FAVORITE "BIOPICS"

There’s been a lot of criticism in the poetry world (at least on the blogs) of BRIGHT STAR, the movie about the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

I loved the flick and considered it incredibly well done. But there’s quite a few of my fellow poets who found the alterations in Keats’ and Brawne’s bios (she was even younger, some of the lines he recites as if for her were written earlier, etc.), at least from their reading, too much. Or they thought he was depicted as a wimp or too passive or simple minded or not lower class enough (or Cockney) etc.

In the end, it’s a matter of taste in terms of enjoyment of the movie, and whose research is more correct in terms of the facts of John Keats’ life and the inspiration he obviously got from his love for Brawne and how you perceive the performances and the story as movie (for instance I didn’t find the portrayal of Keats to he simple-minded, I find it intense and focused and passionate and quite believable, etc.)..

But it got me thinking about other movies based on real peoples’ lives or incidents in them, so I thought that would make a great list for me last night to help me sleep: those I truly like and could watch again anytime.

As they came to mind, I realized I usually didn’t care about the “facts,” I cared how entertaining or engaging or enlightening etc. the movie was for me.

So here are the ones I thought of (and some I had to look up the exact title for this morning, like CAMILLE CLAUDEL and WITHOUT LIMITS) (I did get carried away, took quite a while to fall asleep last night and kept waking up and thinking of other flicks):

AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (maybe my favorite of all of these and, as I understand it, closest to the real facts) and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN
BRIGHT STAR, BASQUIAT (Jeffrey Wright is one of those startling movie actor discoveries in this, as morbid as it is at times) BECKET (one of the few times Richard Burton lived up to his enormous talent), BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, BONNIE AND CLYDE (both these last ones much altered from reality in their “interpretation” but still worth the trouble) and BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (Tom Cruise at his best as an actor) (and before you comment that I’m leaving BIRD out, I had a tough time with the way they redid the music for that flick so it’s not a favorite.)
CINDERELLA MAN, CADILLAC RECORDS, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (DiCaprio at his most charming), COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER, CAMILLE CLAUDEL, CARRINGTON (another on of Emma Thompson’s amazing performances) and CASINO (not Scorcese’s best, partly, in my opinion, because DiNiro is miscast, but it’s one of Sharon Stone’s best performances)
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, DOG DAY AFTERNOON, DONNIE BRASCO (one of Johnny Depp’s most subtle performances) and DEAD MAN WALKING (maybe Sean Penn’s greatest)
ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (no idea how real this one might even be but a great flick to watch), THE ELEPHANT MAN and ELIZABETH (Cate Blanchett seemed born to play this role)
FRANCES (impeccable performance by a young Jessica Lange)
GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, THE GLEN MILLER STORY (another Hollywoodized version of “the truth” but still, with Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson at their most charming, it’s hard to resist, for me, I’m not embarrassed to dig romanticized, even sentimentalized versions of the truth if there’s something in the art of it, like their performances, and I love the music), GOODFELLAS and GORILLAS IN THE MIST
HILDAGO (More legend than fact but beautifully done, and Viggo Mortenson gives an old fashioned charismatic Hollywood movie star performance), HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSON (almost entirely fabricated, but Danny Kaye is a delight in it for my taste) and HEAVENLY CREATURES (my introduction to the amazing Kate Winslet and what an introduction)
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER (brilliant) and INTO THE WILD
THE JACKIE ROBINSON STORY (This actually starred Jackie playing himself and recreating filmic versions of some of the struggles he faced as the first “black” man in professional baseball’s all-white white leagues (at least in the modern game, I understand in the 1800s and early 1900s there was some uncontroversial integration at times), so it wasn’t all that well acted, but as a kid it had an enormous impact on me and made him a lifelong hero of mine)
THE KILLING FIELDS (I’m not a fan of Sam Waterson’s but Hang S. Ngor made this film totally work and Waterson be palatable for me)
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, LA BAMBA, LEAN ON ME and THE LAST EMPEROR (another cinematic masterpiece you maybe had to see on the big screen to fully appreciate, I still listen to the soundtrack almost daily)
MIRACLE (another highly underrated performance by Kurt Russell), MICHAEL COLLINS (it has its problems but Liam Neeson is terrific as Collins and the story gets told, at least from one perspective, though Julia Roberts is miscast unfortunately), MASK, MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, THE MIRACLE WORKER, THE MUSIC LOVERS (as with most of Ken Russeell’s films this one’s way over the top in its bending of reality, but again, for me, it’s a knockout flick), MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE (Jennifer Jason Leigh in one of her many amazing portrayals), MY LEFT FOOT (Daniel Day Lewis in a role that made his well earned rep as an actor’s actor), THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE and MISHIMA (one of the all time great cinematic masterpieces which I fortunately got to see in a screening in which John Baily, the great cinematographer, used three different kinds of spliced together film for the different effects he and Paul Shrader were going for in the separate parts of Mishima’s story, amazing experience, but even in the copies made for theaters on just one type of film it still was a unique and underrated work of film art and still is)
THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT (I think I saw this on TV, it was a British flick, maybe made by the BBC, about Quintin Crisp’s early years as in many ways the first truly “out” gay man in Britain (well, obviously not the first, but in terms of flamboyance and modern perceptions) with John Hurt playing Crisp, the first time I saw that incredible actor)
OUT OF AFRICA (I resisted this for decades but finally gave in)
POLLOCK
QUIZ SHOW
REDS, RAGING BULL (though I found DiNiro’s weight gain distracting), THE RETURN OF MARTIN GUERRE (one of DePardieu’s greatest performances, though based on how much actual known history of this episode beyond the broad facts is obviously debatable) ROB ROY (who knows how true it is but Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange are perfect in it) and RUDY (I love this flick and Sean Astin is wonderful in it, even if it is obviously meant to be inspirational and all Hallmarky)
SONG OF MYSELF (this I saw on TV, probably PBS in the ‘70s with Rip Torn as Walt Whitman in the greatest performance he ever did for my taste, and a beautifully done bio of Walt though necessarily some speculation involved in the story), SERGEANT YORK, SPARTACUS (who even knows what’s the truth here, but man it’s an amazing film), SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME (the young Paul Newman competes with Brando’s Oscar winning totally innovative performance in ON THE WATERFRONT and falls short, but still a gas to watch him try), SERPICO (talk about competing with Brando), SWEET DREAMS (another fantastic Jessica Lange performance as Patsy Cline as well as Ed Harris as her husband in a highly underrated flick), STAND AND DELIVER and SCHINDLER’S LIST
TOMBSTONE (another set of brilliant performances by the underrated Kurt Russel and Val Kilmer, the latter almost steals the movie with his portrayal of Doc Holliday) and THE TEMPTATIONS (my little guy loves to watch this with me)
U?
VIVA ZAPATA! (Great early acting jobs by Brando and Anthony Quinn even if the “facts” are Hollywoodized. Who can forget that final image?), THE VIRGIN QUEEN (Bette Davis in her most remarkably daring phase) and LA VIE EN ROSE
THE WILD CHILD (one of my favorites for sure, though I have no idea how close to “the truth” it is), WITHOUT LIMITS (first time I really dug Billy Crudup’s work, here as a track star, an otherwise boring topic for a film but he makes it work) and WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? (Angela Bassett made her mark with this one)
X?
YOUNG MISTER LINCOLN (One of Henry Fonda’s great roles) and YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (quite contrived but still a delight)
Z?

