Hope to see you there.

David Adam Richards’ Lost Highway (not to be confused with what I found to be one of David Lynch’s weakest films) is a masterpiece. Its sort of an upscale version of A Simple Plan. Things just go wronger. Essentially good, if misguided men, find themselves more than contemplating evil acts. In this case, it is the lost high way.

Richards is without a doubt one of Canada’s, and by extension, the world’s great novelists. His style runs that same form of realism of Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies and John Irving. And though his mastery of all the basic elements of storytelling would be enough to set him apart, what really distinguishes him is his selection of characters. He writes of a place, and thus has been often compared to Faulkner, and it is a place of rural roughness, of people poor. What also is special about his stories is that they are miserable yet enthralling, depressing page turners. It is not uncommon to find people devoted to undermining others to no personal advantage; its just what they do, and they will do it for generations.

The Lost Highway is very good, and so is Mercy Among the Children and River of the Brokenhearted.

And also in the lost files, author of Book of Lost Things, John Connolly writes on his blog of the never ending dismissal of genre writing, this time taking place at a place where it shouldn’t, which might in fact be the Harbour festival in Toronto.

A young American novelist, one whom I can only hope was drunk at the time, commences a spectacularly ignorant attack on genre fiction. Even allowing for any possible intake of alcohol, she is quite stunningly rude. Her basic argument, if I understand it correctly, is that mystery fiction works according to a basic template: in her immortal words, “something happens …”

Once I have managed to lock my jaw back into place, I try to follow her argument to its logical conclusion. If the criticism of mystery fiction is that something happens, then the defence of her particular brand of literary fiction must be that nothing happens. I try to recall the last time I enjoyed a narrative in which nothing happened, and, eventually, admit failure. Even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (a play of which it was famously remarked that nothing happens – twice) is full of incident, and that is as close as I can get to an apparently uneventful narrative that works.

Some just stay lost it seems…and while we are on the topic of genre fiction, keep an eye out for this one:

My first real German mystery/thriller. One of my all time favourites is the Berlin Noir trilogy by Phillip Kerr but he wasn’t quite German. Christian Von Ditfurth who is a German historian has written a number of books featuring the bepained (he suffers from some sort of arthritis) Stachelmann who is one of those happenstance investigators, an academic who as an expert on Nazi history becomes a resource for his friend in the homicide department when a case comes up which may be rooted in the past. and that particular murky past.

Many mystery characters are self doubting but Stachelmann takes it to another level. Though hardly physically prepossessing, he is near fearless in the hunt, but in his everyday existence he is an academic who feels himself a terrible fraud, and believes that he will be found out soon. This book is the first, and the only one translated to date so I don’t know where that theme is taken. But if not a great book, it is a very good one, and the history is as one would suspect, very well done.

If subjects are told for the purposes of experiment that they will face a lonely future, they score lower on intelligence tests and abandon tasks sooner. If cookies are set before subjects who have been told that no one else in the experiment wants to work with them, they eat twice as many as those who have been told that everyone else in the experiment wants to work with them.

I’ve always argued against the idiocy of half the ethics guidelines but this seems a good case for a query. Its not hard to imagine a long lasting, let’s say a haunting continuing echo, of a directive that you are lonely and will die alone in your apartment, your body not being discovered for days, and possibly being partially eaten by cats.

And in other health related news…

This courtesy of InventorSpot
…the shopping cart wash…capitalizing on all the germophobes out there.

You gotta end with something good…great animal portrait from the best nature photography of the year at NationalGeographic

Yes.

So I am watching this film which is not quite coming together but I’m patient and think it may be tricky but it will all work out in the end. The actors are great, the scenes are good, the film is beautiful to watch. And then there comes this moment of dread where I turn and say “if it ends here I will be really pissed off” and of course it does.

Try as I might I could not get this narrative to make sense. And the annoyance was compounded by the fact that I liked everything else about it.

The basic idea is that a woman suggests to a man that he might be better off without his mustache. He shaves if off and then no one seems to notice, then he finds that everyone believes that he never had a mustache. And then its a case of him trying to prove it. (He does have proof in the form of earlier photographs and his last passport but for some reason this is never brought out - kind of the sitcom driver of there would be no plot if people had just exchanged the most logical sentence early on). Then we are tantalized with his world possibly crumbling, him going mad, and then possibly he’s fine but his wife is mad, and so forth, and even a jaunt off to Hong Kong.

Now I don’t mind ambiguity (loved Unbreakable) or complexity but it all has to come together. And this film just doesn’t.

