This heartbreaking story of an impoverished Brazilian boyhood, told in Portuguese (in which Carlos was fluent), moved him to the point of tears; it was so reminiscent, he said, of his past.

Some of the sorcerer’s favorite films were The Barefoot Contessa, Bladerunner, The Seventh Seal, and Tora, Tora, Tora. He also loved Grade-D martial arts movies and all war movies. During the illness approaching death, Wallace says Castaneda would only watch war movies. How spiritual is that?

His favorite singers were Javier Solis of Mexico and the Argentinian Boule de Neve.

Lars and the Real Girl accomplishes the seemingly contradictory goals of being not only cozy, homey and heartwarming, but deeply weird.

Ryan Gosling plays a very shy young man who lives in the garage of the old family homestead, now occupied by his brother and sister-in-law. He doesn’t want to live in the house, and doesn’t want to interact with people. He sends away for one of those super-deluxe imitation women, and introduces her as Bianca, his girlfriend who is in a wheelchair and doesn’t speak English.

The local doctor advises letting him live out the delusion. “Bianca’s in town for a reason,” she sagely advises. So the family, and then pretty much everybody, goes along with it.

Older brother Gus is a great character, who observes all the manly decorum, reserve, and dignitas, yet lets his heart have the final say. Karen is the lovely warm pregnant wife who does her best for Lars and Bianca. As the townsfolk adapt, Bianca gets a job, volunteers at the hospital, and becomes a real member of the community.

Meanwhile, the doctor helps Lars work through his problems, with a happy ending for all, and that is meant in the most innocent possible way. There are some lovely moments.

Lars and the Real Girl can be taken two ways: superficially, as a delightful entertainment; and meaningfully, as a commentary on many aspects of society as we know it. This would be an interesting date movie. The conversation it could inspire would certainly be indicative of the attitudes and beliefs of a new friend you’re getting to know.

It would even be a suitable movie for a family evening with the kids. Despite the fact that she’s an anatomically correct sex doll, not much is made of that, and any mild innuendo they might hear, would go over the heads of young kids anyway. Although her default posture seems to be knees-spread, Bianca is never salacious, and after her first appearance, she is customarily dressed in sensible country outfits borrowed from Karen.

I know it’s a comedy, but I can’t help taking this detail seriously – Despite living in a cold climate, and with the price of fuel what it is… these people spend an awful lot of time standing around yakking with the house door open.

Physicist Richard Feynman conceptualized the field of nanotechnology as far back as the 1950s. Many years later, he figured out and explained to Congress that the defective O-rings caused the Challenger space shuttle to explode. He liked to pick locks and play percussion instruments. More than anything, he wanted to visit Tannu Tuva, but it never happened. He was the youngest member of the team that invented the atomic bomb. He eventually gained the reputation of a formidable ladies’ man, but that was later. Infinity is about Richard Feynman as a young kid in love.

The girl’s name is Arline, and the boy charms her by constructing a Mobius strip. (True story: in the late Sixties I fell in love with a guy because he made a Mobius strip, right there in the cafeteria at Niagara County Community College.) Already, in 1939, Feynman is saying, “What do you care what other people think?” which later becomes the title of one of his books.

Dick shows off by challenging a Chinese man with an abacus to a calculating contest. “The harder the problem gets, the better off I am, and the worse off he is.” Okay, maybe it’s nerd love, but Arline listens to Dick’s abstruse math talk, and also does standard girly stuff, longing for a dress in a store window. They get a room, and she helps him pull out the hide-a-bed, a nice filmic shorthand for her enthusiasm about the physical side of a relationship. In 1941, he dances the jitterbug, he’s a clown, and they’re still sneaking off someplace to make love.

When Arline falls prey to a mysterious illness, Dick he treats it as just another science problem, and studies up on what could be wrong. He wins a major scholarship which will be forfeit if they marry. If they don’t marry, they won’t be able to see each other. Arline has maybe seven years to live, and they can’t kiss on the mouth because her sickness is contagious.

When World War Two starts, someone asks Feynman, “Don’t you read the newspapers?” He says, “As a matter of fact, I don’t.” Next thing you know, he’s at Los Alamos helping to invent the A-bomb. His wife is in a hospital 100 miles away. This is not your typical young marriage. The commuting goes on for a couple of years, and Arline is really starting to look bad. Despite this only being 1944, with Robert Bly and the men’s movement decades in the future, we see Feynman out in the woods, drumming and leaping about.

In 1945, it looks like Arline is on the way out. Dick borrows a car and has a hellacious time getting to Albuquerque, but he’s there when she dies. The bomb goes off. Dick gets the shakes.

