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Word of the day : oriflamme : a banner, symbol, or ideal inspiring devotion or courage

Howdy, readers! Enjoying the Olympics? Me too. Just not the piss-poor coverage of it by NBC.

Who was born today?

Why, Mata Hari was.

Mata Hari was just the stage name of a Dutch prostitute and exotic dancer by the name of Gertrude Margarete Zelle. Born in the Netherlands, Gelle was brought up in a rather well-to-do family before attending a teachers' college and then marrying a captain in the Dutch army; the two lived abroad in Java and Sumatra at the turn of the 20th century. When they returned to Europe, they separated.

At that point, Zelle took to the stage in Paris, becoming the Mata Hari. She became quite famous and very risque, often appearing nude; she had many lovers!

From here on, the details get vague and have never been particularly clear. At some point, she went to the Hague and was reputedly paid in cash by a German consul to spy obtain information on the French. Later, she even claimed that she was a French spy, her goal to gather information when she was in Belgium (which Germany occupied at the time.) She might have been, hence, a double agent!
The British found out about her arrangements with the Germans to spy on the French, and they promptly reported it to France. She was arrested in 1917 and put before a firing squad. Her sentence was carried out in October of that year in Vincennes, near Paris.

Today, her name is eponymous with deceit and espionage. Whether or not she was an actual spy... who knows?

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Brief Reviews

(Film)

American Reunion (2012) is the fourth entry in the raunchily popular series. All the guys (Jason Biggs, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Chris Klein, Eddie Kay Thomas, and, as slobberingly spirited as ever, Seann William Scott) are back, now in their early thirties and attending their 13-year (?) high school reunion. All of them, with the exception of Scott's Stifler, are dealing with the realities of adulthood, but that doesn't necessarily squelch the possibilities of a weekend filled with temptation, inappropriate loves, busty chicks, regrets, and ecstasy. The formula - sex, sex, sex, - still works and Eugene Levy, as Biggs' dad, is still funny in his most iconic role.
(***)

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) is more of the same too, though, likewise, it isn't necessarily a bad thing. The respective stars of the first two wildly-popular films, Katie and her sister Kristi, are back here, this time in 1988, where we see them as little girls, living with their (ill-fated) mom and her boyfriend, a VCR junkie who, convinced that there are things going bump in the night, riggs up a few cameras (including, in the movie's niftiest new invention, a camera set atop an oscillating fan that rotates back and forth between the kitchen and living room) to record any spectral activity. Some big scares - including a marvelous set piece with a sheet-covered ghost, and another one with missing furniture - and a well-maintained level of anxiety, though if you really start to think about it, none of it makes much sense in terms of the chronology of the overall series story and the ending is a letdown.
(***)

The Bang Bang Club (2011) is a true story about four combat photographers who constantly placed themselves in danger by shooting the violence that accompanied the end of apartheid in the early 1990s in South Africa. It's a vivid, well-shot film, often harrowing and tense, and although it wasn't always the most informative of features - you might ask yourself who is fighting whom and why and who exactly the bad guys are - I cared enough about the characters, especially Ryan Phillippe's Greg Marinovich and Taylor Kitsch's Kevin Carter (both of whom would go on to win Pulitzers for their work), that I was able to enjoy the film. The South African accents are tough, though. Malin Akerman gives a likable, winning performance as the group's photo's editor. It's based on the book by Marinovich and fellow Banger Joao Silva, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots From a Hidden War.
(***)

(Books)

My first ever Jim Thompson book, The Killer Inside Me (1952), gave me pretty much what I expected from the crime king: brutal, unsparing violence, sex, humor, a barren landscape full of rotten, insidious, conniving characters. Lou Ford is a folksy, easygoing sheriff with a deep, long-buried urge to kill, but in this book he pretty much starts whacking everyone, including his fiancee-to-be. Will he be caught? Thompson's spare, conversational style is infectious, and if nasty is your thing, you'll dig this, as I did. It hasn't aged too badly.
(***1/2)

My first Joyce Cary novel, Mister Johnson (1939), which is still occasionally taught in high school, was a disappointment. In colonial Nigeria, the titular native clerk, who feels closer to the ruling British than he does his fellow Nigerians, stumbles and bumbles, with quickly grating effervescence and misplaced good nature, along, encouraging his boss to steal money to build a road, borrowing money from various creditors and never paying them back, and, finally, at the end, killing a shopkeeper. I got the various points Cary was making - that no one can escape the snares of officialdom, that whites and blacks just don't mix - but Johnson was one of the most annoying characters I've ever come across. It's regarded as something as a classic, but I beg to differ - it's racist and badly dated, although it is based on the author's own experiences in Nigeria.
(**1/2)

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Today's entry in the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time?

Marlon Brando
as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972)

It's as iconic a role in the history of cinema, a fact that unfortunately obscures what a bold, unique feat of character acting it is by arguably the greatest, mos talented actor in the history of movies. Stuffing his mouth with cotton balls, doing his own makeup, and blithely rubbing his cheek to suggest the quiet, implied, almost rhythmic power of a patriarch, Brando is both funny and electrifying, mumbling and hovering over the proceedings with a calm, watchful power, playing a man much older than the actor was at the time. You simply can not take your eyes off him.

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Finally, Grandma Moses was born on this date in 1860. She was a self-taught artist who came gained fame very late in her life, riding the country's newfound interest in naive, folk art. She was a pleasant painter, her works often just what they appeared to be.