Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

Imagine everyone in the world goes suddenly, inexplicably blind – what would you do? More importantly, how would your government and social services agencies react?

That’s the premise of Blindness, the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. Originally published in Portuguese, the novel was widely translated and critically acclaimed. The film version’s reception has been entirely different.

Considered an unfilmable novel, the movie Blindness has been roundly panned by both viewers and critics alike. In fact, though, the film is brilliant in all respects. Don McKellar (Last Night) has done a great job of adapting the novel; his screenplay is true to the original while nicely condensing the novel long-winded philosophical digressions. Director Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) pushes hard on the action, never letting the film sag into didactic maundering, the way the novel does. The photography is stark and beautiful and the acting wonderful – no mean accomplishment, that, as all the parts are played by sighted actors.

Read more at Curled Up with a Good DVD…

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley admits up front that writing about how philosophers died is, well, odd, and that reading about such things is perhaps even odder. Then again, there are lots of good reasons to write and read about death. It’s inevitable, after all, the one truly irremediable cipher confronting each of us. We know nothing about death (though plenty about how it gets caused), or would say so if we were truly honest about the limits of our cognitive abilities.

And of course we’re fascinated with ciphers, mad to construe their hidden meanings and to make sense out of what, so often, is a devastation for those of us who go on living.

Besides, philosophers are especially good at dying. Not all of them, of course, but the good deaths (the ones that fascinate, the ones that cause the brow to crinkle, the ones that cause us to splutter, wave the storyteller away and take drink with a secret, hidden smile lurking on our lips) tend to be remembered, to be passed on down the line of storytellers. A good death becomes a point of imaginative departure. Here are snippets from Critchley’s wonderful vignettes on my three favorite philosophers. Continue Reading »

On Joanna Russ, a new book of essays on the great lesbian-feminist science fiction writer and to which I am a contributor, has just received a great review in The Village Voice:

Mendlesohn brings 17 writers (including eight men) to her critical enterprise, which picks up where Jeanne Cortiel’s 1999 Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction leaves off. The essayists all believe that Russ’s career trajectory has much to teach next-generation feminists. And all approach Russ’s seven novels, three nonfiction collections, and three short-story collections impressed by how each book bristles with epistemological invention. Her fiction twists the most shopworn genre conventions—like time travel, sword-and-sorcery, or all-female planets—into scenarios that intentionally subvert stereotypical expectations. Comparing these texts against copious amounts of analytical opinion from her various interviews, letters, book reviews, and pedagogic essays, Mendlesohn’s team constructs a fascinating picture of this pioneering “scholar/practitioner” as visionary cultural critic.

review by Brian Charles Clark

La Dolce Vita – “the sweet life” – slices seven days out of the life of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni). We get adultery, murder, suicide, an orgy, a strange and monstrous fish, a castle darkly lit, and several goddesses of the silver screen.

This wondrous film by Federico Fellini is the watershed, if not the masterpiece, in his transition from realistic to more free associative, dreamy and artistic films. Always more a poet than a storyteller, Fellini flexes his episodic skills to create characters by synergizing vignettes, creating a sum greater than the parts.

What emerges are memorable characters wrestling with the universe about the meaning of life. Fellini had a knack for shooting on sets and locations at once particular – and deeply imbued with a sense of place – and archetypal. He also had a knack for working with photographers – in this case Otello Martelli, whose career began in 1919 – capable of photographing dreamscapes with great depth and clarity.

Rubini thinks his existence is bleak. He feels trapped in a meaningless life and marriage, and seeks to emulate Steiner, an older man and an intellectual. Steiner tells the younger man,

Don’t be like me. Salvation doesn’t lie within four walls…. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.

And Marcello agrees, saying to one of the screen goddesses (Yvonne Furneaux), “A man who agrees to live like this is a finished man, he’s nothing but a worm!”

Directionless and desperate, Rubini refuses wormhood emphatically, instead rampantly pursuing the sensuous and the sensual with animal vigor. La Dolce Vita is filled with memorable scenes (like the wading sequence in the Trevi Fountain which carries the myth of Artemis espied in her bath by Aktion to its sexual conclusion) and is, at three hours, transporting enough to warp time.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good DVD.

