Yep, we're headed back to Augusta tomorrow for a full-day of shopping, mixed in with a little Five Guys, this bakery that was featured on the Food Channel, and, of course, 2nd and Charles - the main reason for the northern excursion.
Sad to hear about the death of Dick Clark yesterday. Too bad it wasn't Joan Rivers instead.
Julia and I finished up the first, shocking season of Damages yesterday, and I started to wonder. Is it just me, is it just the shows I watch, or are almost all the best shows out there right now those that feature despicable lead characters?
There's Dexter - charming, funny, but a serial killer.
There's Don Draper on Mad Men - an adulterer. Again, charming - and charismatic.
There's Patty Hewes on Damages - grotesque, vile.
Nurse Jackie? Nuts. Another adulterer. Pill-popper too.
Breaking Bad's Walter White? Drug dealer.
Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David? Well...
HBO must have started this trend with The Sopranos.
Photographer #28 on our way to 100...
Stephen Shore
Shore (b. 1948), born in New York city and a resident of upstate New York, was self-taught. Early on, he was influenced by Walker Evans and, more so, Andy Warhol; he hung around Warhol's Factory in the mid-60s. Shore is one of the defining figures in the new color photography movement, a movement that started, critics argue, around 1970 but really hits its stride in the early 1980s. The movement, to be extremely succinct, reductive, and overly simplistic, showed that color photographs of the everyday, of the banal, could be works of art.
Shore's work is firmly in this vein, showing commonplace subject matter - typically found on his long road trips across America - in sparsely-populated places. His formal sense, his serene compositions are widely acclaimed. His work is distinct too: dusty Main Street movie theaters, gas stations, pancakes. His work is deadpan but not distractingly ironic. These aren't postcard pictures, exactly. Rather they ask us questions: What is natural? What does natural look like?
Thanks: http://gregcookland.com/journal/2011/02/24/stephen-shore-speaks/
Let's look at what movies are opening tomorrow:
The Lucky One You gotta love Nicholas Sparks. He's a terrible writer, putridly sentimental and hackneyed, continually recycling the same gunk, but he's one of the best-selling, most wide-read authors in the world. And his books make, at best, pleasing movies; at worst, they're harmless. His newest book to hit the big screen is one that probably had studio heads salivating: "Give me Sparks and give me... Zac Efron!" Do you really need to know what it's about? It ain't gonna be The Notebook, folks! Although I'm curious to see Efron segueing into adult roles.
Darling Companion Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan was kind of a big deal in the 1980s. He co-wrote the screenplays for Raiders of the Lost Ark, a few of the Star Wars movies, and wrote and directed Body Heat, The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, and Grand Canyon. The fact that this is only the third film he's directed since 1995's French Kiss, combined with the fact of an Oscar-kissed cast (Diane Keaton, Kasdan regular Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, Sam Shepard), a cute story about a man who loses the family dog, some lovely Utah settings... Well, I thought it would be a good one. But SURPRISE! A 0% rating on RottenTomatoes. Critics hate it! "Cloying," "annoying," "insufferable characters." Yikes.
Think Like a Man Comedian Steve Harvey wrote a humorous, best-selling nonfiction book a few years ago, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, and now it's been made into a film. Four men date ladies who buy Harvey's book and then take his advice to heart! The cast includes Taraji P. Henson, Regina Hall, Romany Malco, Gabrielle Union, R&B beater Chris Brown, and some NBA stars. I'll pass, but the reviews aren't too bad.
Chimpanzee Disney's latest Earth Day G-rated adventure follows Oscar, a baby chimp, as she makes her way through the African forest. Review-proof, really, these films; impossible to dislike. As a less than 80-minute long documentary, it's supposed to be impressive.
To the Arctic Another Disney documentary, this one a 40-minute, Meryl Streep-narrated portrait of a mother polar bear and her two twin cubs as they try to navigate the Arctic wilderness.
Marley From director Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, The Last King of Scotland) we get a two-and-a-half hour documentary about the late, great Jamaican reggae star, the Rastafarain whose bearded locks and face fuzz still, I'm sure, grace the poster of many a dorm room. Well-reviewed, comprehensive, and full of great, great music.
We are surely in the political season (for worse or for worse) maybe not the full flush of it, but what better time then to recommend some of the best political, non-documentary films around? Here are ten of my picks, all films dealing in some way with American politics and none of them having anything to do with Oliver Stone:
- Milk (2008) : I'm not going to give in to easy sentiment and sat Sean Penn is a jerk. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. What he is is an astonishing actor.
- All the President's Men (1976) : Crackling, exciting, full of good dialogue with wonderful casting in every role, including Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee.
- The Contender (2000) : Sure, it's lurid, and the Republicans are roasted in this spin on "my personal laundry is none of your business," but it's a fun film, with chewy, enjoyable turns by Jeff Bridges and Gary Oldman, and a persuasive, dignified one by Joan Allen.
- Nothing But the Truth (2008) : From the writer-director of The Contender, Rod Lurie, comes this enthralling, sinuously compellingly veiled account of the Judith Miller scandal.
- Frost/Nixon (2008) : Ron Howard did a fine job with the film version of the Tony winner about the dialogue/debates of Nixon (a towering Frank Langella) and British TV personality David Frost (a winning Michael Sheen).
- Good Night and Good Luck (2005) : A tour-de-force from writer-producer-director George Clooney about Edward R. Murrow's conflict with Joseph McCarthy.
- Primary Colors (1998) : John Travolta as Bill Clinton, Emma Thompson as Hillary, fine, fine, fine support from Kathy Bates, Billy Bob Thornton, and Larry Hagman, sturdily directed by Mike Nichols.
- The Manchurian Candidate (1962) : I have mentioned this one a few times in the last couple weeks.
- The Last Supper (1995) : Low-rent fun, jokey and funny - not a classic, but forgettable, ripe, B-movie nastiness. A bunch of liberal grad students (including Cameron Diaz and Courtney B. Vance) invite their right-wing friends over, one by one, and murder them.
- Citizen Ruth (1996) : Long before gifted writer-director Alexander Payne made great films like Sideways, About Schmidt, and The Descendants, he made this funny, crazily energetic comedy about a wayward, confused young woman (a brilliant Laura Dern) in the middle of the abortion wars. Both sides, Payne says, are prone to rampant nuttiness.
150 years ago today, the eternally-great Austrian Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt was born near Vienna. We've all seen a Klimt sometime in our life - those glittery, gold leaf paintings like The Kiss. Let's take a brief look at his 1916 oil painting Death and Life, held in a private collection.
This is arguably one of Klimt's most ambiguous works, allowing for expansive interpretation. I think how you view it tells it whether you lean more towards a glass-half-full view of life or glass-half-empty outlook. For me, it's a little bit of both. I think Klimt is showing that death is always present, always hovering, a real thing. But another way of interpreting it is that life can be lived fully, from generation to generation, without fear, keeping death (or depression or worry or hypochondria) at bay. Make your own inferences.
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