Month: April 2010

Movie Review: The Blind Side

On By Norbert HauptIn MoviesLeave a comment

Here is a movie I had no interest in watching – based on the previews. Somehow it didn’t touch me. Then Sandra Bullock won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her role in this movie. In addition, The Blind Side played on the flights on American Airlines from San Diego to New York several times. As a rule, I never watch movies on airplanes, but the things was in front of me during several flights, images only, without sound since I didn’t use the headset. I rented and watched it now.

A huge black teenager, apparently homeless and parentless, catches the eye of a suburban, upper-class mother. She and her family take him in, sponsor him and accept him lovingly. And he becomes a football star. That was the story.

It’s a true story, and all the characters are real and alive today. This is a movie without a villain, without any evil, and the tension and suspense does not come from intrigue, crime, evil, danger or any other negative force in contrast with good. It’s just an unlikely story of all good people who do the best they can with their lives. There is nothing stilted here, nothing corny, nothing outlandish or unbelievable. It’s a story told so well, it works.

Rating: ***

Movie Review: A Serious Man

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

This movie is a crack-up, a Jewish crack-up. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I had to check Ebert, who gave it four stars and Rotten Tomatoes, where it got 88 percent.

I got suspicious and confused right at the start. I launched the DVD, I clicked on “Play Movie” with the A Serious Man cover art in the background. Then the first five minutes transported me into eastern Europe, sometime in the late 19th century, for all I could tell, into a blizzard. A young Jewish man is guiding his work horse home. He enters the kitchen, the hearth, and there is his wife (or mother?) and they have a conversation in Yiddish, with bright English subtitles, about events that simply don’t relate to what I expected A Serious Man to be about.

I frown, I wonder if I put in the right disk, but yes, I remember hitting the play button with the right images. Is this a Jewish movie? It’s all dark, weird, and not at all fitting. What is going on? It’s going on for minutes, that’s what.

Then finally the credits start for the “real” movie, and for the next couple of hours I wonder what the beginning had to do with the movie.

Nothing, I figure out.

If you are my age, or close to it, you may have been to the movies before they showed previews, trailers and advertisements, but rather a short film, often some animated cartoon, or other art piece, before the movie starts.

That is what I conclude the Yiddish piece is: a short art film for a start, kind of like an appetizer to get me in the mood – albeit a weird mood.

The picture above, on the left, shows the main character, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) on the left. The guy on the right is Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), one of his best friends, comforting him. But I’ll get to that part later.

Larry is a Jewish physics professor, living in an unnamed midwestern suburb, with cracker-box houses on new streets on the prairie, where the trees are not yet mature giving the neighborhood an unfinished look. The town appears to be mostly Jewish. If this were a country-western song, Larry’s girlfriend would have left him, his dog would have died and his pickup truck would have been stolen.

But he is a physics professor living in the suburbs. His son listens to rock and roll during Hebrew class and is stoned during his bar mitzvah. His daughter steals money for a nose job. One of his students tries to bribe him for a passing grade. He is up on the roof of his house only to see his neighbor’s wife sunbathing naked behind the fence, getting flustered. His loser brother-in-law lives in their house, sleeps on the couch and feels sorry for himself between getting  into trouble with the law and staying up crying at night. And his wife tells him she wants a divorce so she can live with Sy Abelman, one of his best friends.

This is where we get back to the picture above. Sy just sees Larry for the first time since Larry’s wife told him about Sy. Ever the huggy-feely kind, Sy knows how hard this must be for Larry, so he brings a bottle of good wine to “talk.” He gives Larry a hug of comfort to make him feel better, since it must be very painful.

Sy betrays and comforts Larry at the same time. One of his students bribes and blackmails him at the same time. This wife kicks him out and he has to live at the “Jolly Roger”, a fleabag motel in town. To get help, Larry tries one Rabbi after the other. They youngest one is a ditz. The older one is a crackpot. And the wise old one can’t be bothered with mere mortals like Larry. Rabbis and lawyers are no help. Nobody is any help, not even the naked neighbor.

Images after images fly by. I chuckle, I laugh, I wince, I shake my head, glad that I am not Jewish and trapped in the apparently flawed religious and cultural logic that life cages people in. But it’s not the Jewish part that’s the problem. You could just as easily make it a movie about Catholic cages, or Mormon cages.

And then, as jarring as the start of the movie was, the end comes around and I wonder what happened.