The multi-talented Virginia Lee Burton is best remembered for her pioneering work as a children’s picture book writer and illustrator. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel remains a steady seller for its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, since it was first published in 1939. She was first and foremost a graphic designer who, in her home of Folley Cove, Massachusetts, taught the locals how to design and block print fabric.

From a photographic point of view, Rawn Fulton’s film Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place is boring: for all Burton’s geometries, the drama of angularity that plays throughout her illustrations in her books and the print designs that Folley Cove Designers still sells, the camera simply pans across pages and fabrics with plain-Jane horizontals and verticals, penetrating the material with slow zooms, the old in-and-out. It works, but it’s dull. Continue reading on Curled Up with a Good DVD…

review by Brian Charles Clark

Our image of Brooklyn—of New York City in general—is of wall-to-wall people. But, as filmmaker D.W. Young discovered, there are plenty of wide-open spaces in the city. You just have to know where to look. Like through a hole in a fence.

The hole in question gapes in a fence surrounding an abandoned industrial area in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. A home for the homeless and a canvass for graffiti artists, the open space behind the hole in the fence becomes a sounding board for a young architect (Benjamin Uyeda) and filmmaker. In A Hole in a Fence, Young explores issues of class, urban development, the renewal of nature and a host of other issues. Continue reading on Curled Up with a Good DVD…

review by Brian Charles Clark

Through his Epigrams, Martial has come down to us as a Roman rap star, an Empire gangsta who tweaked the noses of all around him – unless you were pretty and had sexy naughty bits, in which case the odds were even as to whether he’d sing your praises or declare you a whore.

Born in Spain in the year 40 A.D., Martial was a poet who lived much of his life in Rome, dying just after the turn of the first century. His mastery of raunchy innuendo (not to mention outright declaration of skankiness) may well be unsurpassed in the history of literature. He’s certainly in the ninetieth percentile. Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Bird lovers, animal lovers, people watchers, rejoice: the not-be-missed The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is back with more of everything. More parrots, updates on bohemian ornithologist Mark Bittner and director Judy Irving, plus a slew of other material amounting to nearly five hours of DVD-watching pleasure crammed onto two discs.

For those who’ve already seen the film, the biggest bonus may be the update on Mark Bittner, the lovable, idealistic, keen-eyed amateur ornithologist who observed, cared for and befriended a flock of wild parrots living on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. Not wanting to spoil the film’s ending for first-time viewers, I’ll merely say the ending is somewhat wrenching, so it’s good to know what became of Bittner. Read more on Curled Up With A Good DVD…

review by Brian Charles Clark

Maybe it’s because I don’t have kids, but when I sat down to watch Please Vote for Me I figured I was in for a lighthearted romp. Foolish me. As any parent will know, children are mean and vicious and will stoop to anything in order to get elected.

Although the third graders in Wiejun Chen’s delightful and frightening film may be new to democracy, they instantly get what it takes to win an election. First, pick on your opponent’s weak points by exaggerating the truth of those weaknesses. If that doesn’t persuade your fellow classmates to vote for you, then try lying and bribery. Never mind that the position being vied for is class monitor; these kids go at it as if they were running for ruler of the world. Read more on Curled Up With A Good DVD…

review by Brian Charles Clark

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuścinśki
A Vintage International paperback
288 pages, June 2008
4.5 stars (out of five possible)

The world-traveled Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścinśki had a special affinity for the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus, in Kapuścinśki’s estimation, was himself a world-traveled journalist by the time he wrote his famous Histories. It’s an audacious move to write a memoir in parallel to such a venerable book, but that, thankfully, is just what Kapuścinśki has done in Travels with Herodotus.

Travels with Herodotus is a marvel of concise, open-ended insight—or “outsight,” more accurately, since both Kapuścinśki and Herodotus are concerned more with anthropology than psychology. Travels is also that rare book that teaches writing as it entertains. For teachers, Travels is a curricular field day, bringing structure and focus to a wide array of subjects, from science to art, from the ethics of violence to the perplexities of love. For lovers of travel writing, Kapuścinśki has created an engine of armchair transportation that moves through both time and space. For students of the reporter’s craft, Kapuścinśki is patient and profound. Continue Reading »