On Sunday, the League convened for an all-too-rare – although much more frequent in Seattle than most other burgs – screening of the wide-screen amazement device entitled Lawrence of Arabia.

I’ve seen this film three times now in 70mm at the Cinerama, and each time, my head spins for days afterward, usually on new topics. For example, since the last time I had seen this, I participated in a couple of film shoots, and it clearly altered the way I was looking at the film. The clearest example of this was in my electric awareness of the frequent use of one-take shots in the film, shots set up by the film crew with the clear knowledge that the first-take of a shot in a setup would in some way always be visually superior to any subsequent takes.

The best examples of these are in some early shots of the journey to Feisal’s camp, in which Lawrence and his guide traverse sand which has clearly not been previously marked by earlier takes, and in a shot depicting a lost Hadith raider, stumbling across an ‘impassable’ desert just before dawn. As the camera catches the actor, the actual sun appears, camera left but very much in the center of attention, a burning sliver above the horizon. What a shot! It defies the imagination to consider the difficulties the setup poses, and yet it’s clear that the result is wholly worthwhile.

Seeing this again, now nearly five years into the Iraq war, shifted meanings within the film one more time. Now I knew several of the physical sites mentioned in the film as places referenced at one time or another in reportage of America’s campaigns in the desert, not least of which is the name of the film provide for Sherif Ali and Prince Feisal’s tribe, the Hadith. It rings with the sound of a town in Iraq: Haditha.

Watching the film directly after an afternoon spent in the company of Roman sculpture was interesting, too. Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq were all under Roman dominion after Pompey’s campaigns, so these places have an arguably closer tie to the culture of Rome and Greece than we do here in the New World. In the film, the characteristically arabesque decorative surfaces and architectural details owe much to the late-period art of the Roman empire.

It should be noted, though, that the film’s interiors were all shot in Spain; while it had been hoped that Jordan and in particular Petra might be used as location scenes, illness disrupted the plans. I’m guessing that informed the choice of the stone city as a location in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

As the League was in attendance, after-film imbibery led to a number of questions and I chased a few down.

Picking up a few threads:

The wikipedia article includes some interesting notes on casting – Marlon Brando was considered for Lawrence, and Laurence Olivier was originally set for Feisal.

Also, I had said that the film was shot in Tunisia (as was some of Star Wars). I was incorrect. The film was set to shoot in Jordan but mostly was shot in Spain and Morocco.

As Lawrence arrives at Feisal’s camp, it is under bombardment by a pair of Turkish biplanes. Much to my frustration, I was unable to ID either the planes actually used by the filmmakers or the model of airplane they had been dressed to resemble.

The planes were DeHavilland 82 Tiger Moths, a 2-seat british trainer of the 1930s, dressed as Rumpler CIVs, sez here.

Finally, for years I have associated the journalist character in the film with Lowell Thomas, correctly (note lower left pic in first section of the page linked to). Here is a link to the Google books result for Lowell’s “With Lawrence in Arabia,” oddly treated as an under-copyright work although it was published in 1924.

For years beyond my certain knowledge of Lawrence, I have associated Lowell Thomas with a Saturday afternoon matinee show shown on WGN Channel 9 Chicago throughout my childhood. I had thought he hosted the show into his dotage. I was entirely mistaken. The actual host of Family Classics was a longtime WGN employee named Frazier Thomas. I still think it’s possible that Family Classics showed Lawrence in a bowdlerized form; the show did introduce me to more than one of the great masterworks of midcentury Technicolor spectacle.

We spent Saturday out and about, getting starter plants and seeds for the garden after starting our day at SAM’s twin traveling exhibits, The Gates of Paradise (hurry, it closes April 6) and Roman Art from the Louvre, through May 11.

It was wonderful to see the Ghiberti panels so intimately. Unfortunately, as the Louvre show is a certified blockbuster, they use timed ticket entry and I was unable to head directly to the panels for some leisurely, intense looking prior to joining the jostling masses one floor up.

