Meryl Streep Calls Out Pretentious People

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I absolutely love this. Meryl Streep is the grand dame of acting on film, stage and TV, and is so accomplished that fellow actors can only crack jokes at how regularly her performance is nominated for an Oscar (18) and frequently won an Oscar (3).  That's just the Academy Awards.  She has had so many that Wikipedia has to installed a separate page for List of awards and nominations received by Meryl Streep. 

I can relate to what she says:  I have an old friend who seeks out my counsel, and has engaged me in numerous projects, but repeatedly fails to follow up and follow through.  He is a sweet guy, and he talks a good talk.  He has embarrassed me with my own colleagues, as recently as six months ago.  So when he tried to reach me in recent weeks, I just ignored him:  I kept telling myself There simply is no need to talk to this guy, no need. 

Hooray for Meryl Streep!

Cold is Inevitably Heartwarming

OH GOD HOW DID I END UP IN THE REALLY DEEP SHORT FILM SIDE OF YOUTUBE I SHOULD REALLY GO BACK TO CAT VIDEOS I AM DROWNING IN MY OWN TEARS, but honestly this was was so fucking deep and they managed to make a 25 minute movie better than 90 percent of 2 hour Hollywood movies good job short film people

agreed..this is so deep..bring tears to me too..and yes for only 25 minutes this short way better than some movies..

These are two YouTubers commenting pointedly how good Cold is and how it drew them in.  It was written and directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Wassim Shaikh, and rather deftly runs a thread through the lives of several people to show how cold their city is.  And we're not talking about the weather.  That deft threading reminds me of Crash (2004) which nabbed the Oscar for Best Picture at the 78th Academy Awards and also of the less known but just as superb 13 Conversations About One Thing (2001).  But Shaikh manages to weave a completely moving story in just 25 minutes. 

There is a quote that crops up now and then on social media, and it says something to the effect of:  Don't judge or criticize people, because you don't know what suffering they've endured.  That's mighty apropos for this short film.  But in the end a simple smile, delivered by a despondent radio DJ to a despondent middle aged transvestite, in a hot dog line at night, no less, unravels that thread in a heartwarming, profound way. 

I looked for more information on this Award-Winning Short Film, and I didn't find much.  Apparently it didn't win an Oscar, but I found this:

Towleroad reports, “Toronto-based filmmaker Waseem Shaikh has released his latest work, the award-winning short film Cold, online for free. The film “is about one night in Toronto where several lives intersect—each of them oblivious to the loneliness that connects them all,” said Shaikh. He also said the film speaks to “the feeling of isolation one often deals with in gay circles.” ”

– NOMINATED for 5 TARA Awards.
– WINNER of Ryerson University’s 2013 President’s Award of Excellence.

Reference:  Short Film: “Cold” A Bitter-Sweet Ode to Toronto of Intersecting Lives of Cold to Strangers. 

Maybe it just wasn't marketed as well as it could've been, as it certainly deserved a wider range of recognition.

Romance, Suspense and Comedy in The Crush

The Crush is sweetly romantic and wickedly suspenseful, all in one 15-minute film, written and directed by Michael Creagh.  It is the age-old schoolboy (Ardal, played by Creagh's son) crush on his pretty teacher (named Ms. Purdy, interestingly).  The inevitable heartbreak comes when Ardal runs into his teacher, her fiance Pierce, and her brand new engagement ring.  From crush to crushed, however, the young lover must've sensed that the fiance isn't quite up to snuff for what Ms. Purdy deserves.  So he openly confronts the dickhead (Ardal's term) to a deadly duel, guns de rigueur.  Creagh could've easily turned this short film into a tragedy, and while expected and usual, it still would've garnered accolades, I think.

Picture this, instead: Ardal pulls out a gun his father had hid in the closet, while Pierce has no weapon whatsoever, because it's all a silly, youthful crackpot of a matter to him.  Under threat of death, however, Pierce confesses the unsavory truth about his sentiments for Ms. Purdy and in so doing proves how much of a dickhead he truly is.  A shot thunders in the gray afternoon, and the errant fiance falls to the ground.  The ending is deliciously hilarious and, did I mention it, sweetly romantic.

By the way, The Crush was a nominee at the 83rd Academy Awards (2011) for Best Live Action Short Film, but lost the Oscar to God of Love.  Still, this film is very well done.

At Issue with Open Water

This film is written and directed by Chris Kentis and co-produced by his wife Laura Lau.  For for a positively meager $130,000 budget, it has a running tally of nearly 55,000,000 at the box office.  Not bad, at all.  It is based on the unsolved mystery of what happened to a diver couple:

It's a diver's worst nightmare: Miles from shore, you surface to find your charter boat nowhere in sight. You call for help, but there's no response. There are no outcroppings to hold on to. You hope that someone realizes their mistake before it's too late.

