New Ways of Seeing and the 2011 Golden Globe Awards

The “famous” tea party scene at Tighsolas. I am having http://www.tighsolas.ca/ redesigned by a PhD in History, but I think I will use this ‘movie’ theme for all the pics.

Well, BBC Radio Four is broadcasting a 100 year retrospective of the motion picture industry, Going to the Flicks, by Barry Norman, and Norman opens by telling me something I did not know, that silent movies weren’t silent, in that there was a lot of noise in the cinema. But of course. And also I did not know that children (who were often literate) read the titles out to illiterate old people. NOW, that is most interesting for my story Flo in the City.

Considering the controversy in the era about children and the evils of the nickelodeon, this contributes some context.

I think I’ll have one of Marion’s students parents say: “At least they are practicing their reading.”

Fabulous.

The Golden Globes were last night, but I didn’t watch. I was at a friend’s and we watched three episodes of Slings and Arrows. My friend’s husband was from Stratford, Ontario.

I got up early this morning, 6 am, to return home, and almost froze my fingers off scraping the thin hard sheet of ice from the windscreen. When I got into the car, the thermostat said -22.

It’s been a long time since I had to suffer in this way. (And my car seats warm up these day which is a real luxury/necessity.) And when I got home 30 minutes later my neighbour was warming up his car to bring his youngest of three to daycare and I remembered HOW HARD it is to be a parent of young children, especially during the winter months in Montreal.

There’s something to be said for being an empty-nester.

Anyway, apparently Ricky Gervais was very acerbic at the Golden Globe Awards and was chastised, perhaps, half way through. (Isn’t that his job to make people uncomfortable?) and Colin Firth won for The King’s Speech and Paul Giamatti won for Barney’s Version and Annette Bening won for the Kids are All Right, so I am happy. And the Social Network won all the 0ther major awards, mostly. (I liked that movie, except for the fact the only female characters in it are young, incidental and skinny sex-objects. It looks to me that Colin Firth will win the only Oscar for the King’s Speech movie, despite the recent hype and that the Social Network has long legs.)

Anyway, back to Going to the Flicks, the radio program chronicling 100 years of cinema.

Box Office Mojo claims in a recent article that box office receipts in 2010 are down 15%. (With dvds and satellite feeds of movies I don’t think this means fewer people are watching movies; just that fewer people are eating overpriced popcorn at the Cineplex’s.)

Well, they must have been worried in November 1938 (the year before ‘the best ever year in cinema’ because the Motion Picture People published the following ad in the Montreal Star. (It’s one of Edith’s clippings, but she clipped it for the story about the demolition of the Reford Home in Westmount on the back. In Barney’s Version, Barney’s dad (Dustin Hoffman) mentions “a big house on the hill.’ He’s referring to rich Westmount.)

This article is VERY interesting, for obvious reasons. Here, in 1938, the movies are described as a ‘democratic medium’. Hmm. TV was only in embryo, I think.

A World Within Four Walls

Going to the ‘movies’ has become as much a part of modern life as going to work or going home to dinner. It is a habit that survives wars, strikes, political upheaval and national crises.

The first ‘movies’ were gaped at in much the same way as their contemporaries, the first automobiles. Today nobody stands at the curb to yell, “Get a horse!” at the streamlined version of either. The modern motion picture is as far a cry from the nickelodeon “flicker’ as the sleek, sixteen cylinder limousine is from its one-lunged ancestor.

This development was possible because going to the movies, like automobiling, became a national habit.

(In 1910, traditional theatre owners blamed the decline in attendance on both movies and the automobile.)

Why? Why do we go to the movies? It is because the motion picture has taken unto itself some basic functions in society. Motion Pictures intensify life!

For the younger generation, especially, an evening at the movies offers nearer kinship with other people – a greater insight into life – than a visit with neighbours.

The movies has given our eyes new ways of seeing. Because a star’s face appears before us on the screen in a hundred foot close up, we are more familiar with his features than those of our sister.

A portrait of a motion picture audience would show peace in the darkened theatre, happiness…freedom from care… hands held. As the audience reacts at what is taking place on the screen, it shares its feelings – and affirms that man is a social being. It is a group experience that is good for all of us, good for our individualities. Motion pictures are the chief cultural possession of the average man and woman. Millions who are removed from the other arts find it in the film their literature, their expressions of beauty in form and design, their interpretations of the world about them.

