Gladiator Emasculation, Fabricated Sheaths

"She doesn't do anything to make herself attractive," Kathleen Ann Quinlan, in foil against a serial poisoner

Jane Campion aims for  piercing through feminine pain in her 2003 In the Cut, a film which miscasts Meg Ryan as a poet teacher and does  an abominable disservice to my favorite novel. Writers tend to have detached personalities, but Meg Ryan’s teacher is a swishing slut, pale and effervescent in comparison to her younger supporting lead in Flesh and Bone, taken aback by the metropolitan brutality in which she deigns to thrive, in a narrative with an otherwise predictable bait and switch, with Ruffalo’s edginess lacking the requisite ambiguity for suspense. Why Bacon was cast as the jilted boyfriend is beyond this blogger’s ability to enter into, in reference to Nicole Kidman’s verve as the producer; he may represent a generalized post-9/11 anxiety, in addition to serving as the typical supporting character for misdirected suspicion, but the repugnant turgid aspect to his role doesn’t quite  ratchet up the audience sympathy for the imperiled heroine. Damici spoils everything as the Detective Richie long gone into section 8 territory, more meatball than methodical predator.

Despite these posterior impediments, Campion does manage to break past the battery of inured defenses. The lack of a musical score concentrates the sickening stench of the body butchery which hypersexualizes Ruffalo’s Malloy for Ryan’s Avery. Kidman’s iciness cues the damsel backstory, with a nod to the snow white feline sauntering along the alleyway, and Ruffalo cannot save the girl because the girl offered the recognition of the tattoo she recognized to the wrong player. Homage to Doris Day’s Que Sera, as the title track, sears the breasts of every woman who necessarily has to be disappointed with patriarchal dominance, settling for ineffectual decency.

This is an incontrovertibly modern movie, understating drama for a stark view of new century difference, a template perhaps not consciously but certainly genetically related to the 2009 Personal Effects. Hollander may have intended this ensemble view of murder victims to be a marquee vehicle for Ashton Kutchner, but the bad aftertaste Vancouver leaves in our mouths is a sad testament to the fact that studio executives insist audiences have to accept mediocre actors as celebrities. Kutchner doesn’t have Charlie Sheen’s ability to make the camera love him, and the screenplay relegates the disabled to indigestible burdens: the honorable retarded man a scapegoated casualty due to the need to assign blame, a fatherless deaf boy indulging in homicidal impulses to salve his losses. Kutchner may be the duty driven protector, but his cruelty surpasses boundaries, both to the retarded suspect, who he calls “a man like that,” and to his ostensible lover’s deaf son, with whom he deliberately maintains fences. Hollander takes so many shots of the megabird costume he might have well marketed this flick to Henson’s muppet market. Being well made doesn’t always translate into being responsible for your end product, which may or may not be the problem with Ben Carson’s candidacy. I am not the first person to suspect the minority with miracle hands might be gaming the nominating process.

In USA today he calls the racism of the Charleston shooter a disease, and then turns around and associates Sunni extremism with rabies. I don’t necessarily disagree with his rhetoric there, but do acknowledge the sand pit in which he’s trapped himself. Racism is not a disease. It may corrode, and with pronounced virulence, may be symptomatic of physiological decline, but in and of itself, prejudice is not equivalent to illness. To his credit, and despite the mote in my eye, as it stands, he is the only GOP candidate who fascinates me as a journalist in pursuit of a subject, the only one who ignites any semblance of a motivation, but surgeons aren’t generally inclined to be tea party absolutists, as those who administer the brutality of the medical model the disabled have to live, and if Carson isn’t the victim of conflicting mental impulses in his own right, perhaps he is running in the top tier so he can die a black millionaire. Powell did the same thing after he left the Bush administration, but kept it within the confines of accepted parameters. Carson is not, and that is fine, but it may also indicate the death of the American two party system. The lunatic fringe is catering to a hunger for flamboyance, and the democratic left, even if Hillary Clinton prevails, is weak. If Xi Jinping sucks this into his vacuum cleaner, like any good opportunist, I’ll join in with the violinists. With some thinking, I may wedge in a more impassioned post to the doctor later. A long post like this may attest to a spastic with no life, but a power chair turned torture chamber makes a poverty sunken mattress a haven of resignation, with which both Hollander and Campion conclude their problematic dramas.

