Two old movies (Review)

The Accidental Tourist (1988) [D: Lawrence Kasdan. William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis] Macon writes travel guides for people who have to travel, and don’t really want to leave the comforts of their American home(s). His son was killed during a robbery, and he has been unable to come to terms with his grief. His wife Sarah asks for a divorce and leaves. When Macon takes his badly behaved dog to a kennel for boarding while he’s on his next assignment, he meets Muriel, who offers to train the dog. She has a son. Macon moves in with her. Eventually, Macon has to choose between the two women, and chooses Muriel. Along the way, Macon’s sister Rose meets Julian, Macon’s publisher, who falls for her. That ends with a happy marriage.

    Obviously, this is a romantic comedy, but it’s not the kind that indulges in farcical or physical humour.  The movie is slow, languid, low-key, it has the feel of one damn thing after another. Anne Tyler wrote the book; based on the few of her things I’ve read, the movie seems a faithful reproduction of her tone. Tyler is interested in the ways in which people manage to eke out some sort of happiness in lives beset with bad luck, pain, stifling habits, obligations to exasperating people, the vagaries of emotion, and the desire for connection. It dragged a bit here and there, but despite that seemed shorter than its two hours.
     There’s a lot of incident and incidental social comedy. Although set in Baltimore, it feels like a New England movie: the characters seem afraid of acknowledging their feelings, let alone expressing them. It’s Muriel’s unapologetic need for pleasure and purpose, not to say any scraps of casual income she can gather, that propels the story. Without her, Sarah and Macon would have divorced without coming up from under their stifling grief, or  understanding how and why their marriage is over. The cliche descriptor is “bitter sweet.” It fits, which might make you think the movie is a cliche, too, but it’s not. It’s one of those quiet little stories that sticks in your mind, and you don’t quite know why. ***


Crossing Delancey (1988) [D: Joan Micklin. Amy Irving, Peter Riegert] Another romantic comedy, one of many that show how one of the partners is mistaken about how to live his or her life, and must be rescued from a fate amounting to death by a wooer who appears to be everything but the right one. In this case, it’s Isabelle, a 30-something New Yorker in the book business, who has deluded herself, and Sam Posner, a third generation pickle seller, who must persist until he has won her. Isabelle’s infatuation with Anton Maes, a third-rate poet, distracts her into believing she wants an intellectual life. Then Sam tells that he saw her three years before, and he only agreed to allow a matchmaker to set him up with Isabelle because he’s been thinking about her ever since. This confession sparks an interest that slowly but surely grows into the kind of comforting passion that spells happy ever after.
     Nicely done, this movie was a pleasure to watch. I’m a sucker for romance, especially the kind where a Knight (Sam) rescues a Maiden (Isabelle) from a Dragon (Anton). ***

Politics & money

     No, this won't be a rant about how much influence the moneyed have on politics. The only rant is this sentence:

"Politics is driven by misconceptions about money and wealth."

     Too many people think that money is wealth, and that therefore it should be hoarded. The phrase we use is "saving money", which makes hoarding money sound like a virtue. It's not. Our ancestors knew that: the money hoarder is a miser, a miserable Scrooge.
    Money is not wealth. Wealth is goods and services. Money and wealth flow in opposite directions: When I give you a $10 bill for a dozen used books at your yard sale, I have a dozen used books, and you have a $10 bill. You can now exchange that for something you think is worth $10, say a small roast and some mushrooms, from which you will make yourself a stew. The owner of the grocery store can use the $10 to pay an employee. Eventually, that $10 bill could show up in the hands of a neighbour who wants to buy a dozen used books from me at my yard sale. In the meantime, it has enabled a great deal of trading of wealth.

      If I hang onto the $10 bill because I think it's wealth, then you can't sell me your used books, and you can't buy the stew meat and mushrooms, and the grocery store owner will have to get $10 from someone else, and so on. Money is only good for one thing: spending. As long as people spend money, wealth will be traded. More than that: wealth will be created, because people want to trade it.
     In Cabaret, the MC sings "Money makes the world go around." Yes it does. Of course, we don't really need money, we could barter directly, or use IOUs, but money makes it much easier to trade with each other. Trading distributes wealth, which is a good thing. If we couldn't trade our wealth, if we couldn't make wealth to trade, we would each one of us have to find what we needed to survive. Just like the animals who don't have any notion of creating or trading what they need.
     Money makes it easier to share the wealth. That's all.

More trees

Here are the most recent tree photos, posted later than planned. This is a view from our bedroom balcony.

Russian olive in front yard. Both pictures were taken on March 3, the day we had planned to drive to Toronto, but the heavy snow made the highways too risky.

