Lost in the Cloud Atlas

I don't smoke or drink but after watching the Wachowski's 
"Cloud Atlas" I felt like I was sharing the doobie Tom Hanks 
and Halle Berry passed back and forth during the Luisa Rey 
movement of this filmic symphony.

"Cloud Atlas" is the kind of movie you feel you should dress 
up for - like going to the theater or going to the symphony. And, 
unfortunately, that is the kind of audience it will ultimately draw. 
Atlas requires the type of sophistication and patience a night at 
the opera might require. A film patron will need the forbearance 
and the fortitude to abide as unfamiliar characters and stories
slowly take stage and unfold with no particular urgency.

The viewer is adrift for long passages of this movie, the primary 
flaw being the lack of a notable thru-character to latch on to and 
care about. There are a few linchpins – Doona Bae and Jim Broad-
bent  being particularly striking as the genetically engineered 
fabricant, Sonmi-451, and the vanity publisher and late in life 
swashbuckler, Timothy Cavendish, respectively. Elsewhere 
formidable star power is muted as big name actors such as Tom 
Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Wachowski repertory player, 
Hugo Weaving, frequently disappear under mounds of makeup. 
In fact, one of the delights of the movie is sitting through the end 
credits and being wonderfully surprised by who was playing who.

You have to respect the high ground the Wachowskis are playing 
on and it is doubly nice to see that, as in the Matrix Trilogy, there 
are black people in the future and they fare pretty well.

In the end I must agree with book critic Robert K. J. Kiheffer 
who wrote, "for its pleasures, Cloud Atlas falls short of 
revolutionary." It may not be a masterpiece, but it is a stunning 
canvas.

~rave!

American Gothic Horror Show

Anyone watching the year two reboot of American Horror Story?  I was highly disaffected by the ending of the first cycle which, IMHO, seemed like a cheat - especially after how invested we, the viewers, had become.  We cared.  Cared enough to be disappointed when all the primary characters ended up in kind of a Beetlejuice-esque limbo - without the calypso.  Anywho, last night in the wee hours of the morning, I watched the first two episodes of "Asylum" and, just like Michael Corleone in the Godfather saga, I'm pulled back in again.

Asylum is full of all of the religious and sexual kinks one comes to associate with a Ryan Murphy project - including his PG rated "Glee."  And, of course, there's the monster mash: slasher movies and alien abductions and mad scientist dismemberments and lobotomies all diced up in some cosmic blender.

As in season one Jessica Lang is revelation.  Still exuding a smoldering (if brittle) sexuality at 63, she continues to amaze with her steely precision as an actress. As Mother Superior, she is one twisted sister.

~rave!

The Faces of Te-Boe

The NFL Network is running a documentary on the phenomenon
of Tim Tebow called "The Faces of Tebow."  As a die-hard pro-
fessional football fan and a card-carrying Dr. Who devotee (since
Tom Baker), I am fascinated by the nexus where two lumps of
granite: Tim Tebow and the Face of Boe can come together in a
populist punchline. I love the linguistic gymnastics involved in
"The Faces of Tebow"; I wonder at the mind of the football loving
sci-fi geek whose brain connected the disparate dots to make
such a psychic connection; and I wonder how many die-hard
Tebow fans could (or would) make the extrapolation to the
iconic "wanderer without a home"...and vice versa.

~rave!

Mocking Time

I just finished reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird.  I had always assumed the "mockingbird" too precious to kill was Tom Robinson, the black man falsely accused of raping the white trash daughter of the town's drunken lout.  Imagine my surprise when i discovered the "mockingbird" is, in fact, Boo Radley, the white town idiot and recluse, who has actually committed a crime - murder - but is not arrested or prosecuted - while innocent Tom is not only arrested, threatened with lynching, wrongfully convicted, and eventually shot dead while trying to escape from a prison farm to which he never should have sent in the first place.

No wonder they want their country back.

Is this the End?

This may be the demise of the Scarjo Hotness Meter.  Not because Scarjo (the redoubtable Miss Scarlett Johansson) is not on the 2012 Maxim Hot 100 List - she is, at number 17 - it is because the list is such a joke that ranking women on the list relative to Scarjo's current position is not only ridiculous but irrelevant.

If the editors of Maxim no longer care, why should I?  Who cares that cartoon mom Lois Griffin, number 85, is a +68 on the Hotness Meter?  LOIS GRIFFIN?  I mean, Rihanna is the first black woman on the list and she is number 32 (+15).  Zoe Saldana is 45 (+28) and LaLa Anthony is 93 (+76).

Meagan Good and Gabrielle Union didn't even make the list and, as always, Halle Berry and Rosario Dawson remain TOO HOT for the Scarjo Hotness Meter.

~(no)rave!

Westward Ho!

I am officially old. Girlfriend out of town and I spent a good chunk of my leisure time, yesterday, watching westerns on Encore's western channel. Watched episodes of Wagon Train with a young and virile Clint Eastwood; watched John Wayne and William Holden in The Horse Soldiers; set my DVR to capture The Ballad of Cable Hogue (in my opinion, one of Sam Peckinpah's best movies - not to mention Stella Stevens' and Jason Robards' - although I like him better in How the West Was Won)and the Sabata trilogy (starring Lee Van Cleef and Yul Brenner).

But i had the most fun watching something called 4 for Texas starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. This movie has many charms, prominent among them the decolletage of Anita Ekberg and the legs and everything else of Ursula Andress, but the thing that resonated with me was the performance of Edric Conner, a black man, co-starring as "Prince George," Dean Martin's coach driver and enforcer. The strapping Conner embodies his Prince with a screen dignity that is as rare as it is compelling. Prince George owns his coach and refuses to sell it to Martin - he is agreeable to renting it and his services, however, as he retains ownership of his rig and himself. It is forebear of the innate, self-contained nobility and virility Sidney Poitier will bring to the screen five years hence in movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night - except there is mischievous glint in Conner's eye that we will not witness on screen again until the heyday of Eddie Murphy. I am not a fan of what Sinatra became, but in the early to middle sixties he was on the side of the angels when it came to showcasing black actors on screen.

 ~rave!

Cross My Heart

I am in full NBA playoff mode (two games EVERY night!) but after the games on TNT I have had the pleasure of catching reruns of some of TNTs welcome characters (the night before I saw my first ever episode of Franklin and Bash and I gotta know, is there some new trend where every television law firm is run by an Afro-American MILF - Garcelle Beauvais on Bash and Gina Torres on Suits?).

Late last night I saw the best episode of Leverage I have ever seen.  I am up and down with this series.  Some episodes wow me while others leave me indifferent but last night's "Cross My Heart" episode from season four was great.  Everything from the cold start during a layover at the Cincinnati Airport to the two lives hanging in the balance drama - with several Sting-like twists in between - left me unable to go to bed (although it was already one am and I had to go to work in the morning)and showed Leverage's tight ensemble group at their best.

~rave!