Decadent Pairs

In Siena the Tomasi revealed that powerful and single-minded religious vocation which later made them famous in Sicily. One went to England as papal legate and tried to settle the dispute between Henry 2.0 [my emendation] and Thomas a Becket. David Gilmour, The Last Leopard, p11

I believe I shall focus my attentions on Giuseppe Tomasi for now, then perhaps work my way back to Henry James. The Prince of Lampedusa presents the demise of the petty nobility as a foregone conclusion. Gilmour presents their obliteration as an almost radical reaction, and to the extent that I understand Dr. Cristina Coletta's abstract in her critical study, Plotting The Past, she is examining the diachronic discourse between historic episode, narrative, and how this frames contemporary perception. Dr. Coletta was very kind to me, and told me she would send me a copy of her book but she only had her reader's copy; not a total ingrate, by dint of my own obstinacy I have nearly all my tools at hand, except a visit to the point of origin. I see where I am going with Il Gattopardo much more clearly than with the work of James, and Tomasi may actually give me my framework to back into James [the New Mobility bloggers who follow my twitter account glaze over at this point saying she goes very far]. Mmm, like Mr. Ramsay's throbbing mind in his theoretical struggle, I am defying much more than domestication in my outreach. Cannot the same be said of Fellini's mastery as an auteur? La Strada is more than the sum of its parts; it borders on the magical realism that Shakespeare invented in The Tempest, which means if you are Julie Taymor you are going to be fanatical in your canonical felicity because you cast the magisterial Helen Mirren in the lead.

It borders on post war fabulism, La Strada, but it is not simply a love song to Mussolini, who in turn was a deluded optimist to the point of insanity. All of us miss the Roman Empire, whether we know it or not. We keep recreating the Colossus, not restoring the past, only reinventing the application of power. I cannot bring full brunt of analysis to on La Strada today, but did want to point out to you how commercialism exhausts genre, much as Haggard exhausts great Victorian contributions. His work is almost an Edwardian squeal about the terror of progressive erosions yet to come. The same can be said with European directors against Hollywood. Fellini is nearly Jamesian when engaging in cinematic ambiguity. Identity is a clever knife thrust into liberal pretensions, but never truly veers off the expected prescription.

Disenfranchisement, Patriot Pluck

Mmm, baby brother accepted my invitation to Google +, this after I gave his voice mail a furious tongue lashing, many weeks ago now, around the time of these events, though I cannot provide a date of the evening the tongue lashing occurred. Why our mother gave him the name of the most loved tribe, born of true love after years of deception, if Hebraic hagiography has any psychic validity, is mystifying, but it seems to suit him. I played chess with his deceased biological father, a schizophrenic who dived on top of my sister and beat her while I had a front row seat on the next pillow over. When he was lucid, I found him sexually attractive, and would have lived Fitch'es best dramatic arc before Oates persuaded her to make it a novel, but the man was on his death march at the dawn of conception. This is Benjamin's history.

He is still my kid brother, and I am his eldest sister, I know people, I know. I have rank, and toggling his blinders might have been harsh, and he has the most adorable boys, my nephews, but those blinders needed some jiggling.

I am not posting a damn word to him in the stream, not now. Lovely, isn't it?

Barring some catastrophic incident, I am not quitting, of course not, but I am not pushing myself hard enough either, not always, afflicted in and not in any good way like Mr. Ramsay, though I hope to hold on, break through.

Not this morning, however. Still need to install the printer. I know it is easy, but I am fearful around all this technology. I came on to reply to my sister citizens who cry out on Facebook asking when is it going to stop?

If you had been paying attention, you'd already know the answer, which is why I have taken so many risks in so many posts, being honest with the negations my dignity has borne, stripped away like a forensic anatomy puzzle. As a journalist, I know nothing, and hell will freeze over before I ever have anything like Ted Koppel's source list, but violence is not created in a vacuum. This is the cost of marginalization.