Watching Parade’s End & Downton Abby and remembering Alien & Aliens

Television

Parades End

Michele and I just finished watching Parade’s End on HBO (on demand).  After a somewhat long courtship – first two hour episodes – when we made the mistake of expecting something like The Age of Innocence, we have fallen in love with it. OK, that may be a little too dramatic, but we both liked it and, increasingly, identified with and against different characters. The hero – protagonist may be a better word – Christopher Tietjens, seems to be an extra uptight Englishman, at first, but we begin to realize that he is trapped in a world that he has been born into. He may be the only one still following the rules but that doesn’t make it any easier for him to breakaway even as he see the problem, saying at one point, Everybody thinks me a fool. I am starting to come around to their opinion. 

Because Parade’s End takes place in the same time approximately the same location, and seems to deal with the same issues as Downton Abby, we expected the two to be similar. But they aren’t. Parade’s End is much slower than Downton Abby at first, but it gains in power and sucked us in. The characters are about three times deeper, probably because the story, adapted for TV by Tom Stoppard, is from a series of books, by Ford Madox Ford, that were written based on his real experiences before and during the war. In this England, the sense of noblesse oblige is dying out and all that is left is the overbearing restrictions of a society that is trying to resist the changing world.

A sort of weird thing about HBO is that its series are often made to shock with lots of nudity and swearing, think The Sopranos, or Deadwood, or The Wire, and the movies are subtle to the extreme, think The Tuskegee Airmen or Everyday People. Parade’s End,  as a mini series, seems to be in the middle, especially compared to Downton Abby, but it does lean towards the subtle. Because I like  Parade’s End  better than Downton Abby, I want to say Check it out if only for the costumes and the gorgeous Rebecca Hall, but it is not for everyone. I keep remembering a friend’s comment about liking Aliens, the second Alien movie directed by Cameron, better than Alien – the first Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott which was my favorite – and thinking He must be nuts. But I have come to accept that some people are Alien people and some people are Aliens people and the same is probably true about Parade’s End  and Downton Abby.
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Happy Birthday Michele Part IV

Around home, Local events

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(iPhone photo by Michele)

For the  final part – presumably – of Michele’s 2013 Birthday Extravaganza, we went to see Anne-Sophie Mutter at the, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed, Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

Before the performance, we went to a new – for us – Thai Restaurant,  Lers Ros. It was a little bit of a shock with tastes and textures that were new to both of us (atleast with Thai food). I think the restaurant is the Thai equivalent of the introduction of new Hunan Chinese food into our cultural cuisinescape about 50! years ago. Up until last night, every Thai restaurant we have been to – even in Hong Kong – have been pretty much the same. Some were better than others, but all were rifts on an established theme. The food here is hotter and had more pickled veggies than we are used to in Thai food. It was more interesting than the satisfying comfort of the familiar and we want to go back.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is a German violinist we both love from her – our? – CD’s and she was accompanied by the pianist, Lambert Orkis. But, for Michele and me, Mutter was the reason we were there and she didn’t disappoint. We sat in the $15 seats behind and above the stage and, I think, they were better than most of the seats in the house (except that they are benches and they did get harder over time). We had a great time – Anne-Sophie Mutter was great, Lambert Orkis was a more than pleasant surprise, and the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill building just gets better with age –   and, because we do stuff like this so infrequently, it felt very celebratory.

Side Effects

Film

 

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Michele and I just saw Side Effects by Stephen Soderbergh. For me, it was the second time and I liked it even more than the first time. But I am a Soderbergh fan. I won’t go so far as to say that he can do no wrong, because he can be very wrong, but his movies are almost always interesting. Starting with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he has made an extraordinarily varied  collection of movies from hits to boxoffice duds.

Think Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven in the hit category with Kafka and Schizopolis in the dud category. In between, there is Traffic and Contagion. And, probably my favorite Soderbergh  movie – it may be my favorite movie, period – Out of Sight. It is such a perfect movie and more delightful because it is just a lite-weight confection that is so perfectly done. I read that Soderbergh  is usually his own cinematographer – listed as Peter Andrews –  and editor which is probably why his movies are often so idiosyncratic.

 Soderbergh says that Side Effects is his last movie and, in many ways, it is a typical Soderbergh movie. It is a little like Contagion in that it does not so much seem to have a story arc as a story wavy line that seems to be going in one direction and then ends up somewhere else. It is a little like Out of Sight in that it a genre movie done well. And it is typical of Soderbergh movies in that it is about people’s work.

It seems to me that most movies – by most directors – are about anything except what most people do all day long: work (none of the Academy Award movies this year – Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty – were about making money). Almost all – OK, maybe just many – of Soderbergh’s movies revolve around people’s jobs, revolve around the different ways people make money (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, The Girlfriend Experience, Magic Mike, The Informant, even Out of Sight).  Side Effects is no exception.

If this is Soderbergh’s last movie, I will miss him and I feel vaguely guilty that I didn’t see all of them.