What just happened?

Movie Review: Shutter Island

On By Norbert HauptIn MoviesLeave a comment

When I saw the previews, Shutter Island looked like a supernatural, gory horror flick. I was not interested. Then several people recommended the movie and told me I’d enjoy it. So off to the movies we went on Easter Sunday afternoon. The theater was surprisingly empty. The weather was great in San Diego, after a day of rain on Saturday. The skies were bright and clear, it was cool out but sunny, and most people wanted to spend the day outdoors, not in a theater. It was just as the lights went down for the previews when the earthquake hit.  The seats rocked, the concrete under our feet vibrated, a few scared cries echoed in the mostly empty theater, and some people started getting up to leave, when after about 30 seconds of shaking, the world became solid again. Thus was our introduction to Shutter Island.

When we got up and walked out a couple of hours later, as the credits rolled, we kept asking ourselves and the people near us whether the earthquake really had happened, or whether that too was just our imagination, a mass hallucination or perhaps just a bad dream.

Shutter Island is a mystery thriller. The lead character is a federal marshal named Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), who with his partner, is sent to Shutter Island, a prison island off the coast of Boston, which houses a maximum security facility for the criminally insane. Supposedly a female prisoner had escaped from a locked room without a trace. The marshals try to investigate what had happened. As they dig deeper, they find inconsistencies in the stories of the medical staff, the guards and the prisoners themselves that make them doubt everything and trust nobody.

Of course, a prison with criminally insane people can only exist before a backdrop of inclement weather, hurricanes that tear down large trees and rain that seems to penetrate solid rock walls. Some of the prisoners are kept naked in dungeons, which seems inconsistent with the message of treating the insanity, but it fits the plot. There is a mysterious lighthouse accessible apparently only by swimming through treacherous surf in ice-cold water. The head psychiatrist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) lives in a civil-war era mansion. The guards all look like Nazis, and some of the prisoners definitely are insane.

As the story unfolds, it goes from plausible and explainable, one step at a time to uncertainty, doubt, fear and later actual terror. What the heck is going on? Things get stranger by the minute. We get the feeling that nothing is quite what it seems. Like in the classic movie American Beauty, where we know all along that nothing is what it seems, in Shutter Island we get the same feeling, but in a sinister and frightening sort of way. The human brain can be very powerful and also very dangerous, and human imagination, guided or misguided, plays a powerful role in this film.

I didn’t know or realize that this was a Martin Scorsese movie, until the final credits started. Well, that explains everything. I got up, and, as I said in the beginning, I asked myself if there really had been an earthquake, or if I had imagined the whole thing.

Rating: ***

Earthquakes Rattling San Diego

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Feelings, Nature1 Comment

Easter Sunday. We went to the movies in the afternoon to see Shutter Island, and just before the previews started, the seats were shaking. The shaking and rattling continued for about 30 seconds, which is quite long when you are trying to decide what to do – stay put or get out.

During the movie, things continued shaking. I checked online and found that the earthquake had hit Mexicali with a strength of 7.2. Mexicali is not far from here.

For the rest of the evening, things have been shaking and rattling. Are these aftershocks, or are these foreshocks?

I loaded up a couple of flashlights with new D-Cell batteries and put them next to the bed.

Let’s hope they were aftershocks – and this is over.

This time.

Movie Review: Amelia

On By Norbert HauptIn MoviesLeave a comment

A chronicle of the life and career of the famed aviator Amelia Earhart, staring Hilary Swank as Amelia, and Richard Gere as her husband, George Putnam. Of course, we all know the significance of Amelia’s achievements. She had big dreams as a little girl in Kansas, picked up aviation as her passion, and eventually became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Eventually, in 1937, she embarked on a trip around the world. The space between Hawaii and Asia, at that time, was unconquerable by plane. It had not been done before. She ran low on gas when trying to find Howland Island, a small strip of sand with a military outpost. Radio signals between the outpost and the plane did not work correctly. The outpost could hear her, but she could not hear them. She was doomed.

What in the age of GPS would be a trivial lookup was deadly in 1937. Amelia and her navigator, and their plane, were never found. They simply vanished. 

The film shows Amelia’s life, her values and her passion. We pick up a little aviation history as we go. The 120 minute movie is slow in parts, and the first half, while informative, had my interest waning at times. I stuck with it, looking forward to the drama of the inevitable end, that we all, unfortunately, knew all along.

