Posted: November 28th, 2007 | Filed under: Community, Culture, Personalities, Sports | 2 Comments »
It is the nature of the place, Las Vegas. With arid desert sprawling in all directions and a grand canyon in one of such magnificence it’s hard to fathom it was created in just one day, the area was discovered to be an oasis centuries ago by Spaniards traveling north from Tejas. The area has always been about survive and advance.
The Vegas of dumbfounding excess, the Vegas that turned the seven deadly sins into a design for glitzkrieg business success, that Vegas the world has come to know is but 50 years old. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 18th, 2007 | Filed under: Cinema, Ruminations | 1 Comment »
Frankly I love everything about The In-Laws. (Do not be confused. I am most certainly talking about the 1979 original, not the deplorable, unnecessary, heretical remake of a year of so ago.) It is among a handful of my favorite flicks of all time.
As much as anything I love the hook behind the film. Alan Arkin and Peter Falk were/ are major buddies They simply wanted to make a movie where the premise would be that Falk annoys Arkin all the time. From that idea the cockamamie plot evolved.
Falk is Vince Ricardo, a renegade, appreciably off kilter CIA operative. He was, he says, part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Arkin is Sheldon Kornpett, a nebbish New York city dentist. Falk’s son is to marry Arkin’s daughter. They meet for the first time a couple of days before the wedding. Falk shows up at Arkin’s office and asks him a small favor. At which point the movie flies. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 11th, 2007 | Filed under: Cinema, Ruminations | 1 Comment »
One of the most intriguing characters in all of film is that of Billy Kwan in Peter Weir’s 1982 masterpiece, The Year of Living Dangerously.
The film is set in the turmoil of Sukarno’s Indonesia in the mid 1960’s. The dictator is trying to hang on, while the forces of change and poverty have turned the exotic locale into a tempest. Kwan is a photographer/ liason/ fixer. Kwan knows everybody from government officials to drivers to those mired in the poverty of the political regime. He is everywhere in his Hawaiian print shirts. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 5th, 2007 | Filed under: Cinema, Culture | 1 Comment »
One guy’s opinion is that the character Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) is the coolest guy in all of film. His self-stated satori is the “art of toast.” He lives in a way cool, sparely furnished Paris loft with a bathtub in the middle, plenty of room for his muse — fetching Vietnamese ingenue/ kleptomaniac Alba (Thuy An Luu) — to blithely rollerskate about. He spends his days in a state of sublime existential sangfroid, piecing together an oversized crossword puzzle of a crashing wave. Or waxing on about the art of cutting a baguette. When he steps out of self-contained serenity, he drives a classic cream Citroen. He has more than one, a necessity you will discover near the end of the movie.
Gorodish is but one of the reasons why the film Diva is the first in a new regular series here — called “Movies I Love.” –heralding older films I, uh, well, uh, love. And you might too. Read the rest of this entry »