The Roman show is flat-out terrific, with a couple of minor exhibit-based quibbles. First, audio-guide numbers are sparsely sited and hard to see, leading to much poking and jostling as people try to figure out what entry they should listen to as they observe this patch of mosaic over someone’s shoulder or that left eye of a head between those two tall persons standing very very close to the sculpture.

The effect is to divert attention away from the art and artifacts, both for the persons desperately seeking a layer of interpretive information to mediate their looking and for other members of the onlooking throng as the seekers dodge in and out of the knots of would-be viewers. Especially in chilly Seattle where personal space is so important, that produces room after room of people uncomfortably twisting away from one another, casting their eyes about in order to mee no other’s gaze, backing away from that tiny grey-haired woman only to bump into the gladiator-huge man standing directly behind your head.

And that, of course, is the other issue. Certainly, by attending the show at midday on a Saturday, we almost certainly experienced the galleries at maximum attendance. That maximum, to put it simply, was too much. The art was not satisfactorily observable. It was truly impossible to look at any one object long enough to develop the least moment of concentrated observation.

However, the objects in the show and the arrangement of them in relation to one another were really quite stunning, well worth another trip at a less trafficked hour, and I surely intend to return. Vivian especially enjoyed comparing the information and nonsense (surprisingly little of that, really) obtained from our relatively recent viewing and appreciation of
the HBO miniseries Rome, which included historical accuracy as a primary production goal.

Viv’s favorite pieces were the twin full-figure sculptures of Augustus and Livia that announce the main body of the show, in a room mostly occupied with portrait sculptures of the family of that founding dynasty of the Empire. I’m not certain what my favorite was, but the amazing mosaic panel in the introductory section of the show may be the one I’d choose.

Given my recent home projects, I would have loved it if a bit more time had been invested in information concerning both formal residential gardens and kitchen gardens in the Empire, but obviously that is outside the scope of the show. Still, I’d like to know about Roman spices and herbs, for example. My intuition is that many of the European herbs we commonly use today such as lavender and oregano would have been in the garden and in the larder, while most Asian and Oceanic herbs (such as black peppercorns) would have been unknown.

Afterwards we drove all the way up to Sky Nursery in Shoreline and returned with a wide array of starter veggies and flowers. Despite all my pissing and moaning I have been forced into book-larnin’ to grok the intrickasees of the planter’s art, which appears to revolve, in spring, about the last frost date for your area. Hereabouts it is March 26.

Thus, most of my flats will go out the weekend before the 26 while I hope that the cold won’t come in those few days. Over the next week I’ll be starting sprouters inside, too.

One unexpected wrinkle is that the books seem to suggest I should wait until mid April to start working on outside tomatoes, which is a pain in the butt from my perspective – I moved my plants in over the winter and they have grown into enormous, vining monstrosities that make it hard to move around in the solarium. I guess I’ll just cage them inside for now and disentangle them from the furniture and so forth.

(Reposting a Leaguemail to ensure dissemination)

Fellow fezzes:

Spencer (note Cha-Cha League headshot), myself, and the lately-befezzed (on the Lake Union jaunt) Agent Cooper are planning to take in one of the 70mm Sunday matinees of Lawrence of Arabia at the Cinerama. Danelope has noted his availability as well.

March 16 or March 23 are the Sunday showings, at noon. My preference is March 16. Please advise!

As the fez carries a peculiarly negative significance in realtion to this film in its’ association with a character portrayed by the father of Miguel Ferrer, I declare this outing fez optional and come one, come all.

Spencer, Coop, and myself have all seen this film at the Cinerama before in 70mm, and it is really among the most amazing moviegoing experiences one might have. Spencer and I also caught a super-clean 70mm 2001 there a few years back, and while I caught many compelling details I had missed in lower rez incarnations, I would personally say that Lawrence in 70mm dominates 2001 in 70mm.

You may recall my thoughts in 2004 or in 2002.

Apparently, Tom will recall them with especial clarity; Manuel may take some selling.

Holy shit, how long have we known each other?

