Two Movies

I like movies, and sometimes watch one twice or even three times. Here's two we watched in March of this year.

    High Noon (1952) [D: Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly] This is one of the classics that holds up. If anything, it gets better every time I see it. Simple story of a sheriff who decides on his wedding day that he has to finish a job he started when he arrested a killer, who has been released, and is coming back for revenge. The one man who is willing to help pulls out when he finds out he’s the only one. The townsfolk back off from risking their lives, unwilling to accept that the killer and his cronies will destroy the town if they win. Cooper wins of course, and rides off with his bride, no doubt happy to leave the town to stew in its cowardice.
   The movie’s a fable, but it’s an unobtrusive one. The pace, the beautifully composed shots, the wonderful tonality of the black and white film, the use of natural sound, the haunting theme music, the conceit of making the movie exactly as long as the sheriff’s job, the desolation surrounding the town, the well-realised characters, all these combine to tell an astonishingly believable story. I’ve seen this movie at least three times that I can recall; I do not tire of it. ****

The movie is adapted from a short story The Tin Star. See my disussion of it at https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2014/08/john-cunningham-tin-star-colliers.html

   The American President (1995) [D: Rob Reiner. Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Michael J. Fox, Martin Sheen.] A love fantasy set in the White House, where widowed president Andrew Shepherd woos lobbyist Sidney Ellen Wade, while dealing with a reelection campaign. The plot is convoluted enough that a short summary is impossible, but the main line is clear enough: Boy meets girl, boy and girl have an affair, boy almost loses girl, boy and girl wed and live happily ever after. Well acted, competently paced and photographed, with just enough cliches bent off-kilter to provide freshness: we enjoyed this movie. Romantic love always gets me. I want to believe that everybody can be happy. The political games are well handled, too, and while they avoid getting too deep into the dirt and stay well away from the dark side, they feel true enough to make us believe the threats to Andrew and Sidney’s happiness, and how they resolve the ethical questions surrounding their relationship. **-½

Murder in the Napa Valley: Bitter Finish by Linda Barnes

Linda Barnes. Bitter Finish (1983) Michael Spragge, scion of a rich Boston clan, actor, sometime P.I., partner in a California winery, answers a summons for help from his business partner and sometime lover. The winemaker has gone missing. A nearly headless corpse found in a derelict car on the winery estate isn’t him. Etc and so on and so forth.
     The book’s an almost page-turner, a mildly amusing entertainment, one of Barnes’ first attempts at a crime series, reissued when her value as a crime writer rose high enough. She followed up the Spraggue series with ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle, a better imagined character. *½

Homo musicis: Why humans make music

Daniel Levitin. This is Your Brain on Music (2006) Levitin was in the music business in LA for many years, but discovered a yen for understanding what it was all about. So he became a neurologist, believing that understanding how the brain works when we make or respond to music would explain it all. It doesn’t, but it comes close.
     Music is species-specific behaviour: only humans make music.We could label oursleves homo musicis. Other animals use sounds for communication and for courtship displays, but none, as far as we can tell, play around with sound-sequences like we do. Not even whales.
     Every known culture and society has music. The three features of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. What’s interesting is how we perceive them. Rhythm is built on sequences of strong and weak beats. We recognise the same rhythm whether played fast or slow. Melody is a sequence of intervals, not notes: we recognise the same melody whether played with higher or lower notes. Harmony in the sense of timbre is omni-present: human voices and all musical instruments generate different combinations of overtones in addition to the main tone. Think of chords as deliberately created and controlled overtone groups. Then a melody becomes a sequence of chords combined with a rhythm. By the way, a melody can be played with different rhythms. And in every culture, music and dance are connected. You can’t have one without the other. (The Western habit of suppressing movement while listening to a performance is a relatively short-lived aberration.)
     Levitin sees two puzzles: First, how do we perceive and produce music? Second, how come music is such an apparently necessary part of human experience? Even people who are tone-deaf experience music as more or less pleasurable. Neurology provides some of the answers. Every part of the brain is involved when we make or listen to music. The cerebellum controls repetitive movements. The cortex plans them, and generates expectations. The limbic system supplies both the memory and the emotions. (It’s unclear just how many melodies we can recognise, for most of us it’s in the hundreds.) The auditory system decodes the complex wave-forms of the sounds of music, and delivers the results to other areas of the brain that recognise melody, rhythm, harmony, and the words of a song. Music is intimately connected with movement and language.
     We use music to build community. Although we can make it a solitary pursuit, it is first and foremost a collective one. We sing together, we dance together, we make music in groups. We prefer the music of our ingroup. Music is part of our courtship behaviour. It persists in our memories after dementia has destroyed almost every other part of our selves. A fragment of a song will trigger memories, and the emotions that accompany them. Music is such a pervasive part of our individual and collective experience that we take it for granted, and hardly realise how much it shapes our lives.
     As you can see, it’s complicated. Levitin has become a premier researcher in the neurology of music. Every result raises new questions. This book is now 14 years old, and recent work on questions of consciousness, mental health, the role of emotions, dementia, etc, have superseded some of his insights, but on the whole I think it’s an excellent introduction to music as a human endeavour. Levitin is an academic, so he tends to pile on the details, but that’s the only flaw in a very good book. Recommended. ***