While the motion picture theatre is itself a great classroom in which our generation has acquired matchless knowledge of far regions and understanding distant peoples. There is more than a passing connection between the American way of life and American leadership in the world of motion pictures. For the movie is by its very nature a democratic product – a cooperative effort of the talents of many people. Their work is subject to the approval of the box office – a referendum as accurate as that of the ballot box itself.

It is in this public expression that motion pictures have found their greatest inspiration, their constant challenge to a new endeavor… Great stories, splendidly produced…love-filled romance, stirring drama, gay adventure, hilarious comedy, tuneful musicals, star studded casts filled with your favorites -new talents for which the world has been searched. One after another these fine pictures are coming to the screen of your favorite theatre, a world within four walls.

Barney’s Version and Bonham Carter

Edison Nymph. Young and Pretty. The movie media loves young faces, especially young female faces.

I never can remember where I parked my car, in the grocery store parking lot, or at the mall, so my anxiety level rises when a character in a movie can’t remember and it’s because of Alzheimer’s. My Dad died of Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s is one of the themes weaving through the movie Barney’s Version, which my husband and I saw yesterday.

It’s a good movie (and Giamatti is, indeed, great as Barney Panofsky) and for English Montrealers it offers up especial goodies. Like Paul Gross in a a self-deprecating cameo. I love that guy. I call him Paul Not Gross At All!

And all those nice wives to Giamatti’s Panofsky.

Rosamund Pike was in my favorite movie of 2009, An Education, and here she plays the diametric opposite character, a grounded mature type of person. Pike is La Belle du Jour I guess, something Minnie Driver was at one time. Driver, like most actresses, is aging backwards, so she looks great, but the parts for women dry up, don’t they?

Anyway, in An Education, Pike wears thick sixties eyeliner to great effect and here she seems to be wearing no make-up at all. My husband thinks she looks Oriental, and I see what he means. She’s an exotic-looking blond, a rarity, and for that reason, alone, she stands out.

Barney’s Version’s murder mystery starts the movie and ends it, but is left to flounder in the middle. That’s my main gripe. Barney’s Vision would have been a fantastic movie had they kept that thread alive throughout. It would have added tension – and irony. To finally figure out the truth about a pivotal and dogging event in your life while in an Alzheimer’s fog.

And as a Montrealer who once worked in radio, I say HA! You see, Barney’s Version suffers from, what might I call it? reverse anachronism. (But only a Montrealer would know, or care.)

The era of the book, I’m guessing was moved ahead a few decades and covers 1974 to 2010, but English Montreal ain’t what it used to be. Well, it ain’t, really.

Pike’s character gets a radio job when in her 40′s or something, on becoming an empty-nester. Are you kidding? Radio or any media in Montreal was always a young woman’s job (Minnie might relate) but now English radio is dead dead dead. Except, maybe, for sports.

I worked in radio in Montreal the early eighties. I was a copywriter. (My boss was a 54 year old woman,with no children, who had been laid off from a big ad agency that went belly up and who got the job because her husband was a newsman at the station.) At 56, I’d have more chance of being hit by a Cuckoo Bird falling from the sky than getting a job in Montreal Media. I just have to pray my husband holds on to his.

And there are no more big tax breaks for cagey movie makers, anymore.

In Barney’s Version Bruce Greenwood gets her the job. Another Canadian actor I really like. He is perfectly cast here as the romantic foil. So handsome in that weathered way.

Anyway, after seeing Barney’s Version, my husband and I stopped in at some over-priced chain-eatery where we both choked down a mushy assembly-line chicken dish (which turned up 4 minutes after we ordered so we knew we were in trouble) and neither of us could remember the movie where we both first saw Giamatti. We referred to it as “that wine movie.”

Anyway, I recalled the name during the night as I slept SIDEWAYS, and got up to write this blog so as not to forget it again.

Anyway, researching my Flo in the City Book, I have discovered a great deal about the history of the Jewish Community in Montreal, more than is common knowledge.

