Last Friday we completed our series of walks on the local rails to trails trail. It was 65 F, and we were in summer jackets. The two weeks before had been lovely weather, too, often getting into the 70s. Then came Saturday (the 12th). Suddenly the temperature was 33 F, and it snowed all day. We were outside trying to plant our spring bulbs, and it was not fun. It has been cold for a week now, and we are heading into the worst of it over the next three days. Monday it is supposed to moderate. I sure as hell hope so.
We had a bus trip to Windsor planned with Amanda for this past Wednesday, but due to a stiff breeze and freezing temps, we cancelled. Instead, we had a long afternoon wood fire here at home, with music, food, drinks, and such. We have recently spent two long afternoons with Amanda as our guest (once with her mom), and hope to see her at least once more before she heads back to Toronto. Parts of New York, including Buffalo, are just entering into a three day snow event that will dump 3-4 of snow. Incredibly cold winds are blowing off the lakes, which are still warm, picking up huge amounts of moisture, and dumping it on land. Our boiler is on its serious heat setting, and it will remain that way until Nature shows some mercy. We are getting the high winds, but not much snow. Parts of Michigan along lake Michigan, and parts of Ontario along Lake Huron, are saying goodbye to a brown landscape, and hello to a white one.
Winter is often tolerable in this part of the world when the winds aren't roaring. Calm, cold winter days and nights are among some of the finest one can ever experience. But add a howling wind and blowing, drifting snow, and hell hath no fury like it. I've had two outings today to feed the birds. It's garbage night, so I will be heading out once more in an hour or two.
We had a bus trip to Windsor planned with Amanda for this past Wednesday, but due to a stiff breeze and freezing temps, we cancelled. Instead, we had a long afternoon wood fire here at home, with music, food, drinks, and such. We have recently spent two long afternoons with Amanda as our guest (once with her mom), and hope to see her at least once more before she heads back to Toronto. Parts of New York, including Buffalo, are just entering into a three day snow event that will dump 3-4 of snow. Incredibly cold winds are blowing off the lakes, which are still warm, picking up huge amounts of moisture, and dumping it on land. Our boiler is on its serious heat setting, and it will remain that way until Nature shows some mercy. We are getting the high winds, but not much snow. Parts of Michigan along lake Michigan, and parts of Ontario along Lake Huron, are saying goodbye to a brown landscape, and hello to a white one.
Winter is often tolerable in this part of the world when the winds aren't roaring. Calm, cold winter days and nights are among some of the finest one can ever experience. But add a howling wind and blowing, drifting snow, and hell hath no fury like it. I've had two outings today to feed the birds. It's garbage night, so I will be heading out once more in an hour or two.
In film news, some good things to report. Before I begin, I will say that I am becoming more and more impressed with how documentaries are being presented. They are evolving works of great entertainment, besides their usual function of educating us philistines about things we should know about but don't. A few good ones will be briefly mentioned in a moment.
Denis Villeneuve's 1998 August 32nd on Earth is an early film by the director of the new Dune film. It's a difficult movie to categorize, or even summarize. It's a somewhat puzzling and unsatisfying look at two close friends, a man and a woman. She is a type of supermodel who has just quit her job. He is an unsettled man with a girlfriend, whom we never really see. The retired model (who never wears any makeup in her scenes, and dresses quite blandly, but we see magazine covers of her in full model mode) contacts her male friend. She tells him that she wants a baby, and that she wants him to do the job. No strings attached. She will go off with baby, and he never need see her again. He jokingly says that he will do it, but only in the desert. They fly from Montreal, where they live, to Utah, and are soon immersed in an otherworldly land of nothingness. Not exactly fun to watch, but curious viewers might be kept watching. Not for all tastes, certainly. The ending was a disappointment.
Showing on Criterion.
Manhattan Melodrama from 1934 is just that. Starring William Powell, Clark Gable, and Myra Loy, it is a watchable old thing that tells the story of two friends who grow up on different sides of the tracks. One becomes a gangster, and the other the district attorney for New York, and then governor of that state. The acting is good, of course, and the story not as predictable as it sounds. The character played by Gable (the gangster) is likable to the end, and he plays him well. One of the better endings of an early film.
Next followed two quite brilliant docs. Terrence Davies ode to growing up in Liverpool is called Of Time and the City, from 2008. It is a fascinating and very moving experience to watch this film about a city that virtually never makes it to the big screen. There are many indelible images used, including plenty of children playing and surviving the bleakness of their surroundings in blissful unawareness. Davies narrates with his own writing, and also with quotes form Joyce and T. S. Eliot, among others. The images and the reading go beautifully together. I can relate, having grown up in a dirty and very smelly mining town in Northern Ontario, though at the time it was simply my home, where I came from, and who I was. Anyone from out of town who said anything bad about it was off my friendship list for life. Mind you, I was allowed to say things about it, but not people from elsewhere. This is a different kind of documentary film, and we enjoyed it a lot. We have seen one other drama by Davies, and there is another in the queue.
Searching For Mr. Rugoff is a documentary from 2019, about a film promoter who influenced American cinema tastes and helped (inadvertently) kick start the American independent film movement. Rugoff owned and operated a cinema chain with 5 or 6 new York City theatres, and began bringing over European films by Godard, Truffaut, Wertmuller, etc. He is a hard man to describe. He wasn't well liked by most people who knew him, being a tyrant. But he changed cinema newspaper and radio adds, and developed American's taste for non-Hollywood films. He is a man virtually no one remembers or has heard of today, so this film should go a long way to correcting that. This is a truly fascinating film about a very influential man who just disappeared off the radar once he lost his business. A must-see for fans of cinema.
I'll conclude with one more film, halfway between a drama and a documentary. Chan Is Missing is from 1982, directed by Wayne Wang. We have now seen a few other films by Mr. Wang, who tells stories of Chinatown, San Francisco. In this one we get behind the scene glimpses of life there (in b&w) under the guise of a search for a missing person by a friend. The story doesn't mean that much, other than what it tells us about Chinese Americans. Sometimes it is very funny, and other times it is dramatic. Not entirely successful, at least it is very short. Chan becomes the symbol of a search for a true Chinese American.
We are currently watching a documentary by Ulrike Ottinger, about a bizarre Viennese amusement park. More on that later.
Mapman Mike
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