Ecopoetry Manifesto, the Update

I've got a good five hundred words on ecopo, but I'll hold off with a post of it until the honchos of Octopus have had a go with it. Nevertheless, if you've got ideas, people, send 'em my way. I'd like to spend the whole time taking apart Saussure, but I don't have the space.

Movies!

And how's that for a transition?

If you've got young'uns lying around, stuff 'em with beer and take 'em down to Charlotte's Web. The art of making animals move their non-speaking lips around so they look like they talk has improved since both Mr. Ed and Babe.

I've liked a few films my colleagues don't. For example, A Scanner Darkly. First, I have nothing essential against Woody Harrelson. Bit of a dim bulb, but so are most actors. They can't all go to Yale. And if they did, I'd have to swear off film. Right. So, I liked the source material. It's uneven, but deeply felt. I'm intrigued by the question of the self in a paranoid culture. I mean, if you're not doing anything wrong, why object to being searche at random? And if you're willing to being searched and/or constantly monitored, what does that make you? Or do to you? Or the narrative of you that you keep in your head? And the movie asks the irksome question that keeps needing to be raised since Reagan: if you're government is funding the war on drugs as well as the druglords, then what the hell does the government want? Or is it simply the Cabinet getting richer? Oh, stop me. I'll be getting all class-conscious in a minute.

Now, The Good Shepherd might be pedestrian in its pacing, but it's fucking beautiful. It's not Haskell Wexler behind the viewfinder, but it must be one of his aesthetic children: Even the most banal shots are gorgeously framed. And don't talk to be about grey and gold tones. I'll say this, too: This film is the most accurate spy movie I've ever seen. These are geeks, dorks of the first water. Shall we do research? Yes! Let's! Shall we weigh heavily the importance of words? Yes! Of course! Is the film a meditation on the costs of pulling oneself tightly around oneself? Oh, yes, that too.

The Good Shepherd dances around the question of family, but Little Miss Sunshine heads right into it. You might not have liked this film. Fair enough. It's dark in a fucked up little way I recognize from my own family, so the scenes had a ring of verisimilitude to them. Between D and I, we had a story that resonated with pretty much every episode. I also liked the pulling apart of the American road story. Heading to California for a better life? You betcha. But this time coupled with the easily pushed aside notion that you take yourself everywhere you go. This is another in a series of American existential black comedies that really took off with The Royal Tennenbaums. Blow as much clove smoke over them as you want, but it's intriguing that the American zeitgeist has begun to not get all freaked out with darker images of itself.

Next, reviews of swimming pools that have only been cleaned haphazardly by men who own not one but two iguanas, and who have been both married and divorced to sisters from different hometowns.

Comments

[Tanya]

I'm surprised you didn't allude to the chattering movie-goers whose commentary added so much to our experience during The Good Shepherd. :0)

T.