I’m real happy this film got made. Richard Feynman was a person well worth knowing, and if this film will inspire people to, for instance, get hold of James Gleick’s book Genius, or Freeman Dyson’s book Disturbing the Universe, to learn more about such an extraordinary human, that will be all to the good.

I like the song about the Romans, and the singer with the gap between his teeth. And the bagpipe procession. And the part about the sheep. And the love scene is particularly enticing. And the soaring “Find Your Dreams.” And of course, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” And the bonus lumberjack and Mounties.

There must be 400 musicians and vocalists, giving the silliness full-scale operatic treatment. Among the cast: Mrs. Betty Palin, who alludes briefly to her time in Alaska giving birth to a governor, and Biggus Dickus makes a cameo appearance.

Two federal marshals are on a boat, headed for the institute for criminally insane, located on an island. Once landed, they have to hand over firearms, and are told the rules they must observe. Ward C is for the worst homicidal maniacs, and, only has 27 inmates, but it’s a Civil War-era fort about as big as the Pentagon. (The sensible thing would be to section off part of the huge building for prison use, and shut off access to the unused portion, which in this case would be the greater majority of the interior space. It’s a scandalous waste of tax dollars. But it has to be that way, for the numerous stalking and chase scenes that take place in the corridors and dungeons.) (The entire institution has seemingly hundreds of staff and employees, for 60-some patients. Somebody’s congresscritter needs a talking-to.)

Leonardo DiCaprio plays marshal Teddy Daniels, who has a serious case of PTSD, complete with flashbacks and hallucinations, as a result of being a liberator of concentration camps during the war. One of the administrators of the institute for the criminally insane is a former German citizen, so that gets Daniels’s back up.

The other chief shrink is Dr. John Cawley, played by Ben Kingsley. It’s nice to have such a good face that baldness doesn’t matter. He explains to the marshals about the escaped patient, which is what they came here to investigate. She’s gone, “as if she evaporated,” and her case psychiatrist left the island for vacation this morning. My first thought is, the chief shrink killed her. Then it gets really complicated, a tricky psychological thriller.

The storm blows out the phone lines. The staff is called together for interrogation, which seems kind of risky, because who’s watching the inmates? Daniels quizzes a nurse about group therapy the previous night. She schools him about how they deal with a lot of really dramatic situations, so group therapy “usually isn’t a big part of our day.”

Everybody who works at the place pretty much stonewalls and stymies the investigation. Daniels threatens to call in the FBI, and tells his partner the main reason he came here was to blow the whistle on the mind control experiments being conducted. And the institution is funded by a special grant from the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Top-secret evil needs to be exposed. Then it gets even more complicated. There’s a lot of derring-do, including the scaling of cliffs by a federal marshal who is better than Spiderman at clinging to vertical surfaces.

How did the entire Board of Overseers manage to get to the island in the hurricane? Around that point was when I started to catch on. But at the end, I still wasn’t sure.

Reason watched: Andy Garcia, Ellen Burstyn, Philip Seymour Hoffman. But mostly Andy Garcia (sigh.)

Michael (Andy Garcia) is an airline pilot, Alice (Meg Ryan) works for the school system, and they have two little girls. They’re both basically very nice people. Alice is a helper, a counselor to teenagers. It’s no wonder she’s burned out and flirting with trouble. For somebody in a position of trust, she lets herself say some indiscreet things. A girl is looking for an excuse to accuse a boy of sexual harassment, and Alice sarcastically suggests that she entice the boy into trying to lift up her skirt. Definitely not cool. But she basically cares, that’s why she got into this line of work. She suffers from the frustration of realizing that some of these kids are beyond help.

When Alice stays out late drinking with a colleague, the excuse to go drinking isn’t the only reason. The friend needs to talk, and Alice wants to help. But she also causes Michael to miss a flying assignment, which is a serious mark against him. Things are starting to come apart.

Sometimes Michael is drawn into Alice’s wild spontaneity, and probably on some level convinces himself that he’s too buttoned-up and conventional, and it’s good for him to have a partner who’s a bit crazy. Their anniversary seems to bring Alice’s discontent to a crisis point. She leads Michael into helping her vandalize a neighbor’s car. This is some over-the-top behavior.

They go on vacation to de-stress. It’s night, and the most gorgeous man in the world, her very own husband, is rowing Alice around on a lake surrounded by sparkly lights. When drunk, Alice is not only bubbly and wildly cute, she can also be a real asshole. She’s standing up in the boat, taking a pugilistic stance, and of course falls in the water and of course he has to dive in and rescue her. Some romantic evening! Consequently, Alice promises to stop drinking so much. Hah.

Michael is such a cool guy. He says ALL the right things. It’s just that he doesn’t know when to stop. The part about responding beautifully when called upon, helping when help is needed and requested, he’s got that right. But he can’t stop there, and is always jumping in to help in situations where the very thing that pisses her off so much is the presumption that he knows better.

