Matt and Cath come to Flint!

 Matt and Cath seem to be doing the complete North American tour, taking in all the great cities of New York, Toronto, Chicago... and of course, Flint!  It was great to see them - I think the last time I saw either must have been at least a decade ago.  They got to sample all the delights that Flint has to offer - the Starlite Diner, Paul's Pipe Shop... and I'm sure there are others I've forgotten.

Sand lake, virtually deserted

This summer, the state of Michigan, in their infinite wisdom, has taken it upon itself to undertake renovations at our fave parks. During the Summer. When everyone wants to use them. As a concession, they have deigned to open up Seven Lakes on the Weekend, but the campsite is closed for the foreseeable. That actually means that we can hike to the lake by the campsite (which is the best one for swimming, because it's clear, deep and weed-free) and more-or-less have it to ourselves. So we do.

 

Old chairs, new chairs

 We finally grew ashamed of our cat-shredded furniture, so we bought new versions, pictured here.  Sylvester is asleep in his new donut house, exhausted from all the antimacassar tossing he's been doing.

One day we'll get rid of that piano and the porch won't be so crowded.  If only Thomas were here to serenade the goldfish.

Walking by the grand ruined schools

 

Film review: Close-Up (1990)

 

By Abbas Kiarostami, the director of Where is the friend's house, this one is considerably different, less immediately enjoyable and more experimental, but definitely profound.  As with that former film, all of the performers are non-professionals, the difference being that they are playing themselves.  In fact, stretches of the film are straightforward documentary, mostly of back and forth between a (very reasonable and tolerant) judge, the defendant, and witnesses.  The only acting is done in flashbacks, portraying events referred to in the course of the testimony.

The film opens with a reporter in the front seat of a taxi, with two soldiers in the rear, excitedly describing to the driver how he has stumbled across the case that will make his reputation.  The taxi driver, who is an ex-pilot, listens tolerantly, even though he's never heard of the film director involved (doesn't have time to see films) 

nor of the famous reporters the reporter wants to emulate.  Turns out the story is one of impersonation.  The family to whose house they are driving has invited in a man claiming to be Iranian auteur Mohsen Makhmalbaf, but that they had realized was not.  They hadn't revealed to him that they knew, so the reporter would be surprising him.  When they find the house, at the end of a dead-end street (behind some rather grand gates), 

first the reporter goes in, then he sends the patriarch out to get the soldiers, and then they emerge with the impostor, and all except the reporter pile into the taxi to go to the police station.  The reporter cannot go along because he realizes he needs a tape recorder and frantically searches from house to house to find one.  Then the opening credits roll.

After the credits, it is weeks later, the reporter's article has appeared in a magazine and come to the attention of Kiarostami, who comes to the jail to interview the impostor, a man called Hossein Sabzian.  He later gets permission to film the trial from a rather bemused official (who thinks there are much more exciting trials to film).  It transpires that the whole thing started when a member of the Ahankhah family (in the reenactment it is the mother, but I think it was really the daughter - perhaps she was too shy to act in the reenactment) sat next to Hossein on a bus and noticed that he was reading the screenplay for Makhmalbaf's film The Cyclist. She initiated a conversation with him because she was also a cineaste, asking where he got the screenplay from.  He offers to give it to her and sign it because "I wrote it."  From there matters escalate, until Hossein is a regular visitor because he has the son and daughter convinced that they are to be actors in his new production, and he has them rehearsing.  When the family work out that he is not who he says he is (when the son congratulates him for The Cyclist winning a prize at a film festival, something reported in the paper, but of which he is clearly unaware), they begin to suspect that his constant entreaties to come and see one of his films at a cinema that is not the nearest one showing it are a ploy to lure everyone out of the house so it can be burgled by his accomplices.  Hossein is most indignant when this suspicion is raised in the courtroom, so the judge tries to winkle out of him his true motivation for the subterfuge.  

And the truth is poignant: he is a poor man, to whom nobody listens, but when he becomes Makhmalbaf the family eagerly listens to him.  They give him money, yes, but that is beside the point.  Furthermore he has a vision of his life as an artistic one, and he becomes part of the world of movies that he loves so deeply.