Photos lead to murder (Snapshot, Linda Barnes 1963)

Linda Barnes. Snapshot (1993) PI Carlotta Carlyle takes on a job to investigate the circs around a beloved child’s death. Someone steals her garbage cans. A nurse is found murdered. Some creep makes friends with Paolina. And so it goes, in a well-plotted tale with a satisfying conclusion and enough detail and ambience to keep our disbelief agreeably suspended. Carlotta gets her garbage cans back, too.
      Found this Carlyle novel at the food bank’s permanent yard sale, if I find any more, I’ll read them too. **½

Boston Irish with Dreams: A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes

Linda Barnes. A Trouble of Fools (1987) The fools are a bunch of Boston Irish cabbies with delusory dreams of reviving the Irish troubles and shoving the Brits out of Ireland. These dreams entangle them in an illicit local enterprise. Carlotta Carlyle, ex-cop and near-indigent P.I., stumbles on the mess when the sister of one of the cabbies asks her to find her missing brother. An FBI sting attempt designed to flush out a drug dealer complicates matters. Carlyle’s private life doesn’t help much, either. Her stint as a cabbie does help, and all’s well that ends well. Almost: the missing brother does turn up, dead at the bottom of the harbour. But we knew something like that would happen.
     A briskly written and plotted entertainment. Carlyle isn’t quite up to the standard of Kinsey Milhone et al, but she plays in the same league. **½

Wexford and Burden monitor a Rock Concert. A corpse spoils the party.

 Some Lie and Some Die (1973) A Rock Concert near Kingsmarkham attracts tens of thousand of (mostly) young people. On the last day, a pair of lovers discover a badly battered body in the small quarry on the edge of the estate. Wexford and Burden use their usual mix of dogged police work (mostly done by coppers off stage), intuition, and psychological insight. We learn a few more details of their back stories (Burden is a widower, Wexford is edging towards retirement), but on the whole this is a potboiler. It feels as if it’s perhaps adapted from another story idea, since it features Rendell’s interest is psycho-pathology. A good quick read, but not her best Wexford. **
    Ruth Rendell.

Post-election comments II

 A comment on my 2015 pre-election musings:

The only prediction in that 2015 post that turned out to be valid is implied in the last sentence. Harper managed to keep the far right and centre right together. Andrew Scheer couldn't do that. The attack on his leadership came from the far right.

Two elections later: Trudeau enjoyed a majority from 2015 to 2019, and now must manage with a minority. The Conservatives are the official opposition, but the deep fault lines between the centre right and the far right in that party have become visible in the attack on Andrew Scheer. They will co-operate or abstain on issues with broad public support, and will reiterate their tax-cutting mantras.

The Greens don't have enough votes to make a difference, but Trudeau will certainly co-opt them for good optics whenever he can. The Bloc Quebecois and the NDP have little common policy, and so will bargain for different goodies. At some point, both will tire of the game, and one or the other will trigger an election when they think the polls show an advantage for them.

This will not be a minority government that will do much for most of us. We Canadians are centre-left, but we've caiught the anti-tax infection from south of the border. This government will try to woo the West, risking loss of support in the rest of Canada (which is getting rather tired of Alberta whinging because  its economy has declined to only slightly better than the rest of the country). A past politician observed that Canada has too much geography. True. And that's what makes it difficult to govern.