I understand Alice’s exasperation, because of an incident that happened. I was in a public place once with a supremely nice guy – very much like Michael in the movie. A stranger did something incredibly rude, behavior I had encountered in the past, and had made myself a vow never to tolerate again. And here it was. The jerk needed to be told what was what, and I was destined to be the one to tell him. If it was just me, I’d have cussed the stranger up one side and down the other.

But the nice guy asked me to let it go, so I did. We walked away. But my sense of mission was thwarted. I wanted a confrontation, wanted to be Woman Hear Me Roar. Of course, on some level, I also really didn’t want the nice guy to see me transmogrify into a raging harpy. But all this anger was still boiling around in me. I didn’t want somebody else to step in and decide what my response to a grievous provocation should be. I didn’t want to be protected by being gently led away. I understand Alice not wanting to be calmed down.

By the way, with such a horrible mother, how did Michael grow up to be so nice? That was surely a triumph of reincarnation over current-life family. If environmental influence were all, Michael would be even more of a mess than his wife Alice. And toward Alice, his mom is the classic poisonous mother-in-law. A quietly persistent bitch is worse than an occasionally flaring-up bitch any day of the week.

Michael arranges for the best alcoholic rehab money can buy. When Alice gets out, she doesn’t want to make love, and doesn’t want anything to do with him outside of bed, either. It’s not fair. That’s one of the horrible things that relatives of addicts need to face. You tried your best, and it still wasn’t enough. The unfairness can kill. He’s an enabler, but only in the most gentle, loving, best-intentioned way. He wants so badly to help, and winds up helping badly. Their troubles are not over. In fact, it gets so bad he has to move out. His good-byes to the children are heart-rending.

Michael comes to hear Alice’s six-month sober speech at AA, and they wind up snogging in the middle of the coffee break. You can tell that they will reconcile.

Loose end – But doesn’t he still have to move to Denver anyway to keep his job? So, does this imply that the family will move to Denver? It would certainly be great to get away from the toxic mother-in-law. Or are we to assume he’s going to take the other career alternative they had discussed, where he stays based in San Francisco and goes to work for a different airline, starting over at the bottom of the seniority ladder? Inquiring minds want to know.

The script was co-written by Al Franken, who had some experience with Al-Anon. He told Entertainment Weekly, ”I really began to understand about people’s pain and suffering and about how families that look normal aren’t.”

“This is Hollywood. We don’t like liars.”
Knocked Up

“I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I wish it were enough.”
Johnny Skidmarks

“There’s something about collaboration that brings out the worst in writers.”
Starting Out in the Evening

“You’re still the nicest person I ever met, even if you’re not dying.”
The Good Life

“You mustn’t kid Mother, dear; I was a married woman before you were born.”
The Women

In House of Games, written and directed by David Mamet, it’s the climactic confrontation scene. Mike starts out thinking he’s still scamming Maggie. Soon, however, he comes to understand that she knows everything, and her intention toward him at this point is potentially homicidal. You can see the realization dawn on him, and he says,
“You’re a bad pony, and I’m not gonna bet on you.”

“I like it. I want more.”
Christopher Walken in Brainstorm. For some reason the delivery of that line just knocked my socks off.

“What fresh hell is this?”
The character is quoting Dorothy Parker, though it sounds like Shakespeare.
War of the Roses

“You can dance to anything.”
A Home at the End of the World

Kid to mother “Why can’t you make anybody love you?”
Later she tells him, “It’s not my job to make somebody love me. Love isn’t a trick you play on somebody.”
The Buddy System

A falsely imprisoned alleged terrorist, to a fellow convict -
“You’re better off being guilty. Al least you get some respect.”
In the Name of the Father

“If you saw that on television you would laugh.”
Knocked Up

Joey is in the hospital, victim of an attempted murder by a hired killer his wife hired because of his constant cheating. His mother visits, scolds him, hits him.
Joey: “Hey, Mama, please, I got a bullet in my head.”
Mama (swats him again): “You should have two bullets in your head. Three bullets. Four bullets.”
I Love You to Death

The cop thinks a killer is putting on airs, and takes him down a peg.
“You’re about as mysterious to me as a blocked toilet is to a fuckin’ plumber.”
Insomnia

“We came over to sit. That’s what people do when tragedy strikes. They come over and sit.”
Lars and the Real Girl

A Gypsy to a cop who is threatening him -
“By jeez, you’re a brave man. I wouldn’t argue with you sir, I wouldn’t. For you’re a brave man always.”
Into the West

“When you throw a stone into a lake, it’s not happy until it hits the bottom. Make sure he doesn’t drag us all down with him.”
Into the West