The trial as a whole is surprisingly moving.  The judge is genuinely curious as to Hossein's motivations, but also a calming presence, repeatedly reminding Hossein when he gets indignant about the theory about him casing the Ahankhah household that he is not accused of that, only of fraud.  He soothes the ruffled feathers of the family and more-or-less talks them into forgiving Hossein (not that the mother needed much encouragement).  It's a vision of a gentler justice system than we're used to, and certainly than we expect from the stereotypes of Iran.  (And it's a real legal court, not a religious court.  In fact, religion seems to play very little role in either of the Kiarostami films we've seen so far.)  The cherry on top is that Kiarostami arranges for the real Makhmalbaf to meet up with Hossein, something that moves him so much that he collapses sobbing into the director's arms, who touchingly consoles him.  He asks him which he prefers being "Sabzian or Makhmalbaf?" to which Hossein just says "I was tired of being me."  Then they both hop on to the director's motorbike as the film cameras follow at a respectful distance, capturing their conversation - but only intermittently.  We don't know if this was just an unplanned equipment failure or some metacommentary, revealing the artificiality of the whole affair.  But they pick up a flowering plant along the way 

and wind up at the Ahankhah family home, where Hossein, sobbing again, gets to apologize, and the family finally get to meet the real director (although I don't know if he agreed to have them in his next film).  Strange, experimental and, while it look like it cost approximately $100 total to film, very thought-provoking and moving.  Apparently Iranian cinema (in marked contrast with, say, Nigerian or Indian cinema) is the cinema of the quotidian.  The Mirror was not an outlier, it turns out.  Now we have to track down The Cyclist...

New Trails at Pierce Park

I got Frederick off the couch for a trot down the road to Pierce Park.  Somebody has been embellishing the street signs:

 The re-wilding of the former golf course continues.  We entered in the now blocked-off-for-cars side entrance and found a new trail, all laid out with bark chips, branching off from the road.  It follows a creek and it's lovely!

It eventually brings you round to the golf course, where new trails have been mown through the overgrowth (which is helpful, because the main one running round the perimeter has got a bit flooded).

We got home and I discovered that Frederick had stubbed his toe quite badly (the blood!) with nary a complaint.  So I had him soak it.  What a trooper!

Film review: Where is the friend's house? (1987)

This film manages both to be heartwarming and more anxiety inducing than most thrillers.  The stakes should be pretty low: the essential plot is very simple - an eight-year-old boy realizes he has taken home his classmate's exercise book as well as his own, knowing that the same classmate is under threat of being expelled if he fails (again) to do his homework in the correct exercise book.  

The problem is, our hero Ahmed, lives in the village of Koker, while his friend lives in another village (Pomphet?).  What is more, when he tells his mother about this she doesn't see the urgency, and wants him to stay home and complete his homework (although, when he tries to do this, she keeps interrupting him with various demands, usually involving helping to settle the baby).  Eventually he sneaks off under cover of getting bread.  We then watch him trot up and down over at least two hills, through scenery (Northern Iran) that is both bucolic and alien, 

into a town that could easily double for a fantastical Star Wars location, with its almost organic winding alleys (that sometimes have cows coming through them) and higgledy-piggledy steps.  What Ahmed realizes very soon is that Pomphet is much larger than he expected (in fact, divided into named districts) and he has no idea where his friend lives.  

He tries asking various adults and they are of varying degrees of uselessness 

(the degree to which the adults, almost without exception, just don't listen to him is positively maddening), until he is informed that his friend, Mohamed Rema Nematzadeh, has departed just five minutes hence to Koker. "But I'm from there!" he says, baffled.  Nonetheless, off he trots back to Koker.  There he is waylaid by his Grandfather (who has the scariest teeth you've ever seen) who wants to know where he's been, and who has firm beliefs about training the young, in the pursuit of which he sends Ahmed to get cigarettes.  We get an interlude (the vast majority of the film just follows our young hero, who is astonishing) where Grandfather discusses his views with a friend, 

and we see a door salesman plying his trade with various people, until Ahmed (unsuccessful) returns, and becomes convinced that the door salesman is his friend's father (because his last name is Nematzadeh).  But (in a running theme) the man, after taking a page from the friend's notebook (to Ahmed's horror) refuses to listen to Ahmed's questions and just sets off back to Pomphet on his donkey.  So back again heads the indefatigable Ahmed.  But, alas, it turns out that this is the wrong Nematzadeh.  Some more wandering brings Ahmed to the home of an old carpenter, who claims to know everybody and have made all the doors that the door salesman is now busily replacing, as well as the crib that Ahmed's own father was rocked in.  He promises to take Ahmed to the right house.  He is, at last, an adult who actually listens, and they make a very charming pair (even if he does a lot more talking than listening, mostly about doors and windows).  However, night is falling, and he moves very slowly...  

