Monday, October 15, 2012
They Say This President is a Bad Mother--Shut Your Mouth
This time tomorrow all the pundits will be talking about how Barrack "Shaft" Obama mopped the floor with his magic underwear touting, dressage lovin', car elevator using piece of Republican shit opponent. President Shaft was fucking with Mittens in the first debate, but the "rope-a-dope" stops tomorrow. If not, I'm moving to Canada.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
In which there's no accounting for taste
It's true. I have a good friend with whom I agree on the most important parts of life: women, whiskey and war, though we disagree on many of the small things. He likes baseball, singularly the worst sport ever imagined or played and I like football. He likes Scotch, the oakier the better--yuck, why not chew on a log soaked in grain alcohol (same thing). These petty differences have provided endless semi-, or wholly drunken conversational material and I'm thankful for that, but there's a line.
When somebody openly disses Anton Karras' brilliant zither soundtrack from Carol Reed's amazing 1949 film The Third Man, it reveals a basic lack of understanding or art and beauty, if not the universe itself, that requires a response. My friend and I agree that the film is a classic. The scene when Joseph Cotton's Holly Martin meets Orson Welles' Harry Lime for the first time in the eastern section of Vienna, when the two ride an enormous Ferris wheel in a nearly empty amusement park, when Lime explains that people are basically insects and killing a few here or there, even if they are children, isn't likely to disturb the universe, is one of the most balanced and beautiful moments in all of film--it's a textbook. The scene, like all the entire movie, is framed by the amazing Karas' soundtrack that I eluded to earlier.
The zither does have a distinct sound, an Austrian sound. The instrument has 20 some odd strings depending on what kind it is, and has a history dating back to King David. Karras played his like a gypsy angel. The soundtrack for the film is a musical version of its most disturbing image, a midnight balloon man, wandering the shadowy post war streets of Vienna, eerily happy, cheerful and dreadfully out of place. The presence of said balloon man has never ceased to blow my mind in The Third Man, nor has the music. Yes, it repetitious, but not unnecessarily so. The music creates a wild opposition to one of the bleakest noir films ever made. It lends the film a creepy quality not unlike the one created in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, which gives us Robert Mitchum as a serial killing preacher who is fond of singing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while he hunts children down. In both cases, the music makes the movies. The Third Man would not have been the same movie without the zither. I have never shown the film without a student commenting on it and I doubt I ever will be able to. The original theatrical trailer for the film was correct in stating, "you'll be in a dither over the zither." Watch the film and tell me if I'm wrong.
When somebody openly disses Anton Karras' brilliant zither soundtrack from Carol Reed's amazing 1949 film The Third Man, it reveals a basic lack of understanding or art and beauty, if not the universe itself, that requires a response. My friend and I agree that the film is a classic. The scene when Joseph Cotton's Holly Martin meets Orson Welles' Harry Lime for the first time in the eastern section of Vienna, when the two ride an enormous Ferris wheel in a nearly empty amusement park, when Lime explains that people are basically insects and killing a few here or there, even if they are children, isn't likely to disturb the universe, is one of the most balanced and beautiful moments in all of film--it's a textbook. The scene, like all the entire movie, is framed by the amazing Karas' soundtrack that I eluded to earlier.
The zither does have a distinct sound, an Austrian sound. The instrument has 20 some odd strings depending on what kind it is, and has a history dating back to King David. Karras played his like a gypsy angel. The soundtrack for the film is a musical version of its most disturbing image, a midnight balloon man, wandering the shadowy post war streets of Vienna, eerily happy, cheerful and dreadfully out of place. The presence of said balloon man has never ceased to blow my mind in The Third Man, nor has the music. Yes, it repetitious, but not unnecessarily so. The music creates a wild opposition to one of the bleakest noir films ever made. It lends the film a creepy quality not unlike the one created in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, which gives us Robert Mitchum as a serial killing preacher who is fond of singing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while he hunts children down. In both cases, the music makes the movies. The Third Man would not have been the same movie without the zither. I have never shown the film without a student commenting on it and I doubt I ever will be able to. The original theatrical trailer for the film was correct in stating, "you'll be in a dither over the zither." Watch the film and tell me if I'm wrong.
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