RAY DIPALMA: THE ANCIENT USE OF STONE

The subtitle of my old friend poet Ray DiPalma’s latest book is: JOURNALS AND DAYBOOKS 1998-2008. But don’t expect anything like a typical journal, or daybook for that matter.

As always, Ray’s work is not only challenging on many levels, but uniquely so. The best way to approach it, from my perspective, is as a work of art, or series of works of art.

And this book certainly is a work of art, even just as an object itself. (It's one of the initial offerings of a fairly new imprint from L.A.: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions.) DiPalma’s been fortunate in that many of his books (and he’s published more than me I believe, which means his count is probably up in the thirties) have been beautifully produced, so much so that even if you never read them you’d love to have them on your shelves.

Plus, Ray himself is an artist, who has produced books—some one of a kind—made up entirely of his “stamp” works: collages and art works made from ink stamps, often antiques, of generic figures and scenes.

I have a little, fold-out-book-like object called “Shivering Polar Bears” in which a figure of a polar bear is stamped twice in the same spot just altering the outline slightly so it looks like the bear is shivering, and then this procedure is done again several times the length of what is maybe a 2” by 16” folded piece of paper as it unfolds, and all on a beautiful bluish gray paper that is speckled with other colors on the other side. Lovely. And unique.

I also have a larger framed work of Ray’s in which he uses two fair-sized pieces of a soft beige art paper (maybe twelve by sixteen) to stamp many copies of a man’s head c. 1930s on one and a woman’s, same era, on the other, repeated in rows that begin at the right margin and then curve slightly down to the left, and each row diminishes in number from the upper right hand of the paper to the lower right hand corner (so that by the bottom there’s only one left in that row) giving the effect of the heads falling, or toppling over, or in mid-topple.