Will Ahmed make it?  Well, remember the heartwarming and the nervewracking?

This film is like a cool drink of water.  Watch it when you've become too engrossed in the news, to remind yourself that the lives and concerns of children are universal, and it doesn't matter if you're growing up in what we would regard as extreme poverty in a newly-established theocratic state, the things that matter to you are understandable to anybody anywhere.  The scenery is stunning, the snapshot of life in Northern Iran is fascinating, and the children (not just Ahmed but his friend, who cries real and heartbreaking tears) are both beautiful, with gigantic soulful eyes (and cute freckles) and wonderfully natural (everybody in the film is a non-actor).  Lovely.

Flooding in Flushing

 

Film review: Barry Lyndon (1975)

Once the red-headed stepchild of Kubrick's oeuvre, this film has suddenly become widely lauded as his masterpiece.  The truth is somewhere in the middle, naturally.  What cannot be denied is that this is absolutely ravishing to look at.  Apparently Kubrick used cameras that only NASA previously had access to, in particular so that he could film without using artificial light (unless you count candles).  There's a website about film with the name "every frame a picture" and it is no exaggeration to say that about this film.  Some of the shots inside the many stately homes that feature absolutely look like Old Masters.  

Furthermore, the costumes and the all-round attention to detail (as one would expect from a perfectionist like Kubrick) are also meticulous (not to mention ridiculous - did they really dress like that?  Ornate neck-coverings for the men, swooping decolletage for women of all ages?  Hair and hats that put modern-day Ascot to shame?).  But the people are certainly hard to love.  Ryan O'Neal, never widely regarded as an actor with range is here not exactly given much range.  His character, initially called Redmond Barry, and only after marrying into money becomes the titular Barry Lyndon, remains a petulant man-child throughout, from his initial infatuation with his cousin 

and the duel that inevitably results, through his disastrous tantrum at his (admittedly obnoxious) stepson and the duel that inevitably results.  

There are a few sympathetic side-characters, but they step in and out of the story quickly, as Barry completes his first-half rise and post-intermission fall, through it all showing pluck and cunning but no moral character and certainly no wisdom.  The story is Thackeray - the novel before Vanity Fair, although the novel is narrated by Barry himself, whereas here we have an omniscient narrator (Michael Hordern, instantly recognizable to those of us raised on his Paddington - oh, and completing the 70s British TV theme, Leonard Rossiter features at the beginning of the film, 

just as in 2001) who gives away events before they happen and makes Barry appear as one whose fate was long-settled.

I must say I enjoyed the first half more, perhaps understandably, as Barry, forced to flee his home after his first duel in which (he believes) he has killed his cousin's rich suitor (in fact the death is faked, precisely to get rid of Barry, because the family needs the cousin to marry into money), and, after having all his money and his horse stolen, 

joins up to fight for the English in the Seven Years War.  

He is certainly brave enough (although it's hard to know exactly what he really did given that he's an unreliable narrator in the novel) and the method of walking slowly towards volleys of musket fire is not for the faint-hearted, but quickly deserts, and after a brief stay with a young mother whose husband is away in the war, is caught out in his disguise as an officer and conscripted into the Prussian Army.  After bravely saving an officer, he is further conscripted to spy on a libertine Gambler suspected of being an Irishman in disguise, at which Barry reveals himself as a fellow Irishman and instead teams up to fleece the nobles of Europe.  

This eventually leads him into contact with the young wife of a disabled British nobleman (the ethereal Marisa Berenson), 

whom he seduces just in time for the nobleman to die.  End of Part I.  

The second half is his slow descent.  He is openly unfaithful to the wife until his mother, whom he has brought over from Ireland, reminds him that he has no money of his own, at which he reconciles.  However, he is genuinely besotted with their son, 

who of course is therefore doomed, plunging him into drunken misery 

and leading to his eventual expulsion from England.

What is the lesson of the film?  That is unclear.  Thackeray was a sharp critic of war and the class system, but Barry, as Becky Sharp, meets a tragic fate while trying to buck said system.  But at the same time, it's not like he doesn't deserve a lot of what happens to him.  He is driven by his appetites at more or less every turn, learning very little along the way.

But... if you thought Amadeus was gorgeous, this may very well have it beaten.