Posted on: April 26, 2010
Summer Hours, directed by Olivier Assayas. 2008
Real lasting beauty is rare in this world. Beauty with a foundation, with potential for lasting traditions for generations to come is rare. When you find those things, when you’re lucky enough to be born into a connection with those things, don’t let it go.
I kept saying that as I watched “Summer Hours,” a very moving, poignant film about family, loss and the complexity of modern life. Don’t let go!! That house!! It’s wonderful, old, thoroughly lived in, big, cumbersome and surrounded by a great lawn with huge, tall trees and room enough for children to run free and laugh and develop memories that will last their entire lives. Don’t let it go.
But life today is so complicated. Family gatherings, even in summer, are complicated and hard to work out.
Jérémie (played by Jérémie Renier) has been living in China and travels from there to France for his mother’s 75th birthday party.…
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Posted on: April 20, 2010
The Chair, by Vincent Van Gogh. 1888
Norman Mailer wrote, in the pages of Dissent back in 1959, about the difference between 19th century capitalism and the 20th century version, provoking much thought. Basically, in the 19th century, a worker would toil in hardship, for little pay, but when he went home, capitalism didn’t follow him there. His own industry didn’t follow him. He wasn’t besieged on all sides by marketing and advertisements pushing him to fill his home with scads of fads and endless consumer goods. He could leave capitalism behind for the most part when he left his job each day.
The root of capitalist exploitation has shifted from the proletariat-at-work to the mass-at-leisure who now may lose as much as four or five ideal hours of extra leisure a day. The old exploitation was vertical — the poor supported the rich.
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Posted on: April 18, 2010
Up in the Air. Directed by Jason Reitman. 2009.
This is the perfect movie for our age of chronic immorality in the business world. This is the perfect movie for the moment, because it encapsulates so much of what is wrong with modern day, monopoly capitalism in America. The enormous pressure, the obvious trend, the powers that be all want to force open more and more areas of life to the potential for profit, costs be damned for the rest of us. Life matters not. Health and heart matter not. The concentration of money in fewer and fewer hands means everything. There is no place that capitalism doesn’t see us — as Rilke might have said today — and seek what little we have left of our own.
George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a professional terminator. He fires people for a living. As I watched his excellent performance, I couldn’t help but think how incredible it was that such a job exists.…
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Posted on: April 2, 2010
The Stone Breakers, by Gustave Courbet. 1849
There is a scene in “The Hurt Locker” near the end that made me think of something that was probably not intended by the director at all, though it may have been. As for the movie itself, I thought it was good, but not nearly as good as the Academy did. I especially disliked the very last scene, which struck me as a return to old style Hollywood glorification of war, which was jolting, given that most of the movie prior to that had managed to avoid those cliches. Watching “The Hurt Locker” up to that point pretty much gave us a visual representation of the total madness and absurdity of war, especially of the war in Iraq. I am also not a fan of hand held cameras and that oh so contrived attempt to create a “documentary” style.…
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