Movies |
Weekend Classics: Shutdown edition
By
Published: Oct 03, 2013
Category:
Classics
Ah, the government shutdown, God’s gift to the stupid.
My favorite quote, so far, is from Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN): "We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is."
If you’ve had the bad luck to be furloughed, you may be spending your days looking at banking screens, in case you need to plan for a salary-free future that lasts longer than it ought to.
If you still have work and food and medical insurance, you may be spending more time than you dreamed possible watching cable "news" and learning about "clean" bills and why they they’re just… not… possible.
Enough.
Your ears deserve better. Your eyes deserve more varied. Your brain deserves smarter.
Try these. Moving from the shockingly familiar to what’s going on elsewhere to another approach to difficult creatures to how grownups behave to just plain funny:
This is not the Andy Griffith we’ll come to love in “Mayberry R.F.D.” He’s a drifter not because he’s had some bad luck but because he’s a blowhard, an egomaniac and a fraud. And the train he’s riding always has the same destination: a crude populism that’s really all about him.
Ed Burtynsky is fascinated with China because it’s creating new “landscapes” on a scale that dwarfs all other nations — in a matter of a decade, it has recreated the process of industrialization that took a century to transform America. In China, we can see our past, projected at warp speed. And in China, we can also see our future. China, China, China — for the first time, you get what a vast impersonal force resides there, and how it works in silent, compliant efficiency, and the connection between anonymous workers and sophisticated consumers.
Buck Brannaman specializes in the improbable. Got a skittish, poorly trained horse? A bucking bronco? A steed who seems not to care about anything? Bring that uncooperative beast to one of Buck’s clinics. Very quickly — often in a matter of minutes — he gets your horse ready to ride. No whips are involved, no threats are made. Buck’s methods call for a little stroking with a flag, a steady gaze, a gentle tone.
The Fugue String Quartet has played together for 25 years. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the second violinist, and Catherine Keener, who plays viola, are married. Mark Ivanir, the first violinist, seems like the group’s natural leader. In fact, it is Walken, the cellist, who founded the group. (”I’m the dad,” Walken told an interviewer.) Playing hundreds of concerts a year, incessantly traveling, tamping down ego for the sake of the group — few quartets can stay together for a quarter of a century. So, yes, a quartet in late life. As the film begins, Walken has just confirmed his darkest suspicion — the trembling in his hand is the first sign of Parkinson’s. Rather than hang on, he wants to retire. Will he be replaced? Or is his exit the sign that the Fugue has run its course, that it is dead?
He strolls onstage in black vinyl pants and high-heeled wedgies, his mouth a slash of red and lashes to die for, and you think "I am a tolerant person, but…oh my." And then he says a word or three about cross-dressing — he is, in fact, heterosexual, not that it matters, and an "executive transvestite," which gets a laugh and so does matter — and after that the way Eddie Izzard looks just disappears as a topic.
