tenebrae (cinema history class)

Session: Giallo-Rama, week 4
Movie: Tenebrae  (1982)
Directed by Dario Argento
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
An American author visits Rome on a book tour. His visit is met with a murder spree that seems to be tied to his latest novel. Hilarity ensues.

Teeing Up:
Keith started things off by talking about Dario Argento's place in the world of giallos. Argento wasn't the best writer, or the best at handling actors. But "he made murder beautiful" and raised it to an art form. Tenebrae was inspired by harassing phone calls that Argento got from a deranged fan, and was the second-to last good film that Argento made. Sorry, I don;t remember what the last one was. Opera?

Before showing the film, Keith showed us trailers for three other giallos:

• Short Night of Glass Dolls
• Asylum Erotica
• The Black Belly of the Tarantula

My Reaction:
It's rare that a movie leaves me breathless. But this did. Part murder mystery, part slasher schlock, this kept me guessing at the end. "Maybe he's the killer," I thought -- before realizing "he" couldn't possibly be (for one reason or another). And at the end, when it was all wrapped up, I knew there would be one more shock left. With two characters left, I didn;t know which one would turn around and kill the other. I was right that one more shock was left, but I was wrong in that it wasn't either of the possibilities I contemplated. Until that ending, I was debating with myself as to whether it was  better or worse than Don't Torture a Duckling, but that ending put it over the top, and I gave it a ten out of ten.

Class Reaction:
There was a lot of great energy in the room as we watched this. The volume of blood -- this movie encouraged us to act out as little boys. Someone (I think it was Dave) and I both made a connection to Jackson Pollack as one character lost an arm and spurted blood all over a white wall. The soundtrack, a set of pulsing synthetic rhythms by Goblin, had everyone going. That being the case, I was surprised that it didn't get tens all around. I really thought Ethan loved it, but he was quite critical, finding the plot uninteresting, and no one to like. But Joe, who gave it a standing ovation, agreed with me that it was the best of the giallos that Keith showed us.

The ratings:

• Joe: 12 / 10
• Dave:9.8 to 9.9 / 10
• Sean 7 to 8 / 10
• Scott: 10 / 10
• Ethan: 7 /10

Tenebrae passes the Bechdel Test. Barely.

even the bunnies aren't safe

So it's come to this?

For United Airlines, when it rains it pours.

The recent dustup regarding United Airlines and their mistreatment of passengers seems new, but I remember when DaveCarroll took the airline on.

Honestly, I don't know what;'s involved in flying with a musical instrument. I've never done it, but I know others have. Duh. I suspect there's more to the story than Carroll shares. And he shouldn't have called out a United employee by name. She's just trying to do her job and make a living within a restrictive corporate structure.

And then the more recent stuff. Not letting the girls with leggings on the flight, having a paying passenger beaten and dragged off a flight. Bumping the hedge fund manager to economy. Kicking the engaged couple off the flight to their destination wedding.

Seems to me United's culpability is clear in some cases (the Vietnamese Doctor who got beaten up). But in other cases, I just don't see it. The legging girls were flying nonrevenue, and the dress code for such passengers is clear.

But at some point, I have to wonder if the hype has taken on a life beyond reality? Do these things really happen only on United? Or are we only hearing about each new case because it's fun to pile on?

Poor bunny.

a weekend of gardening

Coe Hall, where Bill Barash lives

Lots of gardening this weekend...

Saturday was the April LIDS meeting at Planting Fields Arboretum. The featured speaker was Bill Barsash, who has worked at (and lived at) Planting Fields for 45 years, as one of their horticulturists. Bill's presentation was wide-ranging and varied, but always interesting. He talked about the relationships between types of flowers, and shared lots of amusing anecdotes. In one of my favorites, he talked about taking dates back to Coe Hall -- the mansion in Planting Fields where he lived. "It's not much," he would say, "but it's home."

Also amusing, several of Barash's slides had UFOs and space aliens photoshopped in. Just for fun. Blair noted that what was really great about the presentation is that Barash had a way of making the topic interesting, so one learns material without realizing it.

LIDS members weeding the beds

Prior to the meeting, Blair and I, along with a dozen or so other LIDS members spent two hours weeding the daylily beds that LIDS maintains. I hate getting up early on a Saturday, and digging in the beds on a cold, wet, raw day isn't exactly fun. But it feels important to me to be part of the LIDS community -- and helping on projects like the daylily beds helps in a way that simply attending the meetings doesn't.

And, of course, the bonus -- We got some daylilies and a hydrangea from the compost heap. I have no idea what variety of daylily it is -- the color, form, size, could be anything. And, later at the meeting, Blair and I each won an asclepias seedling. To top it off, one of the other members was giving away Zinia seeds.

The upshot of that is that Blair and I spent a good part of Sunday planting in our own yard. The

ANd the day after, I'm back in the yard planting.

hydrangea, the daylilies, the asclepias. As well as a coleus, some tulips and some milkweed plants that we already had waiting for planting. The Zinia seeds will have to wait until the middle of May.

eyeball (cinema history class)

AS ALWAYS, THERE MAY BE SPOILERS

Session: Giallo-Rama, week 3
Movie: Eyeball  (1975)

Plot:
An American tour group is trying to enjoy Barcelona. And they would be enjoying it if not for the fact that a mystery killer keeps murdering them. One at a time. By stabbing them in the eye. Hilarity ensues.

