Hollywood seems like such a great place. Every time you do something, it ends up in one of the rags.
Came across an interesting little posting about the US education system this morning.
Special thanks to Janeane Garofalo for some words that could make those Eggs Benedict come back out the way they came in.| When you're lost in the rain in Juarez And it's Eastertime too And your gravity fails And negativity don't pull you through Don't put on any airs When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue They got some hungry women there And they really make a mess outa you Now if you see Saint Annie Please tell her thanks a lot I cannot move My fingers are all in a knot I don't have the strength To get up and take another shot And my best friend, my doctor Won't even say what it is I've got Sweet Melinda The peasants call her the goddess of gloom She speaks good English And she invites you up into her room And you're so kind And careful not to go to her too soon And she takes your voice And leaves you howling at the moon Up on Housing Project Hill It's either fortune or fame You must pick up one or the other Though neither of them are to be what they claim If you're lookin' to get silly You better go back to from where you came Because the cops don't need you And man they expect the same Now all the authorities They just stand around and boast How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms Into leaving his post And picking up Angel who Just arrived here from the coast Who looked so fine at first But left looking just like a ghost I started out on burgundy But soon hit the harder stuff Everybody said they'd stand behind me When the game got rough But the joke was on me There was nobody even there to call my bluff I'm going back to New York City I do believe I've had enough  |
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I've always been a bit skeptical of the people who loathe the low voter participation rates in this country in a vacuum. That is, they think that all other things constant, raising the level of voter registration is necessarily a good thing.
When I was a kid and learned about the Nazis, I sometimes wondered how a whole society could get all whipped up into believing that an ethnic group was the source of so many ills.
A Richardson honcho had to resign in shame (one has to wonder whether working for Richardson is, in fact, less shameful than being forced to resign!) today when it became public that he had some outstanding warrants and had managed a whorehouse.
I hope I'm not becoming one of these artsy fartsy people, but after Michelangelo Antonioni died a few weeks back, I read the obit in the Times and decided to check out some of his movies.It will be a crying shame if the audience that will undoubtedly be attracted to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up because it has been denied a Production Code seal goes looking more for sensual titillation than for the good, solid substance it contains—and therefore will be distracted from recognizing the magnitude of its forest by paying attention to the comparatively few defoliated trees.
This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed. It is vintage Antonioni fortified with a Hitchcock twist, and it is beautifully photographed in color. It opened at the Coronet last night.
It marks a long step for Mr. Antonioni, the Italian director whose style of introspective visualization has featured in all his Italian-language films from L'Avventura through Red Desert, and in all of which Monica Vitti has played what has amounted to a homogeneous gallery of alienated female roles. It is his first film in eight years without Miss Vitti. It is his first major film about a man. And it is his first film made in England and in English (except for one vagrant episode in his three-part I Vinti, made in 1952).
The fellow whose restlessness and groping interests Mr. Antonioni in this new film is a dizzyingly swinging and stylish freelance magazine photographer, whose racing and tearing around London gives a terrifying hint of mania. He can spend a night dressed up like a hobo shooting a layout of stark photographs of derelicts in a flophouse, then jump into his Rolls-Royce open-top and race back to his studio to shoot a layout of fashion models in shiny mod costumes—and do it without changing expression or his filthy, tattered clothes.
He can break off from this preoccupation and go tearing across the city in his car to buy an antique airplane propeller in a junk shop, with virtually the same degree of casualness and whim as he shows when he breaks off from concentrating on a crucial job in his darkroom to have a brief, orgiastic romp with a couple of silly teenage girls.
Everything about this feral fellow is footloose, arrogant, fierce, signifying a tiger—or an incongruously baby-faced lone wolf—stalking his prey in a society for which he seems to have no more concern, no more feeling or understanding than he has for the equipment and props he impulsively breaks. His only identification is with the camera, that trenchant mechanism with which he makes images and graphic fabrications of—what? Truth or Fantasy?
This is what gets him into trouble. One day, while strolling in a park, he makes some candid snaps of a young woman romancing with a man. The young woman, startled, tries to get him to give the unexposed roll of film to her. So nervous and anxious is she that she follows him to his studio. There, because she is fascinated by him and also in order to get the film, she submits to his arrogant seduction and goes away with a roll of film.
But it is not the right roll. He has tricked her, out of idle curiosity, it appears, as to why the girl should be so anxious. How is she involved?
When he develops the right roll and is casually studying the contact prints, he suddenly notices something. (Here comes the Hitchcock twist!) What is that there in the bushes, a few feet away from where the embracing couple are? He starts making blowups of the pictures, switching them around, studying the blow-ups with a magnifying glass. Is it a hand pointing a gun?
There, that is all I'm going to tell you about this uncommon shot of plot into an Antonioni picture—this flash of melodramatic mystery that suddenly presents our fellow with an involvement that should tightly challenge him. I will only say that it allows Mr. Antonioni to find a proper, rueful climax for this theme.
One may have reservations toward this picture. It is redundant and long. There are the usual Antonioni passages of seemingly endless wanderings. The interest may be too much concentrated in the one character, and the symbolistic conclusions may be too romantic for the mood.
It is still a stunning picture—beautifully built up with glowing images and color compositions that get us into the feelings of our man and into the characteristics of the mod world in which he dwells. There is even exciting vitality in the routine business of his using photographs—prints and blow-ups and superimpositions—to bring a thought, a preconception, alive.
And the performing is excellent. David Hemmings as the chap is completely fascinating—languid, self-indulgent, cool, yet expressive of so much frustration. He looks remarkably like Terence Stamp. Vanessa Redgrave is pliant and elusive, seductive yet remote as the girl who has been snapped in the park and is willing to reveal so much—and yet so little—of herself. And Sarah Miles is an interesting suggestion of an empty emotion in a small role.
How a picture as meaningful as this one could be blackballed is hard to understand. Perhaps it is because it is too candid, too uncomfortably disturbing, about the dehumanizing potential of photography.
BLOW-UP (MOVIE)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; written by Mr. Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond, based on a story by Julio Cortázar; cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma; edited by Frank Clarke; music by Herbie Hancock and The Yardbirds; produced by Pierre Rouve and Carlo Ponti; released by Premier Pictures. Running time: 110 minutes.
With: David Hemmings (Thomas), Vanessa Redgrave (Jane), Sarah Miles (Patricia) and Verushka, Jill Kennington, Peggy Moffit, Rosaleen Murray, Ann Norman, and Melanie Hampshire (Models).
I never thought I would see the day when I got rid of my Gillette Mach III razor, but that time has come.
