Following in the footsteps of Depeche Mode and Ian Curtises both real and fake, master assassin George Clooney looks weary and conflicted in a sumptuously-shot Europe in the new trailer for Anton Corbijn’s The American, also with Bruce Altman, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli and Violante Placido. I’m in.
Author: KcM
His Kingdom for a Horse.
“In 1914, Joey, a beautiful bay-red foal with a distinctive cross on his nose, is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. With his officer, he charges toward the enemy, witnessing the horror of the battles in France. But even in the desolation of the trenches, Joey’s courage touches the soldiers around him and he is able to find warmth and hope. But his heart aches for Albert, the farmer’s son he left behind. Will he ever see his true master again?“
Uh…ok. What’s wrong with the Lincoln biopic again? With Tintin in heavy post-production, Steven Spielberg announces his next film will be the WWI equine epic War Horse, based on the 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo. Guess it must be an amazing novel.
Whither the Darkness?
“If DAMA’s signal were due to dark matter, Xenon 100 would have seen dozens of events — unless the properties of dark matter are very different than expected, says Lang. ‘If DAMA really does see dark matter, it has to be something very, very exotic, something much different from what we expect, so it’s getting a bit unlikely.‘” A new study casts doubt on apparent discoveries of dark matter particles by the DAMA experiment. Back to MOND, then?
Life in the Great American City.
“In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, self-taught urban scholar and activist Jane Jacobs observed that sidewalks and their users are ‘active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism’ (by “barbarism,” she meant crime) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there — ‘the natural proprietors of the street’ — provide ‘eyes upon the street.’ Jacobs, who died in 2006, would not have been surprised to learn that it was two street vendors who first notified police of the suspicious Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just off Broadway.“
In surveying the recent foiled Times Square car-bomb attempt, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan makes the case for the prescience of Jane Jacobs, and explains why Dick Cheney is, yet again, wrong. (Kaplan also makes a case for security cameras which I’m less sanguine about — but, hey, two out of three ain’t bad.)
Speaking of the Times Square situation, Twitter wag pourmecoffee had some arch responses to the near-disaster: “Somebody saw something in Times Square. If Cheney were still around, he’d torture entire Lion King cast for answers,” and “When we catch this Times Square guy, I assume he will be too scary to try in New York.” Ah, Twitter.
Madam Speaker.
“Late one night in January, as congressional leaders and White House officials tried to narrow their differences on the cost of the health-care bill, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) gave Obama credit. ‘I don’t speak for the House, but this is a good offer,’…’Henry, I agree with you about two things,’ Pelosi interjected. ‘The president put out some numbers, and, number two, you don’t speak for the House.’“
The WP‘s Paul Kane profiles the inimitable Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. “Some historians list her alongside Rayburn and his successor, John W. McCormack, as among the most influential speakers in the annals of Congress.” (What, no love for Joe Cannon? C’mon now, American history doesn’t start in 1945.)
In any case, from my ringside seat here in the belly of the beast, it’s pretty clear: Speaker Pelosi gets things done. “After Scott Brown’s special-election victory…some pushed for a scaled-down version of health-care legislation to draw Republican support. Pelosi balked. In a moment that has come to define her speakership, Pelosi mocked a scaled-down bill as ‘Eensy Weensy Spider’ health care.”
Forget It, Jake. It’s Buenos Aires.
At once a police procedural, political thriller, chaste love story, and remembrance of days past, Secret is a hard movie to categorize, but Dana Stevens’ concise summary at Slate — “Imagine a really long, really awesome episode of Law & Order set in Buenos Aires” — is a pretty good start. The thing is, Law & Order in Argentina, particularly ’round the time of the Dirty War, isn’t as black and white as it usually is in our 42-minute visits to the island realm of Jack McCoy and Adam Schiff. In Buenos Aires, as in life, everything gets complicated.
So, how to explain Secret? Well, I was reminded occasionally here of David Fincher’s Zodiac, in that the lingering case at the heart of the story drives some of our characters slightly mad. (The difference being, here an eventual resolution brings little comfort — There are still guilt, complicity, and consequences to contend with.) There’s a bravura sequence in a futbol stadium in the middle going which recalls some of the extended-shot marvels of Alfonse Cuaron’s Children of Men. There’s definitely some of The Wire‘s workingman’s blues and gallows humor here, and and as one of my friends noted, there’s also a good bit of The Remains of the Day in this story too. Taken as a whole, Secret moves to its own unique rhythm, and it is a film that’s definitely worth catching.