Class Reaction:
The reaction here was mixed. Joe and Dave rated this very highly, and had a grand old time with it. They found it to be a well-told story, and often great fun. Again, Dave called it early, figuring out who the murderer was before anyone else did. Joe said that he is now sold on giallos.

Sean, Scott, Ethan and I were less impressed. We enjoyed it, but found that it was missing...something. Maybe that was a result of our coming off two weeks of really great films. But even being unimpressed, none of us really thought this was a bad movie.

We were all kind of stunned by the crucial revelation by one character that she had lost her eye as a child, playing doctor with a friend. You know, if you lose an eye playing doctor, you're doing it wrong.

The ratings:

• Joe: 9.8 / 10
• Dave: 9.3 to 9.4 / 10
• Sean 2 / 4
• Scott: 7 / 10
• Ethan: 7 /10

My Thoughts:
After Bay of Blood and Don't Torture a Duckling I had high -- probably impossibly high -- expectations. This just wasn't as interesting. That said, it was a decent slasher/murder mystery, and I realize that it did keep me guessing. So I can't really dismiss it. If it brought me in to that degree. There was plenty of misdirection, which I tend to like in these kinds of films.

As an aside, Ethan disagreed with my perspective. If he finds himself guessing at who the killer is, he finds that to be a bad sign. I guess he feels that if he's truly being sucked into the drama he's just letting it unfold.

Anyway, I was amused that the Minister in the American tour group looked a lot like Barry Goldwater.

I gave this a 7 out of 10.

Eyeball passes the Bechdel Test.

Extras:
Before the movie, Keith showed us trailers for three other giallos:

• Lizard in a Woman's Skin
• Death Stalks on High Heels
• Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Also, Sean was back, having missed the prior session, where we watched Don't Torture a Duckling. Missing the class experience, he hunted it down and watched it on his own (and then with friends) so he could comment to us. He agreed that it was a great film, and rated it a perfect ten. Oh, and Joe revised his rating of Duckling from 9.8 to 9.95. In so doing, he coined the phrase, "Hot Duck Breath," which I think would make an excellent band name.

some day i'll read this...

I just noticed a book on my shelf that's been teasing me since I got it.

The Land of Painted Caves, the sixth (and last) in Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series has been sitting in one place almost since I got it. Unread.

I really want to read it. Scratch that. I don't want to read it. I want to have read it. To know what happens and how the story ends without actually going to the bother of reading it. Reading a novel is not something that should be a burden. And, to my thinking, if you're in a novel and find you don't enjoy it, then put it down There are other novels out there.

But I've read the other five books in the series, and I just have to know how things turn out for Ayla and Jondalar. And their daughter, Jonayla. Yes, Jonayla. Oy.

The first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear, was very good. Great, even. It's a stone age fish-out-of-water story, set in Europe when the human family tree had more than one living branch. A little girl, a member of the branch that would produce today's modern humans is orphaned and taken in by a band of cavepeople whose branch would die out. Their ways are different than hers, but it's more than just a difference of custom.There are fundamental biological differences that make it difficult for her to acculturate. It was quite  the page turner -- very compelling. It was also made into a movie starring Daryl Hannah, which sucked. The trailer is below.

The sequel, The Valley of Horses, followed Ayla after leaving the tribe that raised her. And it introduces a love interest, Jondalar, who would be with her for the rest of the series. It was also a good novel, but nowhere near as good as the original. The Mammoth Hunters was still enjoyable, but was, in some ways, a prehistoric version of Beverly Hills 90210.

Those were the three novels that were out when I first got interested in the series, sometime around the time I finished college. I picked up the fourth book, The Plains of Passage, as soon as it came out in 1991. By this point, the downward trend (qualitywise) was well-established and seemingly irreversible. But, as I noted to people who would discuss it with me, I had to know what happens. There were, generally speaking, two things that annoyed me about the series. The first was the way Ayla had become some kind of super human wonderwoman. As the story tells it, she's responsible for millenia of human advancement -- in weapons technology, in domestication of animals, in medicine. It gets kind of boring after a while. And then there's Jondalar, her man. He's not quite the genius she is, but he's sure close. And he's the perfect lover. Just right for Ayla the Goddess. My other problem was that each book was longer than the previous one. That wouldn't be a problem if the books had progressively more story to tell. But they don't. They just have more and more of what my grandfather called the "berry-picking passages" -- stretches of exposition describing the flora and fauna, and the prehistoric cooking and construction techniques. Auel had done a lot of research, and made sure it didn't go to waste.

In 2003, Auel released The Shelters of Stone. And I bought it and read it as soon as it came out. But the downward trend had continued, and it was little more than a soap opera with the berry-picking passages. The Land of Painted Caves came out in 2011. I didn't rush out to buy it. I decided I'd wait until I could borrow it from the library. Given my relationship with media at the time, that was definitely a bad sign. I never did get it from the library. It was always out from my local branch, and I never wanted it enough to put in a reservation. Eventually I bought a copy at a thrift store for like $1.50. I may have overpaid. At any rate, I read the beginning. It was some hunting scene, which was interesting enough. But then came the long boring crap following group dynamics and long descriptions of prehistoric technology. At some point I put the book down for the night, and never picked it back up.

I still want to get to the end. Just to know what happens, and to be able to have that closure. But I just don't want to bother...