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Some Observations that Go Unobserved.
It is almost 5 AM and inhibitions are loosened, time to fulminate. In 1972 Nixon won handedly over George McGovern, a real war hero, a man, as time has proven, of not inconsiderable integrity. I had grown up with Tricky Dicky during the Fifties, and I was just stunned that this nation put him into office. We are such poor judges of character. A psychopath became President and there are enough learned articles about Nixon to sustain that DSM III diagnosis. Here was Nixon walking beaches fully clothed down to his buttoned cuffs; the always moist upper lip; that deathly…
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Day-Lewis Redux
“There Will Be Blood” has proven a vexing movie for me; my simple test for almost anything literary or cinematic is that it moves me on many different levels, somehow touches my soul. I have concluded that the film is great but like “Citizen Kane” has a coldness to it, although the furnace/sled ending and Hermann’s music forever roasted in me primally — the loss, the abandonment, the agonies of memory forever left to the self and unknown to the world. Sheer heart-rending. Watching Daniel Day-Lewis is like watching a slide into third, legs outstretched, spikes high, going for the…
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“There Will Be Blood”
Since I saw him first in “My Left Foot,” Daniel Day-Lewis has become my favorite actor, Al Pacino a close second. DeNiro is fading fast as he has lost his sure-footing at least in my eyes these past ten years. I recall Olivier’s comment that a good or great actor does it all with his eyes, and his admonition to us is to watch the eyes. I’ve been doing that for some time now and Daniel says quite a bit with his eyes. He does not act, the style of Tracy and Stewart is just different; Brando had it but…
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“Where Do We Go from Here?”
I believe this was the first movie I ever saw as a human being; vaguely, as I recall it, for I saw it in the 40s, a series of episodes in time, from the American Revolution…to…I cannot remember. As we grow older, as we age, the past in a cliche sense becomes starkly clearer — think of Bernstein in “Citizen Kane” talking about the young girl with the white parasol that he saw decades ago and still thinks about her. It is an instinctual imprint, is it not? very primal, and I like primal. I know that after 16 the…