This is what presumably happened to Eileen and Tom Lonergan on January 25, 1998, at St. Crispin's Reef, a popular dive site on the Great Barrier Reef, 25 miles off the coast of Queensland, Australia. The Lonergans, diving veterans from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had gone out with the Port Douglas, Queensland-based scuba boat Outer Edge. Stories vary, but at the end of the day, the crew did a head count and came up with only 24 of their 26 clients. Someone pointed out two young divers who had jumped in to swim off the bow, and the crew, assuming that they had missed them, adjusted the count to 26. With the swimmers on board, the Outer Edge headed back to port.

Two days later, Geoffrey Nairn, the boat's skipper, discovered Eileen and Tom's personal belongings in the Outer Edge's lost-property bin, including Tom's wallet, glasses, and clothes. Concerned, he called the owner of the Gone Walkabout Hostel, in Cairns, where the couple had been staying, to see if they had returned. They had not. A five-day search began, which turned up no trace of Eileen or Tom. After more than 48 hours in the ocean, the couple may have drowned, or been eaten by sharks. But as the chilling story broke, other theories emerged. One is that they committed suicide, or a murder-suicide took place. Journals in their hotel room hinted at personal troubles, but the couple were devout Catholics with good prospects.

Reference: A Watery Grave.  Also, check The Cruel Sea.

Employing his artistic license, Kentis fashions a gruesome end to the couple - Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel Kintner (Daniel Travis) - who are inadvertently abandoned in shark-infested waters.  But critic Roger Ebert speaks to the apparent popularity of Open Water:

Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. "Open Water" had that effect on me.

That's not to say "Open Water" is a thriller that churned my emotions. It's a quiet film, really, in which less and less happens as a large implacable reality begins to form. The ending is so low-key, we almost miss it. It tells the story of a couple who go scuba diving and surface to discover that a curious thing has happened: The boat has left without them. The horizon is empty in all directions. They feel very alone.

I'm not afraid of water and don't spend much time thinking about sharks, but the prospect of being lost, of being forgotten about, awakens emotions from deep in childhood. To be left behind stirs such anger and hopelessness.

When night follows day, when thirst becomes unbearable, when jellyfish sting, when sharks make themselves known, when the boat still does not come back for them, their situation becomes a vast dark cosmic joke.

I don't always agree with Ebert, of course, but there is lyrical resonance in how he describes the effect this film had on him.  It's one thing to weigh fact vs fiction as a case for intellect, and it's quite another to experience it as a matter for gut and soul.  We may never know what happened to the Lonergan couple, but even the thought of being stranded in endless miles of ocean is, in and of itself, frightening.  This simply-shot film succeeds in this fashion.

At Issue with Amityville Horror

It's been 35 years since I watched this film (1979), and about as long since I read the Jay Anson novel (1977), on which the film was based.  But the issue is fact vs fiction, so consider this documentary on the sleepy town and the grisly murders that Anson drew on:

The Amityville Horror. You've heard of it as a movie or maybe a true story. You might even have heard it mentioned in an Eminem song. However you first heard about it, you heard the real truth. Amityville is a real town in New York, Suffolk County to be precise. The town was settled back in the 1600's, but it wouldn't be until the 1970's that it'd rise to national prominence due to a tragic real crime committed at the famous address 112 Ocean Avenue.

On the night in November [13th] of 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr killed 6 of his own family members in what would come to be known as the Amityville murders. That's the true Amityville horror, but the story continues after that. George Lutz and his wife (along with their three children) moved into that house on Ocean Ave the following December [19th 1975]. Kathy Lutz found the place creepy right away and 28 days later [January 16th 1976] (interesting?) the family moved from that residence claiming they'd experienced traumatic paranormal events.

Now, enter the author Jay Anson. He wrote not only the book 666, but also the novel titled 'The Amityville Horror' based on the events that the Lutz family went through, though it is up for debate how close he stuck to the original real story. That book (published in 1977), in turn, became used to base a movie that would bear its same title in 1979. The movie terrified audiences worldwide with James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger all giving creepy performances that only added to the already scary story of the Amityville horror house.

Does the Amityville house exist today in real life? It certainly does, though it's been renovated these days and the address has been changed. Many people came to see the site of the DeFeo murders and the place where demon possession was supposed to have taken place. Obviously, the home owners needed their privacy so they took steps to get that back.

I hope I've helped clear up any misunderstandings about the awful events surrounding the Amityville house. While the movies are terrific (a new version was made in 2005), the real stories are nothing to smile about.

Reference: Top Documentary Films: The Real Amityville Horror Story.  (Note: The foregoing write up was in the description box of this documentary.  But since I watched it, YouTube terminated the account.  In any event, I found the above version, instead.) 

The fact vs fiction matter of this film is more complicated than that of Captain Phillips, which I wrote about in the preceding article.  Besides the novelist himself, the Lutzes and William Weber, the attorney for Ronald DeFeo, Jr., among a range of parties involved, seem to have obscured the lines between fact and fiction.