Trees (Photos of)

Here are a couple of my photos of trees, made back in the days of black and white film. In the darkroom, I fiddled with contrast and range by selecting paper and controlling exposure and development. Now, I just move sliders on a tool pane. The trees hugging each other have survived. I will post the most recent photo tomorrow. If you like these pictures, leave a comment.

The Book of Bunny Suicides

Andy Riley The Book of Bunny Suicides (2003) Cartoons illustrating the title theme. Some are bizarre and gruesome (a bunny jumps into a colander, the rock at the other end of the see-saw flips on top of it, it’s reduced to bunny noodles), others merely bizarre (a bunny sits on a bobsled run reading the paper while a four-man sled hurtles down on it), some are just funny (a bunny has attached dynamite to the leaning Tower of Pisa, and is about to depress the plunger). I have no idea how bunny lovers would react to this book. Oh wait, I’m a bunny lover, and I thought this book was funny. Ok, mildly amusing: the joke wears off about half way through. **-½

The Best of Poul Anderson (Book Review)

     Malzberg, Barry ed. The Best of Poul Anderson (1976) Anderson (1926-2001) was a gifted and prolific SF writer, whose need to make a living made much of his work formulaic. But he was a master at playing with formula and cliche, and his stories range from satire to tragedy. He was a pioneer in the development of "future history", a concept that morphed into something like a movement in the 1950s-70s (see Asimov's Foundation series, or Herbert's Dune) and is now an SF cliche. He liked to set stories in the past as well, finding great inspiration in the medieval romance (which he both parodied and emulated). He tried, and succeeded at, every SF form and genre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson provides a well-done overview.
     Anderson was an economic libertarian, but with an acute sense of the paradoxes and contradictions of the free-market economics he espoused. He disliked hypocrisy, and many of his stories have political or moral/ethical themes. He liked swashbuckling, too, and had a rather ambivalent attitude towards women, whom he often presents as sex objects, albeit usually as tough, intelligent, and resourceful as the men. His books and stories are fun to read when you are in the mood for fantasy or hard SF. He's very good at plotting a story around a technical problem, and making us care that the protagonists get it right. Like a surprising number of his contemporaries, his most common mood is elegiac, even in the tales of the Polysotechnic League, which are essentially space-operas. Technology cannot protect us from the loss of friends and lovers, nor can it make freedom and justice any more likely. Freedom must be taken and defended. Justice depends on individual choice and action, not on systems and protocols.
     In essence, Anderson sees the future pretty much as a variation on the present: people are people, and none of us is perfect. Many of his tales are thinly veiled satires on the present, which he saw as lacking in honour, generosity, scholarship, courage, and various other of the masculine and chivalric virtues.
     A common motif in his stories is the under-estimated underdog. Sometimes a rascal, sometimes an uncouth peon, sometimes an apparently primitive alien, sometimes an apparently weak human on an alien world, but always someone whom the antagonist sees as less than what he is. The underdog wins by means of his wit and insight into his supposed superior's weaknesses. Anderson likes to show that a presumed superiority based on social status, academic learning, political power, bureaucratic process, or other social constructs, is in the long run a guarantee of failure. It's your character, your virtues, and your skills that ensure your success.
     I 've actually started re-reading this book, which will explain why I rate it at **1/2 to ****.

Digital Crops

 White iris

Red poppy

These images were made by repeatedly enlarging and cropping an image. I like the abstract patterns made by the pixels.

Collages

Revelation 1985

Time is money 1975

Pharaoh 1980

Venus 2009

I've made many collages over the years. One can juxtapose images, and experiment with pattern or form, and play with colour harmonies and contrasts. Content, form, and colour do affect each other, I think. I'm in two minds about titles. They tend to be corny, but also suggest a meaning. They may even impose an interpretation, because many viewers want to know what the artist "had in mind", or "what the pictures means".

I'm not sure what I had in mind for "Revelation". It's actually half a collage which I thought was too large and complicated. so I cut it apart. The other half included a portrait of Freud. So there's a clue. Maybe artworks should be labelled and numbered, the way most music is.

Update: 2025-07-29: I use markers and/or or water colour on some of my collages. which I suppose should be labelled "Collage and mixed media".

Art blog link

http://blog.drawn.ca/

Try it, you'll like it. ;-)

Politics: What else is new?

     The Harper government is being noticed. It's not only Bill C-19, renamed the "Protecting Children from Internet Predator's Act", but in fact a blatant attempt to enable spying by the government on us, the citizens who employ it. Now a Boing-Boing contributor has noticed another Harper government attempt to control the spread of information that we, the taxpayers, have paid for. Here's Boing-Boing's note. I guess the Harper government worries that the more we know, the less we will believe Harper government propaganda. As if that were possible.
     Have a good sleep.