1973. Directed by Orson Welles. Orson Welles opens and closes his final film with magic tricks, in part to show us that we can be fooled for our own enjoyment, that we welcome illusions if we willingly participate in them, but also to associate those harmless tricks with the perils of trust. After all — he reminds us at the end — at the start of the film he promised he would absolutely tell the truth for the next hour, then notes that the hour was up long before the end of the film. The question at the heart of …
About the When I Stop Dreaming blog
Movie Review: Sin Nombre
2009. Starring Edgar Flores and Paulina Gaitan. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. The right-wing outrage over illegal immigration — like its outrage over nearly every issue — purposefully avoids consideration of the human lives at the heart of the debate. There is even a trend to refer to illegal immigrants as “illegals,” so as to remove any reference to the humanity of the desperate people involved. Ignoring the vulnerable souls behind a painful and difficult decision must help when you want to demonize and demagogue. What Sin Nombre forces you to do, from its beginning, is to consider the circumstances of …
Movie Review: Adventureland
2009. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart. Directed by Greg Mottola. Why do boys and girls in America have such a sad time together? (You can ask the Hold Steady, but I doubt it involves John Berryman.) I don’t think I’ll ever see a coming-of-age movie that explains why teenage love is misery. Maybe it’s not possible — I don’t know if I can lose myself in someone else’s story, like this very noble effort by writer-director Greg Mottola. The events in this movie mean a lot to him, and you just hope, as you begin to invest the time and …
Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds
2009. Starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. The lady who handed me my ticket asked me, why do they call them “Inglourious Basterds”? I knew there was a 1970s movie with the same name, but I wasn’t completely sure whether this was one of those Tarantino homages — like how his film company is named A Band Apart, or how Sonny Chiba appears in Kill Bill as a past-his-prime samurai sword artisan. So I muttered, I don’t know, I haven’t seen the movie yet — maybe they’re like the Dirty Dozen? I wasn’t too far off. The …
Passings: Les Paul
You know that you’re a success when your name is used to represent your creation and, in the same breath, endows in it a sense of quality and authenticity. I’m going to defer to the many guitarists who are mourning the 94-year-old Les Paul online today, who love what he created and did with his life — they are better than I am at describing how his work changed the world. But I want to acknowledge the passing of this man and what he accomplished. By all accounts, a master with a guitar in his hands, Lester Polfus didn’t settle …
Movie Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2007. Starring Casey Affleck, Brad Pitt, Sam Rockwell. Directed by Andrew Dominik. A film that announces its conclusion in the title promises to cast the events through some very subjective filters. The legend of Jesse James, I’m sure, is known by most people much like it’s sung by a barroom busker (nice cameo, Nick Cave), mistakenly crediting Jesse with stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He also gets the number of Jesse’s kids wrong. But it doesn’t matter, because legends are legends, and as John Ford taught us in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when the …
Year Two
Today marks the first day of my second year without a job. I don’t get tired of saying that it’s not so bad — every day is like that laundry day you add to the end of a long vacation. The biggest hit has been to my savings, but I figure that if the period spent rescuing my self-esteem while mourning my father wasn’t a “rainy day,” I’d never save enough for a real downpour. Back in the dark days, coming home from another unrewarding day at the office, that Bright Eyes song would always drift into my head. Especially, …
Movie Review: Gran Torino
2008. Starring Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood has become of those actors whom you cannot pretend is a character not named Clint Eastwood. It happened to John Wayne and Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart. But a good role can overcome that curse. As Walt Kowalski, the perfectly-named working-class bigot next door, Eastwood more or less succeeds in creating a believable character through his trademark squint and a variety of grunts. Walt Kowalski lives in a modest house in a changing neighborhood that used to be his, having retired from an auto industry that …
In My Day: The Young Pup and Air Conditioning
On my birthday this year, a slightly older lady referred to me as a “young pup,” which proves that everything is relative. However young a pup I might be, I fight the urge every day to proclaim that the best days are behind us. It seems that the effort and time required by nearly everything in the past has taken on a golden glow as I look back through the filter of 48 years. All that’s keeping me from geezerhood is the lack of someone who’ll listen to my observations. That’s, in part, why I blog. The NYT has an …
Passings: Walter Cronkite
I am sad to learn of Walter Cronkite’s passing this evening. He lived to be 92 — quite an achievement — but he seems like the last of a dying breed. When I was growing up, he was the voice of authority. Hard to imagine in these hyper-partisan days, but he was an anchorman whose outlook you didn’t question — if he said so, it was so. The assassination of President Kennedy was bad enough until Walter took off his glasses to announce his death, then you couldn’t do anything but lose it. Because it was so. 1968 probably changed …