mexico City is caught in a wave of child-kidnappings. Creasy only reluctantly agrees to serve as the body guard of the nine-year-old Pita (Dakota Fanning) because he is afraid that the body of an alcoholic would be too weak to protect the girl. But Creasy has no idea how difficult Pita will make it for him to continue on the path that he has chosen.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
The movie has a standard plot of a science fiction film: a madman tries to destroy the world as we know it. What renders this airplane movie charming, however, is that it makes a serious attempt to recreate how people in 1939 would have imagined a sci-fi world. At the time, German technological prowess inspired the imagination of science fiction writers.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Love at first sight may be a romantic illusion. Wild excitement at first sight is certainly real. That’s what I experienced reading the first couple of pages of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I quickly realized that this collection is a literary event not to be missed. When I was in college, I bought myself a copy of Didion’s Democracy but did not get beyond the first couple of pages. After picking up Slouching Towards Bethlehem I had to force myself to keep appointments because I did not want to put the book down.
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