Spencer screened the oddball 1929 silent/sound hybrid The Mysterious Island at NWFF tonight, and according to his presentation notes, the film was budgeted at over $4m – the equivalent, according to this, of from $40m to $400m today.

You could, as they say, see the money on the screen, in huge and elaborate sets and miniatures and in a peculiar grand finale involving what must have been a thousand midgets in rubber suits.

All in all, a film I found worth seeing, but one which must be characterized as muddled in construction. Other folks have written about it at length.

Tonight I foisted 1948’s Act of Violence on Viv over dinner, which largely drove her to bed. I was quite taken with the location shots in Glendale and one presumes Pasadena, the wartime fallout plot, and the lady leads, a very young but no less striking Janet Leigh and a ripe – even naturalistic – Mary Astor.

According to that link up there, director Zinnemann followed this noir up eventually with From Here To Eternity. There’s no beach in this flick, the architecture is superior, the women are better looking, and the moralizing is less obstreperous. Oh, and this film’s in black and white.

It’s time to get my mind around No Country for Old Men, which of these three films remains for me the slipperiest. I’m a long-time admirer of the Coens’ work, Raising Arizona excepted (note adoption subtheme! interesting!).

No Country feels materially different from all their preceding films, a result of the filmmakers’ easing off their previously aggressively mannered style. Despite this major shift in approach the film retains themes and moods from three precursors in particular: Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and Fargo.

Blood Simple, the Coens’ first commercial feature, shares the Texas setting and the sense of unsavory doins coexisting with an everyday sunlit world of small towns and big spaces. Miller’s Crossing, possibly the filmmakers’ first attempt at a major work, is focused on a power struggle between 1920s gangsters in which the gangsters’ nighttime world of firefights and speakeasies actually completely trumps the day-to-day world. Fargo, of course, presents a Minnesota sherriff struggling to disentangle a botched and ill-starred kidnapping plot.

All three films share with No Country (as well as the majority of all the other films by the team) a deeply misanthropic view of the world, which endears them mightily to me. However, all three present a traditional resolution to their events even as the films clearly present a disturbing and amoral outcome of the plots they convey. In No Country, the assassin’s unexpected wreck fills the role of the moral resolution, even as it remains ambiguous. Tommy Lee Jones’ retiring sheriff sits at his table and recounts a dream of his father leading the way to the underworld over a mountain pass, and the string of killings remains unresolved by the lawman, who has come to feel that he cannot bring justice to a world he believes he cannot understand.

Of course, the sheriff’s loss of faith is tragic precisely because we are shown that he does grasp the task he faces, even as he fails to protect his charges. He just doesn’t realize that he sees the pieces to the puzzle even as he tells others about them. In particular, when he muses out loud, distractedly, about the cattle hammer, we can see that his mind has assembled the parts of a puzzle we know he’s been thinking about, yet he never proceeds to an ‘aha!’ moment.

This aspect of the sherriff’s character is reflected in the way the film sits in my mind. When I try to work out what I think of it, it slides around in my head, and I can’t quite grasp it. Specific technical elements of the film were very impressive and effective indeed, notably the nighttime duel in the streets of Eagle Pass and Jones’ sympathetic performance.

I’m kind of trying to figure out what this means with regard to my affection for the Coens’ earlier work. It would seem to imply that nihilism as an aesthetic philosophy is most easily enjoyed when presented in a stylized manner, and that the less visible style overlain upon the viewpoint the more difficult it is for me to analyze and describe how or why the film was effective for me as a viewer.

Clearly I missed giggling in delirious approval over this or that outrageous and unexpected filip of irony or improbable stylization, and the lack of that endorphin has paralyzed a part of my critical faculties. Perhaps this is how the Coens have chosen to show me something of a life of the mind.

As noted recently, I clubbed Viv across the head and dragged her by her hair to attend a suite of Oscar nominated films this past weekend. I’ve already treated of There Will Be Blood, my pick for best of the three. I will ho’d off on No Country For Old Men as the film provoked the most complex, postmodern reactions in my mind and I’m not done thinking about it.