Amelia Earhart changed the lives of women in this country through her example, her courage and her passion. She made history, and as it goes with people who break the rules and attempt things that have not been done before, sometimes things go wrong. If the vehicles of  those dreams are airplanes flying low with not enough gas in inclement weather over vast oceans, there isn’t any margin for error. Amelia died a few weeks before her 40th birthday. It was, I now know, much too soon.

The movie was slow, and like a plane overloaded with too much gas, too heavy to take off, it bounced up and down and it never really soared like it should have. It left me thinking that the story was interesting, and that’s that.

Rating: **

Movie Review: The Maiden Heist

On By Norbert HauptIn Art, Movies1 Comment

I notice art in other people’s offices when I visit there and I go to art museums when I have extra time on a business trip. I enjoy my art and I love the inspiration I get from taking in other people’s art. Museums are wonderful places.

To be a museum security guard must be the most boring job in the world. Have you watched the men and women that stand around in art museums, in uniforms, ties, quiet, alone, never talking to others unless asked by a visitor for directions to the bathroom, mostly? I cannot imagine doing a single 8-hour-shift of this, except the first one, and perhaps the second and third one, until I was done looking at all the art.

The Maiden Heist is packed with first-rate actors, Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken, William Macy and Marcia Gay Harden, all academy award winners or nominees. If it hadn’t been for that lineup, I might have passed on this movie, but with those names, I could  not help but give in to my curiosity.

Three men, Charles, Roger and George, are security guards in an art museum. Each has his favorite work of art, and each is instantly hypnotized and mesmerized when in front of it. The works have captured the men and now we understand how they can go to work every day and do this job. They are the model of honest men and stewards of their entrusted art. Then they learn that the museum is preparing for an exchange of works with a museum in Denmark, and their favorite art is scheduled to leave. Since they cannot bear this they find themselves plotting an unlikely plan to steal the works.

This is a light comedy. You will laugh, chuckle and be amused. Some of the humor is almost slapstick-like and you shake your head but you accept it. Lesser actors could not pull this off. But this cast does it so well and makes the characters become so real, that it becomes a story well told. There is no important message here, no huge suspense, just a cute little story that leads to satisfying entertainment when you need a couple of hours off because you have a cold and you need something to watch while spooning up chicken soup.

Rating: **

How Big is the Solar System – Take Two

On By Norbert HauptIn ScienceLeave a comment

To go in the spirit of the toilet paper timeline of the earth below, here is a repost of my visualization of the size of the solar system.

Who is Paul Johnson?

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Political2 Comments

In Forbes Magazine of March 15, 2010 on page 15, the column for “Current Events” is titled The Sickness of the West.

In this full-page column, the author claims that the world is groaning beneath a mountain of debt, and to get out of it, we must trust those that lead us. But we don’t trust them, with good reason.

At the very top we have a sad bunch of flawed mediocrities.

  • President Barack Obama. To quote Benjamin Disraeli, “A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” If only he would talk less, and think more.
  • Chancellor Angela Merkel. A well-meaning hausfrau with the steely will of a dishcloth.
  • President Nicolas Sarkozy. An operator who is clever at everything except what matters most.
  • Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A machine politician whose own machinery is visibly breaking down.
  • Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. A splendid advertisement for Viagra, a man whose antics would have afforded us much amusement in a time of normal prosperity.

The collapse in leadership is a serious matter, made worse by the fact that none of the main central bank chairmen is well known, liked or trusted.

This column is written by Paul Johnson.

Who is Paul Johnson, who has the audacity to not just criticize, but denigrate the leaders of five of the largest economies in the world?

The byline, at the very bottom of the article reads:

Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author.

Ah, he’s an author. Well, that gives him the qualifications. He is eminent? He is so significant, well known, trusted and liked that I had no idea who he was, never heard of him, and if he wrote columns in Forbes before, they were so striking that I have no recollection of them or his name.

I am weary of people who have to put titles behind their names to make themselves look important. I am also weary of people who have to be introduced with the byline of “eminent” by the magazine so they can justify them being there.

If his name was not Paul Johnson, but rather something like Sir Paul Pompousness, Esq. it would speak for itself and it would work better.

Forbes Magazine, once a vibrant source if information, is now a thin leaflet of 80 pages, 43 of which are full-page advertisements, and one of which is Paul Johnson’s column.

Is Forbes going under?