Oh Nay! (The Passion Continued)

So that business took a while.

But here we are again, talking about MOVIES!!!!

Yeah, let’s say it once more lest we forget: Will Ferrell is a genius and we can’t imagine the world without him. Mr Burgundy, you have a MASSIVE e&*%#)n. A single plop!

Now, any idea as to what makes a good biographical movie? How about what makes ANY movie good: story, script, actors, direction… Or at least great images and music - look at Frida! What, that’s all? That’s why we haven’t written for so long? No, of course not! Read on!

If you want to make a biographical movie about somebody and are looking for a fool-proof recipe to avoid the documentary without voice-over effect, here’s an idea: let the story be told, felt, judged, by the right observer! That would be the secretary (Hitler), the doctor (Idi Amin), the secret rival (Salieri), what have you...

… the young lover who survived (Jackson Pollock), the admirer and husband’s lover who too killed herself (Sylvia Plath). We aren’t in the movie business, but we are in the FREE!! advice business. Yes, we urge you people to let the lover and the husband’s lover tell the story of Pollock and Plath – respectively. They already sound like excellent movies.

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And we’ve been sort of punished for our ramblings. As we were saying last week, we had ordered a Pollock reproduction for on the wall, an unmatched jungle … etc. and were expecting it to be delivered on Thursday by UPS. Thursday we decided to check the tracking number of the delivery. Turns out the package had been delivered already since days! The online receipt said: “Signed by: NAY”. Dysxelic though/as we are, we took that to mean that NOBODY had signed upon delivery and that the UPS had some nerve to hide their incompetence behind archaic expressions.

To cut a long story short, we now know that we have a neighbor called Nay. It was hard to trace his apartment, since it’s not on his name, but on the name of his sect. He tried to convert us, but we already have our sect.

As you know, we belong to an unholy disorder, we call ourselves Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.

Kind Mr Nay gave us our Pollock, despite our inconvertibility. But our new Pollock doesn’t fit in the living room, it’s too much. Ain’t that a bugger? No, it’s great! We needed something for above the drawer chest in the bedroom and this turns out to be perfect!

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And now, some brand new lyrics, from DIG!! LAZARUS, DIG!! that Roufa claims were stolen from him, and Mimi confirms that they sound familiar to her:

One day I’ll buy a factory & I’ll assemble y/

On a production line

I’d build a million of y/ baby
& every single one of them will be mine

I will fill the house w/ y/ stack y/ up

In every room/ we’ll have a real good time

Lie down here & be my girl.

The Passion of the Biographer

It is still Tuesday. Interesting.

Or rather, it is already Tuesday! So let's roll!

We watched Pollock, the movie, this weekend. Big mistake. Huge. And right after we had ordered a Pollock reproduction for on the wall, an unmatched jungle of high-order gravitational strokes, denser than Sven's prickles and Florian's leafy sprawls (that's our other plant). Luckily one of us at least – Mimi – has read Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut and can still appreciate the Abstract Expressionists and their potato barns. Fiction is a much more interesting – not to say, plausible - version of reality than facts. The movie about Jackson Pollock was like a documentary without the voice-over. Biographical movies are prone to this disease. There may be a few things better than a good read or a movie – not many. But there are certainly a lot of movies better than biographical movies.

We've been working on a little theory as to what makes a good biographical movie. One thing is clear, it's not the biographee that makes the movie: There exist perfectly good movies about unknown, mostly fictional people.

Here are some very good movies based on the lives – or important moments in the lives – of real, more or less famous people:

“Amadeus” (W.A.Mozart): Where dedicated musician Salieri is consumed by his envy and admiration towards the repugnant genius.
“The Downfall” (A.Hitler): The last days in the bunker through the eyes of a naïve secretary.
“Last King of Scotland” (Idi Amin dictator of Uganda): A young doctor overwhelmed by the gravitational field of insanity.
“Ali” (Mohammed Ali): Dances like a butterfly, stings like a bee!
“Frida” (Frida Kahlo): The passion of the painter through, well, paintings and wonderful music.
“Marie Antoinnete” (Marie Antoinnette, Last Queen of France): Reckless youth.
“The Hours” (V.Woolf): The writer has to kill, or die, or both.

And here are some embarrassing movies that we wouldn't recommend to anyone we like:

Pollock (Jackson Pollock): An autistic painter, whose paintings somehow make everyone swoon but don't sell?? No? Hmm...
Ted and Sylvia (Sylvia Plath): Sylvia falls in love, cries, cleans up after Ted, cries, is jealous, cries, ...??
Everything about Marilyn Monroe: It always seems to be about a blond with a back problem and a very particular make-up style.
The Aviator: Some epos about somebody.
The Journalist: Cate Blanchet amongst adults is always a bad idea.

So, have you seen any of the above movies? Do you agree with us? Any additions to our lists?

And what's the theory?

Well, right now we have to leave you - we'll continue tomorrow or sometime. This session is open for discussion!