Juno, on the other hand, lived up to its’ rep and my expected response. I don’t think I have anything in specific to contribute to the critical literature on the film, but I wanted to get my own experience down so that a few years from now, I can consult my own record.

The film first came to my attention on seeing the flat-out terrific first trailer sometime this summer, possibly preceding Ratatouille or Knocked Up. I actually forced everyone I work with to watch the trailer, something I avoid in general, being quite aware that the quality of a trailer has literally nothing to do with the quality of the film it advertises.

When the film opened, I was interested to read and hear some of the press work associated with the film’s publicity, interviews with the scriptwriter and director, that sort of thing. When I gained a sense of the narrative arc of the film – teenage pregnancy ends in smiles thanks to the miracle of adoption – my interest in the film plummeted to near-zero.

Now, I am an adopted person and one with a specific rage toward my birth parents, who will remain forever anonymous to me by personal choice (not that I’ve been contacted, but in closed adoptions the parties must both agree to contact as adults and I would not agree if contacted). While aware of this, I am not convinced that my drift in interest stemmed from my own background as much as it did from a sense that I had already seen the film, in Knocked Up.

Of course Juno is very different from Knocked Up. But both films treat a real-world problem – the unexpected and unwanted pregnancy – with previously unseen psychological delicacy, sympathy, and lightheartedness. Sadly, from my perspective, it appears that this particular approach is one which I find tiresome after a mere two outings. Give me angst and rage or cartoon melodrama over comedy which includes realist characterizations when babies are involved, apparently.

I feel that both films artificially resolve complicated situations that, until the falsely-happy plot resolution, are presented with sympathy and complexity. I did not find these resolutions convincing or satisfying.

Returning to Juno in particular, I specifically found the adoption plot element disinteresting as I watched the film. My attention wandered in the scenes which directly involved the adoptive couple and which were more focused on the mechanics of the impending adoption than on Juno’s impeccable taste in rock music. This is interesting to me, because I don’t think it was due to poor scripting or direction or cinematography.

I think it was psychologically defensive boredom stemming from a desire to avoid time spent in the company of my own emotions regarding my adoption. I do think I have a handle on my adoption, and it runs like this: the parents that raised me are my real parents. I love and honor them.

The parents that bore me are of no interest to me, and I bear them considerable ill will. Is that ill will based on rage at abandonment? Or is it based on coming into being? I know what my own answer to this question is, and I know that literally no-one in my circle of social relations either believes or respects my own self-analysis in this matter, something that strongly contributes to my ongoing social withdrawal.

Went to the Crumb show at the Frye, which I must say is really worth hitting, especialy considering it is FREE. They have some real grails of Crumbology on display, such as the famous bathtub orgy late-60’s Fritz the Cat sequence and two or three original, unpublished childhood Arcades.

The real revelation, though, and I don’t think I’m alone in noting this, is Bob’s extraordinary sensitivity as a colorist. It’s consistent – the Arcade covers from his teenage youth show it, and he’s still executing these incredible technicolor miniatures fifty years later.

The highlight was overhearing some sixty-year-old Jersey transplant explaining to his eighty-year-old deef ma why Crumb’s explorations of sex and misogyny were so important. I think she kept going “huh?” to the guy just so he’d have to yell out why Angelfood McSpade’s gargantuan ass was in fact a mitzvah, and a liberation.

The most interesting moment was coming up to the aforesaid Angelfood McSpade strip just as a fifty-ish African-American church-lady in a pink pantsuit came over to look at it. I couldn’t read her reaction, but I’m sure that she was having a more complex set of personal responses to the strip than I ever could.

Tonight’s American Masters looks to have been inspired by the new biography, and so far I am enjoying it, good grief.

Viv and I just watched the 1995 Ian McKellen production of Richard III, something I have been wanting to watch since its’ US theatrical release, and it really blew me away, even considering occasional deviations of tone in editing or performer’s choice. Brain food.