Marty Barrett: The Flight of the Mavervorl

--8.26.2008--

Easy Beautiful: Horror in Norway

This is a documentary my team and I created about one of the many issues corporate-owned historians would just as soon you never knew.

Open your eyes, slaves!

Labels: movies, pop

--1.04.2008--

Another country heard from - Inland Empire edition

I got my wife an iPod Touch (the iPhone without the useless phone) for Christmas. She has so far refused to pick it up, look at it, or even sniff it when I thrust it at her (we're still talking about the iPod).

Here, David Lynch talks about watching movies in a manner signifying the depth of feeling people have about technology.

Labels: apple, faulty technology, geekery, movies

--11.06.2007--

The Golden Compass

Without knowing there was a movie coming out, I started reading Phillip Pullman's brilliant "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the first book of which, "The Golden Compass", has been adapted for film.

My education in fantasy stories has been limited by my dislike of most people who like fantasy stories. It is an ancient prejudice. But I've been lucky; I've enjoyed the "Harry Potter" books, think "The Lord of the Rings" is a masterpiece, and am very impressed with "His Dark Materials", which takes its title from this area of "Paradise Lost":

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,

Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.

My brief exposure to fantasy stories has revealed that they all have things in common:

1. Children with dead or compromised parents
2. Guys in robes
3. A weapon to be used for good or evil
4. Betrayal

Based on this, I have written my own short fantasy story. It is called

The Wondrous Bathrobe Tool
by Marty Barrett

Hugh Hefner approached Gary.

"It's a shame your parents are dead," he said, "but these witches want you to be their leader."

"May I take my magic toothbrush?" asked Gary.

"That's not any toothbrush," replied Hef.

"His Dark Materials" is ambitious and uncondescending to young readers. It also has some bold things to say about organized religion and God, something I think "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" deal with obliquely, but Pullman puts right out there.

"But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one; you can never see any concrete proof that it exists but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of thibngs that couldn't be imagined without it."

If the movie trailer is any indication, "The Golden Compass" gets dumbed down in the adaptation, but I'll still see it; it still looks fun. Gandalf plays a bear, for example.

Labels: books, geekery, movies, poetry

--11.01.2007--

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival

The American Cinematheque at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre is a good place to see a movie. The audiences are of varied ages, and not so relentlessly young and hipsterish that I think I'm living in the land of Logan's Run.

The lady who sold me popcorn was older and sullen, rather than young and sullen, and looked a little like Janice from The Muppets. I felt like I was in Cambridge.

Recently I saw a double feature of documentaries presented by director Murray Lerner: The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, and Festival, which still spent a lot of time with Dylan but which also focused on Odetta, Johnny Cash, and dozens of other acts from the festivals of 1963-'65.

I enjoyed the first movie, released this year, because I hadn't seen a lot of the footage before. While the climax was obviously Dylan's "going electric" with "Maggie's Farm" in 1965, footage of the younger Dylan with Joan Baez tuning his guitar for him (no wonder they broke up), Dylan actually smiling, and Dylan interacting - albeit minimally - with the audience were fun to see.

The myth is that Dylan surprised the crowd with electrification in '65, and that he was booed. While we can hear boos from the audience, and while his acoustic encore is greeted with almost palpable relief, there were no cries of "Judas!" like he got when he took the act to England.

Director Lerner spoke between the movies.

"Remember, I was there," he said in response to the mythology that has been generated by Dylan's final performance at Newport, "and people swear to me that it was the audience booing or the journalists booing or people behind the stage booing. There were selected people booing, and it came mostly from the journalists."

Festival, released in 1967, was by comparison a much better movie. It was edited with audience and band interviews, and was more reminiscent of the Maysles Brothers' later Woodstock film than the raw presentation of chronological Dylan footage that made up Other Side of the Mirror.

My favorite parts of Festival were Odetta's performances. She brought the house down. And Peter, Paul, and Mary (especially Mary Travers) put on a great show, while Peter Yarrow seemed a little toolish and Joan Baez seemed in love with her voice to the detriment of the music. When I am an old man, I want to dress like Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, on alternate days.

Festival also featured cloggers, a jug band, and the Georgia Island Sea Singers. I can imagine that none of them knew what to make of Dylan, and Donovan, and Baez. Still, everyone seemed clean cut.

The biggest letdown for me was that Phil Ochs was not included. He was a Newport mainstay but was always overshadowed by Dylan. Very little footage of him exists.

I am looking forward to the release of Roy Karch's "Underground Tonight Show", a New York City cable access show from the 70's. It featured a drunken performance by Ochs in his decline that was still very good. The rights are still up in the air, so I am not holding my breath.

Buy: Festival

Labels: los angeles, movies, music, pop

--7.24.2007--

The Faunz reimagined

I watched Pan's Labyrinth the other night and was a little upset by how one of my favorite television characters, The Fonz, was recharacterized as a menacing, child-frightening monster.

Not since Wayne Rogers' happy go lucky character in M*A*S*H became the dour Pernell Roberts interpretation in Trapper John, MD has an iconic character from my youth been so poorly treated.

Despite this, Pan's Labyrinth is a beautiful, beguiling, and poignant movie that nevertheless puts me as a parent yet again on edge: What's with the goddamn faeries leading children away? It seems that, throughout literature, faeries are the manifestation of a parent's - and therefore society's - failure to keep children entertained.

I resolve to feed my daughter more gum.

The Stolen Child - William Butler Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

--7.09.2007--

"Sorry Fugu": If the River Was Ratatouille

TAARG noticed that the food critic/Alan Rickman character in Pixar's Ratatouille (played by Peter O'Toole) recalled the food critic in T.C. Boyle's short story "Sorry Fugu" from a 1989 collection.

In the movie, the merciless critic Anton Ego caves in to a simple peasant dish that he remembers from his childhood. In the short story, the critic's boyfriend is kept at bay with burned steak and peas, "shanty Irish" food his mother used to make.

The critics in both stories find it easier to dismiss things than embrace them.

"To like something," Boyle's critic says, "to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?"

Ratatouille's critic says, "But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."

This was the first movie the three of us attended at a theatre, and our 2.5-year-old took the movie like a champ while other kids around her shrieked and kicked their chairs. Ours was the child that made single people and childless couples want to have children, and both TAARG and I had to fend off proposals to create children.

"No, really," TAARG said. "I'm already pregnant."

"Sure, when?" I said. "I've got a 3:00 and a 3:15 available."

Ratatouille's animation was brilliant but the story required a little too much of the audience. It wasn't a matter of giving the audience too much credit, it was a matter of not knowing when to stop teaching us about individualism and following one's dreams and listening to one's heart. There were too many ingredients in the stew.

And the density in one area was a deficit in another. While it's not very interesting that "anyone can cook", we would like to know how the human protagonist suddenly is an expert rollerblader and customer service representative when before he couldn't ride a bike or keep a job. The story needed simpling up, but visually it was rich, and the ending was very satisfying.

See also: Buy T.C. Boyle's "If the River Was Whiskey"

Labels: books, movies, TAARG, tot

--7.03.2007--

Finding Mido

South Korea's Oldboy (2003) is a provocative and poignant study of the relationship between fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters.

It is a film for as much of the family as possible.

See also: Oldboy (imdb), Official site

Labels: movies, netflix odyssey

Below is the only pornographic image you will find on this site. Sorry, I can't be all things to all people.

The links below may, and often do, contain objectionable material. Go ahead. Wreck your life.