Like a lot of Ray’s writing, it seems to imply a lot more than the simple combination of symbols or figures initially might superficially mean. There is whimsy and a sense of playfulness on the surface, but at the same time something much more deeply serious and even, perhaps, threatening.

So too these journals and daybooks. There are some entries that are about as personal as Ray’s writing gets, more so than any I can remember actually, But the bulk of the writing in this book is more concerned with larger and/or more minute concerns than the personal.

Even the intellect behind them is much broader than the personal, except in the act of selection (and who knows how much that may have been determined by chance no matter how arbitrarily conferred on the material by Ray) because so much of the written material here seems taken from other sources: his reading that day, or memory, or as I say some arbitrary chance method of selection like randomly opening a book and dropping your finger to the page (not saying this is what he does, just that the juxtaposition of bits of writing from obviously different eras and authors suggest some randomness at times).

Or, as he puts it himself in an entry for March 5th of his “Jihadgraphy” journal:

“Not doing something with
language but doing something to
language”

(That "to" should be italicized but I can't figure out how to do it on the initial blog composition page!)

Or this from March 27th of the same journal:

“Meditative, unintelligible, beyond
the tides”

Or his made up words that resonate in ways beyond the obvious, like “choruspondence” etc.

Or the more personal entries that sometimes are obviously coming from Ray and his daily experiences and sometimes might actually be coming from the voice of another, though may resonate with Ray’s own, like this first stanza from August 1, 2005 in “An August Daybook”:

“I move more slowly now
because there is no one to go with me.
Once again the contrarian has reclaimed
a part of my temperament and demeanor—
back again, back again as always”

I remember the influence Beckett had on Ray, at least the way I saw it when we were both at the U. of Iowa Writer’s Workshop where we first became friends and I saw Ray perform on stage the lead in KRAPP’S LAST TAPE (in which he was excellent, decades later he was one of four actors in a play of mine at a poet’s festival in NYC and once again amazed me with his skills as a stage actor) which may be why I hear the resonance of Beckett’s voice in those lines above.

Maybe the best way to illustrate some of the many things he is doing with language and composition is to show you a page from the “Jihadgraphy” section (one of the most compelling of the journals because it includes Ray’s artwork in the margins of many of the pages, although in my scanning of this particular page some of the artwork gets cut off because I didn’t want to damage the binding to fit the page in the scanner, but it gives you an idea, especially if you click on it to enlarge it and read the text).

I could go on, but the main point I want to make is that if you treat each page of this book like a painting or sculpture in a gallery or museum and take the time to absorb what engages you initially, just on the surface, and then stick around to let deeper meanings or resonances sink in, I think you’ll be well rewarded. But even if you find the work at times too difficult to comprehend in any way that you’re used to or prefer, I think Ray wouldn’t mind if you skipped around and found pieces here and there that might better speak to you and then expand from those to explore the other multiple possibilities in Ray’s technique(s).

I’ll leave you with one more quote from the text, this one from the journal titled “Mules at the Wake” for July 18, 2006, that, to my mind, best encapsulates what Ray is doing in this book:

“Wet ink drying on the eyelids—
Ensorcelled mazes
Minimal insight plethoral possibility
A catalogue of the haphazard and abortive
Radical trajectories
A capacity for mutation at cross-purposes
The path of the misanthrope and panther”

"WE'VE GOT REPS"

Thanks to Butch from Waukegan who put a link to this hilarious YouTube video on my last post. It's so good I have to share it more directly here.

PS TO YESTERDAY'S POST

If you've been reading the posts on this blog that concern themselves with politics, and in the past year especially with the Obama administration, then you know that my goals have been stated over and over again as well as my credentials.

I have worked actively for most of my adult life for the kinds of changes that would secure the things that many on what the rightwing calls "the left" ("so-called "progressives" or "liberals"—many of whom are actually more in the center) seem to want Obama and the Democrats to secure. But experience and history have taught me that ignoring practical and powerful realities is not an option when you are trying to get a gigantic organism (the federal gov.) to change direction.

I've written many times that those who believe Obama should be doing more in terms of "progressive" or "liberal" goals should definitely be putting pressure on him and his administration, and even more so on Representatives and Senators in Congress. But the point of the article I linked to in the last post, as well as many of my own political posts on this blog, is that the combination of rightwing control and/or influence on the mass media plus their ability to rouse their troops to protest any slight change in the rightwing policies that have dominated the federal government for the past eight years, and longer, has given them an outsized power that the left hasn't matched or beaten except at the polls last Fall.

That right leaning media plus rightwing protestors' pressure on the federal government and policy makers and lawmakers etc. is constant and powerful, while the pressure from the left as the article I linked to contends, has been mostly confined to blogging and op-eds from some, and cynicism and disillusionment from too many.