In September 1979, Judge [Jack B] Weinstein dismissed the Lutzes' claims and observed in his ruling: "Based on what I have heard, it appears to me that to a large extent the book is a work of fiction, relying in a large part upon the suggestions of Mr. Weber." In the September 17, 1979 issue of People magazine, William Weber wrote: "I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine." This refers to a meeting that Weber is said to have had with George and Kathy Lutz, during which they discussed what would later become the outline of Anson's book. Judge Weinstein also expressed concern about the conduct of William Weber and Bernard Burton relating to the affair, stating: "There is a very serious ethical question when lawyers become literary agents."

George Lutz maintained that events in the book were "mostly true" and denied any suggestion of dishonesty on his part. In June 1979, George and Kathy Lutz took a polygraph test relating to their experiences at the house, which they both passed.  In October 2000, The History Channel broadcast Amityville: The Haunting and Amityville: Horror or Hoax?, a two-part documentary made by horror screenwriter/producer Daniel Farrands to mark the 25th anniversary of the case. George Lutz commented in an interview for the program: "I believe this has stayed alive for 25 years because it's a true story. It doesn't mean that everything that has ever been said about it is true. It's certainly not a hoax. It's real easy to call something a hoax. I wish it was. It's not."

Reference: The Amityville Horror.

There is a lot to sort out, but it is clear that art does not exist in a vacuum, and there is probably no such thing as pure, unadulterated art.  Inevitably its context is human one, and thus subject to the best and the worst of people involved.  The original story spawned several films over nearly 40 years, so if money was at all a motivation for any of these people, there must've been plenty to grab.

Finally, we mustn't forget the matter of paranormal activity.  Doesn't it really happen?  Is it reasonable for me to say I believe it can, yet also say I am skeptical?  I am mindful enough of the many things we as humankind simply don't know, so weird stuff like a haunting is a possibility that we cannot categorically dismiss.  However, I am skeptical at the same time about what people may say, given whatever motives they harbor within themselves. 

They say, Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.  Ain't that the truth.

At Issue with Captain Phillips

This film, along with Gravity and Prisoners, easily gripped me on a long flight from the US to the Middle East last March, and kept me awake when I should have been sleeping.  But oh well.  You see what grips me, and scores of others, is the drama: story, acting, filming, script etc.  We know it's art, and in absorbing ourselves in it, we deliberately break from the reality of our lives.  The drama of course may have frank elements of fact in it, but on the whole it's a piece of fiction.  So there is a truly a Richard Phillips who wrote A Captain's Duty, on which the film was based.

Then the headline from the New York Post screamed: Crew Members: 'Captain Phillips' is one big lie.  To wit:

According to this crew member, during the first attack, as two pirate boats came into view, clearly chasing them, Phillips was putting the crew through a fire drill. In the film, it’s a security drill.

“We said, ‘You want us to knock it off and go to our pirate stations?’ ” the crew member recalls. “And he goes, ‘Oh, no, no, no — you’ve got to do the lifeboats drill.’ This is how screwed up he is. These are drills we need to do once a year. Two boats with pirates and he doesn’t give a s- -t. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

At first, Phillips maintains this is a lie. “No,” he says. “The mate called up and said, ‘Do you want to stop the drill?’ They [the boats] were seven miles away. There was nothing we could do. We didn’t know the exact situation.”

But is it true that he ordered the entire drill completed anyway?

“Correct,” Phillips says.

You see, it's one thing to fictionalize facts.  We may like it or not, and we may or may not be cognizant of it, but what makes any art so ennobling, even cathartic is its artistic license, that is, to create whatever it is that the artist wishes to create.

Consider the following exchange between the protagonist and his lady companion in another brilliant film - V for Vendetta:

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It's another thing altogether, however, to factualize fiction.  Some people may be prone to believe what they see in a film or read in a book, even if they know it's fiction. That's something each of them has to reconcile on his or her own. But when the media steps in, and the President comes calling, then it truly is quite another thing indeed:

“We vowed we were going to take it to our graves, that we weren’t going to say anything,” Perry told CNN in 2010. “Then we hear this p.r. stuff about him giving himself up . . . and the whole crew’s like, ‘What?’ ”

“If you’re gonna shoot somebody, shoot me!” Hanks pleads in the film.

It didn’t go down like that, say several crew members: The pirates just reneged on the deal, grabbing their guy and making off with Phillips in a Maersk lifeboat.

While the remaining crew waited for the Navy to reach them, they sat and wondered: What just happened?

Four days later, Phillips was rescued by SEAL Team Six. He was hailed as an American hero. He met with President Obama in the Oval Office and wrote a memoir.

In the run-up to Friday’s release of “Captain Phillips,” [actor Tom] Hanks has appeared on the cover of Parade magazine with Phillips and the headline “The Making of an American Hero.” The film won the opening-night slot at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 28 and opened the London Film Festival last Wednesday. It has won raves, all of which note the film is based on real events. The two men have walked the red carpet together.

We may never know the real story of that pirate assault of Captain Phillips and his crew, but it bears investigation, as some media outfits have evidently done, if only to hear the multiple sides of the story (i.e., from crew members as well).  At best, then, hailing Phillips as an American hero sounded rather premature, and, at worst, it was a big oops, if not an outright lie.