Puck

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…

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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…

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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 »

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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…

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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…

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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 »

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A novel by Victor Pelevin

A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.

A Hu-Li and her sisters are sexual predators. They are, in other words, a top-level crypto-predator species that happens to feed on human sexual energy. Obviously, then, a fox’s perfect disguise is as a high-class prostitute. What better character to skewer the norms of society than the prostitute who pops the bubble of every hypocritical prick along her journey to enlightenment? A Hu-Li and her sisters are not human and don’t care about our values. A Hu-Li has her own. She’s not a liberated sex worker, she’s a predator.

An enticing one, too: she wears her years of experience with cunning wit, style, pragmatic grace and imperial wisdom—most of the time. The narrative sweet spot Pelevin has found in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and the one that powers this character-driven novel, lies in the friction between A Hu-Li’s human enculturation and her animal instincts, a friction awash in a superseding assumption: all beings are searching for the levels of their souls. A Hu-Li manages to remain a haughty bitch while purporting a profoundly leveling philosophy. Continue Reading »

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Curled Up with a Good DVD just posted my review of Cinematographer Style:

“Scientists of light,” one cinematographer describes his trade. Cinematographer Style is a mostly beautifully shot film (except when the makers are forced outside their controlled, indoor studio) about the technological core of filmmaking. As Arthur C. Clarke always insisted, any technology advanced enough appears to be magic. Camera and film (or digital image) are technologies far enough beyond the ken of most that their technicians are called “wizards” (for a hysterical and cheesy send up of tech wizardry, see Mike Jittlov’s The Wizard of Speed and Time, so Cinematographer Style is also about the magic of filmmaking.

The problem with Cinematographer Style is that it is composed entirely of interviews. Jon Fauer interviewed 110 of his colleagues for the film and used snips from many dozens of them in the final cut. That works, because the rapid editing coupled with dramatic lighting and translucent music keeps the pace lively. What doesn’t work is not actually seeing cinematography. Rather, we are told, pretty much throughout, what a jolly good thing it is. Cinematographer Style is a pep rally. Motion picture photography deserves pep rallies, but it already had a much better one in Arnold Glassman and Todd McCarthy’s 1992 Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography.

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Curled Up With a Good DVD just published my review of the Kennedy Film Collection by Robert Drew.

Robert Drew’s Primary reopens an old conundrum: does technological innovation drive cultural change, or does cultural need drive technological innovation? In other words, do inventors work in a cultural vacuum producing stuff people then find a need and a market, or are cultural niches filled by market-incentivized innovators? Whichever side you agree with, there’s no question that Primary is a landmark in film history, marking a place where our expectations about what a film should be changed in tandem with the way we make them.

The innovation was a portable camera that allowed photographers to more or less unobtrusively immerse themselves in events, recording without distinction the mundane and the monumental. More or less because, in fact, though certainly smaller and lighter than previous pro-grade equipment, the cameras used by Drew and his gang of photographers looked like snub-nosed bazookas and probably weighed about the same.

Read more on Curled Up.

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Curled Up with a Good DVD has just posted two new reviews I wrote.

“Maluala is a historical adventure film set in nineteenth-century Cuba with lots of parallels to contemporary events. The film’s action centers on a group of runaway African slaves, cimarrons who, after battling with their Spanish masters, hide in the rugged mountains of eastern Cuba in a region called Maluala. Led by the fierce Gallo and his lieutenant Coba, the ex-slaves demand freedom and land from the Spaniards.” Read more…

“Holland is flatter than a pancake, reclaimed from the sea, and always cloudy: that’s the recipe for Dutch Light. This lovely-to-look-at film is an artist’s meditation on the visual perception of sunlight, especially as perceived by other artists.” Read more…

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