Posted on: January 31, 2009
The Fall
Visually stunning, with a brilliant, imaginative surface, The Fall (2006) is a movie made for polarities. Viewers will love it, hate it, find it exotic and intriguing, shallow and boring, but probably not many things in between. It was made to appeal to the director, Tarsem, it seems. The audience might just have been an afterthought.
It’s the story of a paralyzed stunt man, Roy Walker (Lee Pace), convalescing in Los Angeles, cerca 1915. He meets a five-year-old Romanian girl, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), who is also convalescing there, from a badly broken arm. They strike up a friendship and Roy begins telling her incredible stories of heroes, villains, lost loves and revenge. The fantasy mirrors Roy’s own predicament, though with grandiose proportions, wild scene changes, and obvious mythic elements included. Roy wants to…
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Posted on: January 26, 2009
What you see is often not what you see. In wartime, borders vanish, buildings, people, loyalties, trust. Vanish. Morality, ethics, the truth. Vanish. Not for everyone, at all times. But for many, and for most of the time. The god of ambiguity loves war. Perhaps as much as he loves love. As much as he loves the way people alter their behavior when faced with moral dilemmas. Strife, fear, hatred, betrayal. War feeds all of that. More often than not, we want to see things in black and white, but we really get shades. Or think we do. Blurring, in and out of focus, sharp over here, dull and fuzzy over there.
If war has music, it thunders all too often. It shrieks and rises into crescendos and then tanks. Collapses of its own weight.…
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Posted on: January 24, 2009
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. 1912
Below, we have a new essay by Robert Mueller. He deals with two fine poets, Barbara Guest and Jill Magi, with imagination and verve.
Jill Magi’s author’s page over at Shearsman Books can be found here. Jill’s homepage can be found here.
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The topic of poetic space on the page is an interesting one. How it looks alters our reception and perception. We read it differently to ourselves depending upon topography.
Poetry is both spatial and aural. Traditionally, poetry was heard, not seen, passed down to us from bard to bard, from shaman to shaman, registering across the centuries in the ear, as we imagined the words and their referents with our inner eye. With the advent books, of…
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Posted on: January 23, 2009
Barbara Guest, Now Jill Magi in brevi
by
Robert Mueller
Shearsman Books, which seems to specialize in poets on their way, recently brought out a fine collection of poetry by Jill Magi, her second full volume, titled Torchwood. This collection is assembled uncharacteristically, even for a time when in poetry books great attention is paid to the presentation. For Magi, it started with the patchwork of historical and personal documentation of her earlier volume Threads (Futurepoem, 2007), and is extended here in a sequencing and a selection that are beautifully realized. The poet nurtures a light touch, sometimes a homey touch, and almost always the quick and sure calibration. Challenging and disciplined, her techniques because of…
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Posted on: January 19, 2009
Edgar Allen Poe
It’s Edgar Allen Poe’s 200th birthday! The grandfather (by way of Baudelaire’s translations, among others) of Modern Poetry in English. What would Eliot, Pound and Yeats have been without the man whose ghost I once saw at UVA? Would there have been a Symbolist Movement without him?
His last poetic composition, written in 1849:
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the
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Posted on: January 17, 2009
Appaloosa
One of the great things about watching DVDs is the chance to see the film-making process in action, to hear the directors and stars, to go over again what they cut out and why. In several cases, the best perhaps being Blade Runner, additional scenes, deleted scenes, make the film stronger when included. Generally, the deletions occur because of time constraints, though directors often say they cut the scene because it hurt the flow. My guess is that in many cases they really don’t want to admit that they had to conform to theater guidelines and general population tastes, to our short-attention-span culture. In the case of Appaloosa, the theatrical release was nearly two hours, so they must have felt more scenes would have pushed the limits.
But the film itself would have been…
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