“You want me to stop smoking pot because there’s an earthquake every ten years?”
Knocked Up

“If my life were a movie, this would be the end.”
The Good Life

“I lied to you when I said that I would never lie to you again.”
The Good Life

“If we don’t meet, this allows the possibility that it could have been perfect.”
Bad Timing

about the French-
“They have a whole relationship to dairy products which I don’t understand.”
French Kiss

The name by which I first knew this film isn’t what appears on the picture above. But it’s the same. Actually, it’s been known by several titles:

Tabor ukhodit v nebo (the approximate Russian)
Gypsies are Found Near Heaven
Queen of the Gypsies
Gypsy Queen
Gypsy Camp Vanishes into Thin Air
Gypsy Camp Vanishes Into the Heaven
Gypsy camp vanishes into the blue
Gypsies Go to Heaven

I saw The Gypsy Camp at the Fox Venice Theater, so it was in the late ’70s or early ’80s. My first thought was, “I can’t live without this music.” But of course it was not available. Movies on videotape were possessed only by people who owned editing studios. And it was made in Russia.

Years later, when VCRs got popular, I even wrote to the Russian embassy to see if they could help me get a copy of the film, or at least of the soundtrack. No luck. And after a whole lot more time, when I finally got online (years later than most of my contemporaries), I searched for The Gypsy Camp, but no luck then either.
.
Finally I found a press release about how hundreds of Russian films were scheduled to be released on portable media. They were gradually being converted, one by one, and according to the schedule, the one I wanted would be released in a couple of years, in the summer of 2004. But then when I checked again in the fall of 2004, it wasn’t available yet.

When it finally came out, the only source was a pretty dicey-looking outfit that I didn’t want to give my credit card number to. Eventually, it showed up on eBay, but only on DVD, which I didn’t have the technology for, but I bought it anyway, figuring I’d go over to a friend’s house and watch it. Months went by and it never seemed to be the right time for that. Then one day my housemate brought in a DVD player

So finally, I watched The Gypsy Camp again, and yes, you can repeat a peak experience. It is so damn gorgeous to look at and the music is deliriously wonderful – it’s every bit as good as I remembered it being 25 years ago or more. Just fabulous.

Of course there are plenty of parallels between Gypsies and the homeless folk and vehicle dwellers I knew from Venice Beach. They only own what they can carry, the food supply is undependable, they have to deal with the weather as best they can, and put up with criminals in their midst. And of course they can be killed with impunity. The way the soldiers in the movie treat the Gypsies could be a template for the LAPD and their ilk, in their treatment of the homeless. Go in and bust up their shelters, throw their bedding and other possessions in a pile and burn everything, put pressure on everybody in the whole group so they will betray anyone the authorities are looking for, make them keep moving, provide no public toilets and then bust them for pissing in the alley, provide no washing facilities and then tell them they stink, and on and on.

Good Hair (2009)

“Weave sex is a little awkward,” an actress named Nia Long says. “Keep your hands on the titties,” is the advice given by the barbershop men.

If I were a sociology teacher I’d show this movie in my class and we would have plenty enough to talk about for a whole semester. Definitely more to it than meets the eye.

Chris Rock has delightful spontaneous wit.
Al Sharpton is cool.
Ice-T is cool.
Maya Angelou is cool.

The dancers and models we see here are of course in excellent shape, but the ordinary citizens, the folks interviewed by in barbershops and beauty parlors, are so overweight. I’ve been studying up on obesity in America, and it really does seem like we’re being secretly poisoned by something inescapable.

It’s wrong to be judgmental or discriminatory against anybody because of their size, but I’m pretty sure that people who are 100 pounds overweight, don’t want to be, any more than I want to be however many pounds overweight I am. And medical care for the various conditions that occur alongside obesity, well, who can afford any kind of medical care any more? And how beautiful can a person feel, even with a $3,500 hair weave, when carrying around an extra 100 pounds?

A Staggering Work of Smart Humor, Yet Serious as a Heart Attack

Rev. Billy is an activist preacher whose road show choir sings out in protest against the commercialization of Christmas. They do performance art, infiltrating Times Square or the Mall of America, where they prophesy the Shopocalypse. Finally the holy flash-mob winds up at Disneyland, home of the Antichrist, aka Mickey Mouse.

The average American spends 5 hours a week shopping, so some poor bastard is out there shopping 9 hours a week to make up for me. Some people are clinically addicted to shopping. (One such addict calls herself a shopping bulimic, always buying a mountain of stuff she can’t afford and then returning it.)

The action is interspersed with interviews with real people, and Python-esque animations, one with a sound effect that is somewhere between a Latin liturgical chant and an auctioneer’s spiel. Sometimes Rev. Billy gets arrested. And when the Stop Shopping Choir goes caroling, look out!