Posters

The last year or so, I've been hand-painting posters for my day job at the LIU Brooklyn Campus Library Media Center, having fun with some different genres.  Here's the three I've done so far. 

They're all acrylics and cheap poster paints and watercolor on heavy duty contractor's paper.  I found a roll of paper in a dumpster and thought I'd put it to use.  I started with the robot one, which was inspired by an old serial, then the musical one, which was inspired by Busby Berkeley musicals, and the beach one is up now.  That seemed right for summer.  For the fall, I might do something inspired by Pam Grier action movies from the 70's, though I'm not sure about that yet.

And I guess they're all inspired by the posters you see made all around the world, just that kind of handmade, casual, folky appearance.  And they're all the size of a big bulleten board, about four feet tall by six wide.  Approximately. 

a few random new year thoughts

Jason Bay is a Met. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to allow myself to get excited about a new baseball season.

Also, Andre Dawson elected to the Hall of Fame: this makes sense to me. On a purely gut level, as a guy I watched on TV as a kid, I've always thought the Hawk belonged in the Hall.

Great trip to Toledo. My son had a blast with the cousins and his grandma. Had a nice birthday dinner out with family. Met my oldest newphew's fiancee's family. Saw the Zoo lights. Caught a couple movies, both entertaining and fun, but nothing great: It's Complicated and Sherlock Holmes. And met my sister's nice new bf, too. A really great visit.

That's right, a birthday. Have entered what I'll call my Jackie Robinson year. That means I'm 42.

That's another iPhone photo up there. Our Mr. Met Christmas ornament.

Toledo's great to visit, but it's always even greater to be back in NYC.

smattering

Went bowling this weekend. Channelled my inner Dude. Despite growing up in Toledo, Ohia, I was never a big bowler. But this weekend a friend had a birthday celebration that included rolling some balls at the lanes in the Port Authority. Lotsa fun. Our son had a blast, too, and my wife was rolling unconscious for a while, three straight strikes and a couple spares.

On our way from the lanes to dinner at a homey little Italian place, walking along the edges of Times Square, it snowed a little bit--big, wet, floppy flakes that glistened in the night air. Christmas lights and headlamps reflected in the slick black streets. Beautiful night. "God, I love this dirty town!"

Sunday we saw Fantastic Mr. Fox. I am a Wes Anderson fan, and I'd put this up there with my favorites of his. The whole stop motion world seems perfect for his stagelike, neoclassically balanced images. Really a fun, beautiful, touching film. We watched Up again on DVD this weekend, too, and that is even better than I remembered. It will be a tough call between those two come Oscar time [and don't forget Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which is also a really fine and funny animated film. but I think the Academy will overlook it because of the silly title].

Oh, and there should be a moratorium on the use of the old saw about second acts and American lives. Maybe, fifteen minutes of fame, too. Sick of 'em.

Meatballs

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: great fun! A lot like Up, in that it's more than just funny, it's big and grand oldstyle adventure. And I think it's as good as Up, no question.

I've never seen the book, so I didn't have any preconceived notions. On that note, looking forward to seeing Wild Things, just not sure if it will be too intense for my five-year old. He usually will watch anything, but we had to leave twenty minutes into Ponyo, which had some pretty scary water monster images.

Some movies, quickly

I don't see movies as much as I used to. But thanks to netflix, I do still see movies. Here's a few quick hits on stuff watched recently, and watched via netflix, unless otherwise noted. In no particular order:

The Visitor. From the same guy who made the terrific The Station Agent a few years ago, this is the same kind of fine, fine movie: thoughtful, funny, with intriguing characters you care about.

Slumdog Millionaire. Liked it; didn't love it. Watched the day after the Visitor, and the differences in characterization were sharp; fast, beautiful, and yes, moving, but not because I particularly cared about the characters, who were pretty generalized. Glad I saw it, but not a movie I'll return to. As far as Danny Boyle goes, my favorite movie is Millions.

Up. Saw this in the theater. Great fun and adventure, maybe a little darker than most Pixar stories, but it was funny and beautiful, and weird as a non-Tarzan Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Can't remember the last time I saw a Woody Allen movie, but liked this one well enough, with its Barcelona backdrop and great work from Bardem and Cruz. A little chilly and abstract, especially with the voiceover, but I liked it fine.

To Catch a Thief. Caught this one recent evening on TCM; an overlooked Hitchcock for me. I knew I'd seen it, but couldn't remember the way it ends. So we watched it for the stylish Grant and Kelly and the Riviera, and had a great time. Light as a feather and just as ticklish. Was watching for the float scene, the picnic scene, and the fireworks scene, and stayed on through to the end.

Nine Queens. Really enjoyable little con/heist/caper flick from Argentina. Funny. Highly recommended.

I see from the TV listings that both Rio Bravo and The Princess Bride, two of the most re-watchable movies ever, are on tonight, but I'll be watching the MLB All Star Game. We have them both on DVD, but there's still something special about coming across something you love on broadcast.