 

 

Only three degrees of seperation from President George Washington

Americana, Politics

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In early August 1962 – atleast I think it was 1962, it could have been 1966 – my dad took me to to the Democratic California State Convention at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. In those days, the Fairmont, owned by Ben Swig, was the Democratic Hotel and the Mark Hopkins Hotel –  across the street and owned by cowboy movie star Gene Autry – was the Republican hotel. This convention was to nominate Governor Pat Brown to run for either a second term against Richard Nixon – which he won – or a third term against Ronald Reagan,  – which he lost – and all of California’s Democratic big wigs were there.

By now, I had become a little used to going to Democratic Conventions with my dad, having gone to the 1960 National Convention earlier. My dad was not very good at remembering names which was a distinct disadvantage at a convention of glad-handers where the whole point was what we now call networking. My dad’s strategy was that we could walk around together but, if he stopped to say Hello to somebody, I would just keep walking. If my dad knew their name, he would call me back and introduce me to his friend? acquaintance? famous-to-everybody-but my-dad luminary?  If he did not know their name, I would just keep walking. Since I knew almost nobody and my dad couldn’t remember alot of names, often I would wander around among the big wigs, alone, for a while.

As an aside, I am not sure when the Convention’s business was over, but the drinking and partying continued way past the legal-bar-closing time of 2:00 AM. I did not want to pay the exorbitant fee of $2.00 to park, so I had parked about a mile away, across Van Ness Avenue, in a residential area. As an aside to the aside, Van Ness is so wide because the buildings on one side were dynamited to make a fire break after the earthquake of 1906 which is also why there are no wooden Victorians to the east of Van Ness and so many on the west side. End of aside to the aside. Anyway, about 3:00 AM, I walked back to my car. The streets were mostly empty because of the hour, but every bus zone, every fire hydrant, every no parking zone -really – had a car in it. There were no tickets on any of the windows: it was a graphic demonstration of  how politicians – and Police Chiefs, and Fire Chiefs, and assorted highranking public employees, just big wigs in general – don’t feel it necessary to follow the laws they make. I won’t say that I was devastated, but I did become more cynical and angry as I walked. End aside.

One of those big wigs was an old man whose name I don’t remember and I don’t think that my dad did either. (When I say old man, it comes from the perspective of a young twenty-something; the old man would now look considerably younger but, then, he could have been anything over 70.) Anyway, when my dads called me over and I shook hands with the old man, I was told that the old man’s grandfather had shaken hands with President George Washington so I was three handshakes away from Washington himself. At the time, it did not seem like a very big deal because, among other things, at the time I did not not think of myself as very young, so that the connection could easily be stretched by, say, 17 years and the old man was sort of wasting his time with me. Now the connection seems pretty amazing, and just marginally possible which I guess was the point.

This was the early to mid 1960’s: let’s say 1962. If the old man was 86, he would have been born in 1876. Let’s say that a handshake doesn’t count until a child is five and knows what they are doing, that means the earliest time he could have meaningfully shaken his grandfather’s hand was 1881. If his grandfather lived to be 86, that means the earliest time he could have meaningfully shaken Washington’s hand was 1799. The same year that Washington died. But, Washington died at the very end of 1799 – December 14th – making the whole thing possible. Giving me only three degrees of separation from the first President of the United States.

The Academy Awards

Film

Argo

Everybody seemed to agree that Argo would win the Academy Award for best picture so it was no surprise that it did.  I am OK with that; it was very entertaining and, because it seemed to be a lightweight movie that sort of wiggled into being a very good movie, it left a nice, surprising, aftertaste. That was Michele’s and my reaction, at least. We went in expecting a good movie and came out saying, Well, that was better than I expected. For no particular reason: it got good to excellent reviews but, somehow, it arrived without much buzz. I am not sure why. Maybe it is because Ben Affleck has been involved in alot of pretty crummy movies – like Pearl Harbor – and is not take very seriously, but he also directed The Town and Gone Baby Gone both of which were very good (IMHO).

Argo was  not my favorite movie of the year, however. There are so many good movies this year that weren’t even mentioned. Cabin in the Woods which was great fun even if it was almost a Joss Whedon parody. The Avengers, also by Whedon, was fun to watch but not very memorable (atleast by me). Moonrise Kingdom was delightful. I do think that all three of these movies, Cabin in the Woods, The Avengers, and Moonrise Kingdom had a certain unbelievablity that may have hurt them.

Django Unchained was another movie than came across as unreal but that seems to be Quinton Tarantino’s style. I think that part of it is that I have come to think of gritty, narrow focus, and quick cuts as more real than beautiful long scenes with deep focus.  So Zero Dark Thirty – which my neighbor, Mark, tells me is really pronounced Oh Dark Thirty and means too early to be up – seems much more real than it really was and the beautiful scenes in Skyfall and Django Unchained, not to mention Life of Pi, take away from the realness. In a way, the most outrageous movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild  seemed so real at times that it almost seemed like a documentary.

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DJANGO UNCHAINED

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(Quvenzhané Wallis)

 

That is not to say that I like movies that feel real  better than movies that seem unreal. I don’t; I loved Skyfall, and Dark Knight Rising for that matter, and Django Unchained is one of my favorite movies of the year. I also loved Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Moonrise Kingdom and probably more movies that don’t come to mind. Looking back at it, it just seems like this was a great year for movies.