So of course there are the extras: an interview with the director/writer, Emmanuel Carrere and editor, Camille Cotte. It becomes apparent that they removed essential scenes and deliberately made obscure certain elements. They then crowed about the fact that necessary information was missing and that this made the film have ghosts, and how wonderful was that? It reminded me most of what a friend once said about The Five Obstructions as a film in which, though enjoyable, two directors mentally jerk each other off…kind of an obscene mutual admiration society…and in this case listening to these two talk about how they had deliberately obfuscated a good story, how they trumpeted about their obvious failures as tellers and supposedly transforming their ludicrous choices into some sort of triumphant fog, I could only think they had their heads so far up each others asses that any mustache would have been arguable.

It all reminded me of the worst of those French experimental novels of a few decades ago.

Nonetheless, if you can contrive to be suddenly called away to some kind of emergency about five minutes before this film ends, you will think you missed the finish of a great movie.

(My appreciation comes late and was not particularly twigged with his role in Jamon Jamon: A Tale of Ham and Passion, though the title is almost worth the admission…had to see that having just come back from Madrid and various ham emporia, and the first hand knowledge of the Iberian love of the pig on the plate).

Goya’s Ghosts

In Goya’s Ghosts, Bardem plays a priest who under duress abandons the Spanish Inquisition, running off to France and returning with the French invaders. It gets much more complicated than that. He plays someone who comes to enlightment but attains amorality in the bargain. He’s good but a real pleasure here is the oddity of Stellan Skarsgaard as Goya (I think he does well but its kind of like Sean Connery where he is always Sean Connery; I do have a great deal of respect for Skarsgaard and found him to be astonishingly visceral and brutally charismatic in King Arthur). And Nathalie Portman.

The intriguing thing about Portman’s role as as a young girl taken by the Inquisition and imprisoned for years is that when she is finally out, wandering destitute, her family slaughtered by the same forces that liberated her, is that she remains somewhat disfigured by her time there.

In near any Hollywood film she would have been cleaned up, her teeth fixed, but she wanders the rest of the film, a slovenly shamble.

The Sea Inside

The Sea Inside is similar to Diving Bell and Butterfly with a bedridden main character. Bardem plays a man who has been paralyzed for decades and petitions the state for the right to die. Its a true story and the rendition is both moving and unsentimental. This is a man who was loved, who entertained those around him, who was essentially cheerful but never lost the desire to lose the burden of his life.

If you get the dvd, check the extras for interviews with Bardem on his preparation for the role, and the details of the filming process, the work to keep dynamic a film about someone lying around in bed. They succeeded in creating a lively film which did not shut out the world.

Before Night Falls

In Before Night Falls,  Bardem plays the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Its based on his memoir of the same title, and this film together with these others is what for me cemented my feeling that Bardem is one of the great actors of our time.

The story is about a gay artist in revolutionary Cuba who finally makes his way to New York City. Its a film about the losing and gaining of liberties, of life under oppression, of unfairness yet interwoven with moments of true joy. But Bardem does seem to get more than his share of death scenes; there are more than a few correspondences between this and Sea Inside. I wouldn’t recommend watching them on the same night.

Julian Schnabel who also directed Diving Bell and Butterfly helmed this film and its incredible that an American director could have made that film and this. This film, which is one of the most beautiful and authentic films I have ever seen, is also utterly Latin American. It has occasional elements of the documentary, and just seems to revel in the scenes of Cuba in a way that feels indigenous. This film is, as they say, a revelation.

Now I have to go back and see Bardem in Collateral again (and I do not mind that at all), as well as hunting down the Schnabels I haven’t seen yet.

And finally, I had the sudden thought that Bardem would be perfect to play Buster Keaton.  Why has there not been a biopic of this man?

I would also like to put in my vote for Bardem to play the next Bond villain.  Now that Bond has become the rational and cold part of the equation, the villains can be the lively ones, ergo Bardem.  (My first choice was Juan Valdez but I understand that he has retired from acting).

Previous ruminations on Bardem
Vicky Christina Barcelona
Books, happiness, learning Spanish and bad haircuts

Via OddityCentral comes this most remarkable thing. The people above are listening to the sounds of their city, Dresden, during World War 2. Developed by Markus Kison, the sound is not produced by speakers, it does not make its way through the air but is transmitted through metal. Placing your elbows on the railing and palms over your ears will bring the sound to you.

I can only imagine this to be surreal but deeply moving. To hear the past superimposed over the present.

Video from TED, (via WebUrbanist) Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures….science and art, and above all, amazement.