Even in 1909, Baron Byng educated mostly Jewish students. I have been trying to figure out how many Jewish students might have attended Marion’s school, Royal Arthur – and also how many of her parents might have worked at Dominion Textile. Because that’s a key thread in my Flo in the City story, so to speak, about the 1910 garment and textile industry and the strikes.

In 1890, 2 to 3 percent of St. Anne Ward’s population was Jewish, but later the growing Jewish population lived mostly West of St. Laurent. So Battina Gregory’s book says.

Royal Arthur was near that area, but even more West.

Oh, and I also listened to Helena Bonham Carter being interviewed on the Film Programme on BBC Radio 4, in promotion of her movie The King’s Speech. She was very interesting, actually. Beautiful, smart and witty. Bugger!

Bonham Carter is mated to a Director and she claimed in the interview that no matter how well an actor prepares, it’s up to the Director to decide what to show…. And she also said something else, that the George VI’s wife wore the pants in the relationship..

Sex, Drug Fiends and Veriscopes

My husband’s off work today and we want to see a movie but the only one we can agree to see is Barney’s Version, which is playing in town at AMC and only comes to the burbs tomorrow. So we’ll have to wait. We’ve already seen the King’s Speech – and I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

I remember watching The Apprenticeship Duddy Kravitz when it came out, and loving Richard Dreyfuss in it. And last night I started to watch A Serious Man on the TV and decided it was too good to watch alone, so I taped it. (A Serious Man’s portrayal of 1962 was as stylized as was A Single Man’s. Funny, both movie protagonists were college professors, yet one lived in a fantasy house in the woods and the other in a small bungalow in a sterile-looking treeless new development. Tract housing, I think they call it.)

My husband and I are not the only ones with this filmic dilemma this holiday season. A family I know, at their Christmas meal, was trying to decide on a movie, one that Gran, 92 and grand kids, in their twenties, would like.

They could not decide, as a group, so went to the Casino, although the 21 year old grandson went on and on about a certain scene in the Black Swan, which contains, in his words, “some serious m##f-diving”.

(He didn’t appear to have registered anything else about the movie.)

Grandma (who still drives) wanted to see King’s Speech, as she has her own stash of “Colin Firth porn” no doubt – or at least a well-worn VHS copy of P and P.

Whatever. On a more serious note: I’m going to talk about opium and morphine addiction. In the 1900′s.

I’ve dug out my copy of The Gentlewoman Magazine, out of New York, to take another look. It is falling apart.

This magazine should be re-named The Hypocondriac Gentlewoman’s Magazine, if the advertisements are any indication.

Cures for all that ails the lady with nothing to do, two of the cures for morphine and opium addiction.

That’s the point: pre-1903 it was these respectable well-heeled ladies who were addicted to the stuff, in their tonics and such. Once the stuff was made illegal, it became controlled by the under-class (peddled by Jews or Chinese to Blacks, so it was claimed in the press) and the menacing, out-of-control ‘ drug fiend’ was invented.

That’s why it is so interesting that the very proper George Falconer in A Single Man admits to taking drugs, including mescaline. Or that the prim and proper Meryl Streep character in It’s Complicated smokes marijuana and has the night of her middle-aged life.

Anyway, the fashion editorial in the Gentlewoman is especially intriguing. This is 1900 remember. A woman is calling for simpler less restrictive clothing, “like the Hindoos wear.”

This is interesting to me, because, as it happens I have a scene in Flo in the City where Flo is getting dressed with all her layers, on a hot summer day, and her mind wanders to something she read about Indian women, and, for a brief moment she envisages herself in a sarong or sari- and the thought disturbs her….

Her m##f-diving moment.

Here’s a snippet: Did any woman in a tea-gown, with plaits and fancy sleeves and much lace and ribbons ever look so well as the Hindoo in her softly folded draperies?…. It is possible to argue that they are an indolent people, that we could not do business or keep house in draperies.(sic) No, we could not conveniently. But the East has workers. I am not arguing only voluminious draperies or even draperies at all, but I am arguing for simpler patterns, and for their superior patterns.”

Yes, I will use this snippet in that chapter in my book.

As it happened, simpler patterns slowly came in over the next two decades… and this helped doom the custom-tailoring industry and promote the exponential growth of garment industry.

In 1900, they didn’t have films, they had VERISCOPES.