There were two brief periods in recent history when the media took a slightly leftist bent, when Walter Cronkite decided to comment on the reality of the stalemate in Viet Nam and his courage sparked other journalists to report the realities on the ground in that war instead of the military talking points, and when the Washington Post uncovered the conspiracy behind the Watergate break-in and the involvement of the Nixon White House. There were small media outlets that had a more "liberal" bent that maybe covered these things and more, but the mainstream media pretty much followed the talking points of the corporate world and those they influenced in Washington. But in these two instances the stories were too big and their impact too powerful to ignore.

The rest of the time, the mainstream media has leaned either to the right or straddled the center. We now have MSNBC that has a few shows that report from a leftist perspective but base their reporting on factual events and evidence (Rachel Maddow is the best example), and The Daily Show often exposes the right's influence on the media. But that's about it.

If the left controls any of the mass media than as John Stewart pointed out in the links I had to him a few posts back, why were demonstrations by handfuls of "teabaggers" covered not just in passing but extensively—you couldn't get away from them on every network, every station—and when they marched on DC it received more coverage than any policy or bill passed since Obama's election, much much more, but when the gay rights march brought out as many people on DC it was ignored by most media outlets or given just glancing coverage?

That's proof positive of the rightwing control and/or outsized influence on the media. And there are endless examples I could give and that I even witnessed—like the demonstrations against Bush and the Republicans at the Republican convention held in NYC in '04 where more arrests were made than in any other demonstration in the city's recent and even most of its long term history, where thousands and thousands and thousands of people from all walks of live protested, and yet in the mass media, it was either glanced over or completely ignored. But when a handful of Republican operatives stage crafted a supposed "spontaneous" demonstration to stop the recounting of votes in Florida in 2000, so that a final full recount was never achieved, that was covered as though it was the second coming, et-endlessly-cetera.

I don't want to waste any more time, yours or mine, on the obviousness of all this, but it is a sign of the times and of the proof of the article I linked to in my last post, that much of political discourse now is over the results of the rightwing's capacity to spin the news in ways that are favorable to its positions, and how even those who are more in the center or on the left get sucked into the rightwing slant on current events rather than an objective recognition of what the realities truly are.

Which, in the case of Obama, and the Democrats, is that they do not have the kind of majority that could insure any bill they wanted passed getting passed, that the influence and pressure from the right is constant and seems to control the terms of the argument so that it favors their side in the media (the classic example of supposed "fairness" turning out to mean in practice any reality can be challenged and the challenger gets equal time if the challenge is from the right, but if it's from the left it gets ignored, except on some shows on MSNBC). (In other words, CNN may use so-called "pundits" from the "left" and right, but what they address is controlled by what the right is making the arguments of the day rather than the true facts that CNN should be uncovering and reporting, etc.)

Nonetheless, much has been achieved in the less than ten months Obama has been in office, on every front, things that would not have been achieved had McCain been elected. But there is so much more to do, and Obama seems so willing to compromise or accept less than many of his more leftist supporters would like (including me), the right seems to be scoring all the points while the left bickers or gives up in too many instances. All I've been saying is: don't. Organize, get active, find ways to put pressure on Congress and the administration to push for the progressive goals Obama seemed to represent to many of us.

But meanwhile, we should also be touting Obama's achievements so far, and the achievements of the Democrats in Congress who all seem as lame at touting their accomplishments and getting that information out to the public as they are at naming these achievements (a game the right has dominated ever since Gingrich figured out how to play it as in "The Contract With America" as opposed to the convoluted titles of much of the recent Democratic legislation and initiatives).

BETTER THAN I HAVE

Here's an article making the points I've been making since before the last election and in response to those who continue to contend (and in my perspective pretend) that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans etc., only doing it better than I have.

QUOTE (POEM) FOR TODAY

Here's a small poem I always dug:

"DIFFICULTY ALONG THE WAY

Seeking Perfect Total Enlightenment
is looking for a flashlight
when all you need the flashlight for
is to find your flashlight"

—Lew Welch

STEWART NAILS REPUBLICAN HYPOCRISY

Here. (Be sure to watch the video at the end.) This is the way the "mainstream media" should have covered this story. (See this Daily Show excerpt for Stewart's nailing CNN coverage of SNL skit as news, and again scroll down for the video.)

[PS: Thanks Willy. Here's Stewart exposing rightwing media hypocrisy visa vis the Gay March on DC. Gotta watch it, and the ones above, to the end to get the full impact. And I gotta figure out how to embed them in posts.]

[PPS: Here's a pretty good summary of how "patriotic" the rightwing Republicans are.]