Anyway, that is obviously more expensive (though, because the seat available was not as good as what I had last season, not twice as expensive), so I decided that my compensatory sacrifices would be: (1) peanuts bought locally rather than the overpriced ballpark legumes; (2) a generic scorebook to last the season rather than the $5 program every game; and (3) no in-season M#s.
But then my employer announced that it was dropping the Presidents Day and Columbus Day holidays, plus the birthday holiday (yes, a birthday holiday), and adding those three days to the the year-end holidays to give us a full week plus. OK, so fine: that suggests to me that maybe I can still keep the in-season long weekends in play; we'll see. Anyway, this is such a weekend for celebration that it could not be neglected:
End-of-the-Bush administration M4
Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of underdevelopment) (1968)
IFC
Cuba, framed by the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, but seen through the eyes of an apolitical Godardesque antihero whose biggest issue is whether he can avoid marrying, then avoid going to jail for not not marrying, the young kinda crazy woman he takes up with for a time to ease the boredom since his wife split for Miami.The Godard parallel is not random: as with JLG, I sometimes wondered exactly what I was watching but was never quite bored with it. Intermittently bad print, intermittently inept projection-room work on focus and sound, but to IFC's credit, the free passes were handed out right as we left the theater.
Wendy and Lucy
FF
You know, it's sad enough to see Michelle Williams these days, given what she's been through in the past year in real life; but now she's gotta lose her dog? Come on!Unremittingly grim, one of those Joblike surely-things-can't-get-worse-can-they? ordeals, but matter-of-fact, unsentimental, unflinching. And oddly, all this bad stuff happens despite the fact that, aside from one Hitler Youth grocery-store stockboy and one unhinged-but-not-necessarily-dangerous menacer, the people she encounters are all pretty decent.
La Graine et le mulet (The secret of the grain)
IFC
Think Big Night, only with Tunisian immigrants to Mediterranean France. Damn, if this doesn't make you hungry for a big old plate of couscous, you're just not paying attention. The mulet of the title, by the way, = mullet, the working-class fish served with the working-class grain, not mule, as I suggested in a coming-attractions post some time back; the French word can also be translated thus, but you probably wouldn't want to eat it.Remarkable film: the symphonic ingredients of the main dish parallel the symphonic ingredients of family and the symphonic ingredients of an immigrant community--everything is a knife's edge symbiosis, and neglecting even the most mundane element invites disaster.
Stellet licht (Silent light)
FF
Life, death, faith, and adultery in a Germanish-speaking religious community in Chihuahua. Huh?If you read a review more carefully or recently than I, you'd know that they're Mennonites; that that is indeed a local German dialect (Plautdietsch, Manohla Dargis tells us); and that the actors are almost all nonactors (and Mennonites). The first of those doesn't much matter, and the second and third are pretty evident, but the question I want answered is what brought German-speaking Mennonites to Chihuahua in the first place? I suppose I could do some Googresearch, but maybe some helpful reader w/ an interest in immigration and a Mexican connection could help me out.
Anyway, lovely, unhurried, funny, painful, and triumphant film.
Made in U.S.A. (1966)
FF
As I was settling in for a show at Film Forum during December's M, two guys behind me were comparing notes about how long it had been since they'd been there. "Last time I was here was for some Godard piece of crap," one said. Ah, we've all been there, haven't we?Anyway, weighing the possibility of another Godard piece of crap against the certainty of getting home after 2 if I stayed, I bowed out. The main thing I wanted to see was Marianne Faithfull's a cappella "As Tears Go By," and I'd found that a couple of days earlier on YouTube.
Trailers
- 12--A Russian remake of Twelve Angry Men; maybe.
- Of Time and the City--Terence Davies's documentary about his hometown of Liverpool, but get this: he hates the Beatles.
- Katyn--Oh, this is gonna be a feel-gooder, ain't it? Drama, not doc.
4 comments:
I knew there were German Mennonites in Mexico, but I can't remember my source, so I'll just supply info from Wikipedia: there are about 80,000 of them in the states of Chihuahua and Durango, including about 50,000 near Cuauhtémoc, where Reygadas shot the film. They arrived from Manitoba in the 1920s, apparently because the Canadians wanted them to learn English.
"In 1922 Mexican President Álvaro Obregón invited Mennonites to settle in the northern regions of the country. He offered them cheap land and freedom from taxation for 100 years as long as the Mennonites agreed to supply cheese (now called Queso menonita) for northern Mexico." Sounds like a good deal to me!
That Plautdietsch (or Plattdeutsch), or Low German, is what my ancestors spoke in Ostfriesland, although no doubt the dialects are different now.
¡Mmmm, queso menonita! But wait: por que -ita, como no -ito? Well, anyway, thanks for the fascinating and cheese-specific explanation.
More info on Mennonite Low-German and Plautdietsch can be found at www.plautcast.com
I will take time later this week to give an indepth explanation of why the Mennonites are in South an Central america.
Vern
Wow--fascinating site, though I can read scarcely anything there. Thanks, Vern--eager to read your further elucidation. Have you had a chance to see the film?
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