The tonal ambiguity of Secret is reflected in the opening moments, as we first meet Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) — a recently retired ex-lawyer now settling into the writing life — going through the author’s quandary of figuring how to start the book on his brain. First we see and hear that tired romantic cliche, a sad parting at a train station, and a lover chasing down the train. Wait, scratch that. Let’s start with a final breakfast together with the lost lover, and all the details — the honey, the fruit, her floral-print dress, her sun-dappled smile — that can now never be forgotten. No, that’s not it either. So Benjamin falls back to the case file and we witness some brief and dreadful moments in a brutal, bloody rape/homicide. Ugh. That’s no way to start this tale.
Still struggling with his opening chapter, Benjamin visits his old friend and colleague Irene (Soledad Villamil), now a judge in Buenos Aires, who is not particularly enthused to hear that he’s decided to reopen old wounds and write about the tumultuous Morales case. Nonetheless, she gives him an old typewriter (with a broken A) and some excellent advice — Start with what you remember best. And so he does. And soon we find ourselves thirty years in the past, in the small, paper-strewn offices of Ben, Irene, and their semi-functioning alcoholic co-worker Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), just before they pulled the case that transformed their lives.
Particularly by L&O standards, the whodunit aspect of the story is not all that baroque (although it does rely on some potentially clever, potentially dubious po-lice work that helps give the film its name. While I’m on the subject, there’s some implausibly successful good-cop, bad-cop interrogating later on that took me out of the film.) Instead, our investigative trio has much more trouble finding, catching, and holding on to their man after they’ve made him. After all, Argentina between 1976 and 1983 is a slippery place — down is up and up is down, and searching for criminals is no longer a very safe pastime once the criminals are in charge…
I said in my review of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet that “if The Secret in Their Eyes is better, it must be really something.” And, while I think I ever-so-slightly preferred A Prophet in the end — due to the earlier noted implausibilities here, and because this film’s various acts sometimes feel disconnected from each other– my strong advice is: See them both! A Prophet is a young man’s movie, a coming-of-age, learning-the-ropes story of an ascent into power, while Secret is an older man’s tale, a wistful look back at earlier times and the mistakes, regrets, and chance circumstances that haunted a life. And along with Red Riding, Ellsberg, Terribly Happy, and Kick-Ass, they’re both at the top of my 2010 list so far.
Nano > Chemo?
“To create melanin particles tiny enough to squeeze through the liver, lungs, and spleen, Dr. Dadachova and her team layered several coats of synthesized melanin on silica particles. The particles, once injected into mice, clung onto bone marrow, as the researchers intended.“
It’s in the air, for you and me…By way of the always illuminating Dangerous Meta, scientists find a possible way to make people radiation resistant via melanin nanoparticles. “Clinical trials testing the melanized particles on cancer patients may begin two or three years. Dr. Dadachova also surmises that the technique has potential for protecting astronauts against radiation exposure.“
The Back of another Bat Day.
“‘I’m very excited about the end of the film, the conclusion, and what we’ve done with the characters,’ said Nolan. ‘My brother has come up with some pretty exciting stuff.'” The third and final Christopher Nolan Batman film gets a release date: July 20th, 2012. “Unlike the comics, these things don’t go on forever in film and viewing it as a story with an end is useful. Viewing it as an ending, that sets you very much on the right track about the appropriate conclusion and the essence of what tale we’re telling.‘” (FWIW, whatever Batman III has in store, Nolan seems to have closed the door on Robin awhile ago.)
If I Had a Hammer…
Drill Baby…Spill.
“‘There’s no way to wash the oil out of a Spartina marsh,’ said Thomas Shirley, a professor at Texas A&M University’s Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies. Spartina, or cordgrass, is the dominant plant in these marshes. ‘It’s just a big sponge.” Several weeks after the President embraces coastal offshore drilling, reversing a notable campaign pledge — 11 dimensional chess! — the Fates conspire to remind us all why this might not be a very good idea. Along with the 11 missing (and presumed dead) workers, “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that cleanup efforts could end up costing billions of dollars.“
Well, I say “the Fates,” but it sounds like Halliburton may have royally screwed up also. But, hey, maybe they’ll acquire another no-bid clean-up contract for their troubles. And speaking of our old friends on the right, it seems the “Drill Baby Drill!” camp has gone mysteriously silent…for now. [Image via Boston’s Big Picture.]
Update: “The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn’t really a spill: It’s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.” It’s even worse than it sounds, and that’s assuming the wellhead isn’t lost. [Track the spill here.]