Ghost Town. Really enjoyable little film in the screwball tradition with great Gervais, Leoni, and Kinnear. Leoni reminds of Grant in Bringing Up Baby.

Cadillac Records. Some great performances and period detail, but still comes across as a pretty standard Hollywood musical biopic kind of dealie. Great music, of course.

In Bruges. Dark, funny, twisted, over the top. Two hit men hiding in Bruges after a botched job, waiting for orders from the boss. Great work from the three mains.

So there you go, a few capsuley reviews from a sporadic movie watcher.

on the stoop

On the way to the Whale Playground, we picked up a few DVDs at a sidewalk sale, a buck a pop. Space Chimps for my son, Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires for me, Brothers Grimm for the heck of it, and the guy threw in a VHS copy of some Jules Verney movie I don't know, Island at the Top of the World, which I hope is somewhere in the same league as At the Earth's Core and fun stuff like that.

a few quick Christmas thoughts

Elf is an excellent Christmas movie, and I bet I'll still be watching it ten years from now. That's right, it will be a Classic. Great Rankin/Bass touches. Speaking of, I watched a few Rankin/Bass things this year, and boy, some of them are trippy and strange in places.

Lots of little articles lately about the darkness of It's a Wonderful Life. Duh. I love that movie and I don't care who knows it.

A Christmas Story is great, but I'm conflicted about the 24 hour marathon.

Macy's does a great job with the whole Santaland thing. We took our son this past Saturday and were only on line for twenty minutes. The Saturday before Christmas. Very cool. Last year it was more than an hour.

I will improve [have improved [3/11/09] the quality of the holiday card pics, but am glad I put them up, even in the less than perfect photos that they are [were], because it's good to see them all in one place, and I've enjoyed going back and thinking a little about what went into each one.

Driving to Toledo for Christmas. Wish us luck.

Ninotchka in New York

'Ninotchka' was on tv the other night. I first saw the Ernst Lubitsch film 'Ninotchka' during my first summer in New York, the summer of 1992. I was a student in Pratt Institute's MFA program, and as such, I enjoyed the benefits of membership to the Museum of Modern Art, the chief benefit being free admission whenever the museum was open.

So on hot summer days it was great, one of the cheapest ways to enjoy air conditioning -- the price of a couple subway tokens and a slice for lunch. Besides the Matisses, Pollocks, de Koonings, Cezannes, Seurats, Picassos, Mondrians, and the rest, The Modern also has movies. Free movies for money-challenged grad student. An even better way to escape the summer heat.

I found myself at the Modern one afternoon when 'Ninotchka' was playing. I knew nothing about it. I'd heard of Greta Garbo, at least, but had never seen one of her movies. The blurb in the museum guide said this was the one where 'Garbo laughs!' Good enough for me. I found a seat in the auditorium, which was filling with a mix of older movie fans and young students like me.

First things first, I loved the movie for the same reasons everybody does -- funny, sophisticated, satirical, elegant, sparkling. And then there's Garbo. What I really remember most clearly about watching it that first time, was not the movie, but the reaction of the moviegoers when Garbo came on screen for the first time. The three Soviet envoys are at the train station in Paris looking for the new emissary from the USSR. They expect a man. But it is Greta Garbo. She stands stiffly, in drab Soviet clothes, with a plain hat, but of course the camera holds on her for a couple beats, a shot of her stern but luminous face. And the New York crowd applauds. Long and hard, the crowd applauds. For an actress in a movie! An actress who's dead! (An actress, it must be said, who was a New Yorker herself.) And the crowd applauds as if this is the Zeigfeld Theatre and we have Garbo up on stage alive and in the flesh and doing a buck and wing. Well, I've never forgotten that moment to this day. New York is a lot of things, one of which is a pretty damn serious movie town.

Ghost Rider

When I was talking superhero movies yesterday, I forgot to mention how much I enjoyed Ghost Rider when I came across it on tv the other week. I was expecting it to be pretty bad, but ended up really enjoying it, so it makes my list of fun, but not great, comic book superhero movies. Strange, bad, funny performances by Nicolas Cage as flaming skullhead stunt biker and Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles (!).

But what was really the big revelation was that Ghost Rider completes the Sam Elliott trilogy, begun with the cheesy Patrick Swayze fightin' bartender actioner Roadhouse, and continued with The Big Lebowski, which needs no further comment from me. The Great Sam Elliott Trilogy consists of three films where he plays very similar mysterious/supernatural/badass/wryfull stranger characters. Nobody does it better. Lebowski, of course, is the best movie of the three, and I might rank Ghost Rider just a shade better than Roadhouse, but I withhold final judgment on that until I can see Ghost Rider a few more times, since I've probably seen the other two in their entirety about a half dozen times and have seen them in part a whole lot more n that. "More n that." See, I'm starting to sound like Sam Elliott.