From Here to Eternity

In 1953 this movie won the Oscar for best film, best adapted screenplay, best supporting actor and supporting actress. The movie, adapted from the best selling novel by James Jones tells the stories of soldiers based in Hawaii in the weeks prior to the beginning of World War II.

The movie has an all star cast. The movie begins with Private Robert E Lee Prewitt transferring to the Pearl Harbor base. Prewit is a bugler, has transferred in after having undisclosed troubles in his last regiment. As his reputation as an accomplished boxer precedes him the company commander assumes he will be a boon to the regiment's boxing team. Prewitt however insists he does not wish to box any longer leading to his being pressured to do so. Montgomery Clift gives a strong performance.

Burt Lancaster stars as Sgt. Milton Warden. Warden is an enlisted man who feels disdain for his commander who makes little effort at performing his duties, often neglecting them and or leaving Warden to perform them while he chases women. Eventually his disgust with his commanding officer leads Warden down a dangerous path, he begins and affair with the his commanders neglected wife played infamously by Deborah Kerr. Most anyone who has watched a movie or two in their lives has seen the infamous scene in which Lancaster and Kerr lay in the surf in a romantic clinch.

The movie also features Frank Sinatra in an Oscar winning performance as Private Angelo Maggio. Maggio befriends Prewitt when most of the soldiers either ignore or ostracize him. Maggio comes to a bad end however when he gets on the wrong side of the sadistic Fatso Judson. Ernest Borgnine is famous for this role.

Also winning an Oscar was Donna Reed as Alma Burke. Called Lorene in the gentleman's club she works at she and Prewitt develop a relationship after Maggio takes Prewitt out for a night on the town. Seeing Reed in any role that is not innocent or later, matronly, is a bit of a surprise. She was strong enough in this role to win the Oscar. We forget what a strong actress she was.

I have seen several movies Lancaster started in now and what becomes more clear each time is that he was a towering figure. Truthfully I have not seen anything that makes me think that he was a great actor, but he certainly could carry a role.

Eventually the Japanese come to call and our characters lives change forever. The movie offers more depth than a typical World War II film and is well worth a look. Sinatra, so skinny he looks like he could blow away, is especially strong.

The Carpenter by The Avett Brothers

A week from tomorrow The Avett Brothers next album will be released. Thanks to the good folks at NPR we are able to stream the entire album and get a preview. As the Avett's have , for the last year or so, and currently continue to do so, sit at the top of our favorite current artists this album has been much anticipated in our house.

We discovered the Avett's early in the year 2011 when the Palladia network aired the DVD of their recent concert album Live Volume III. The performance was so spellbinding that it was almost impossible to not recognize that this was a rarity, a band that wrote beautiful, insightful lyrics, and yet was as much fun to see in person as any band that you will see.

In listening to the new album, which is very good, what becomes apparent quickly is that living up to Live Volume III might well be impossible. For those fans of the Avett's who had discovered them long ago, the live album was a recording of songs they already knew, just in live format. For latecomers like myself the album was just an album that was fantastic beginning to end. It was, however, a greatest hits package.

Still the new album as I am on the third listen is certainly to be on heavy rotation on our house station this fall. Some of the initial buzz said that this album is a little more rock oriented but in listening to it I do not find that to be the case. There are a couple of songs that do so, including the album highlight " Paul Newman vs the Demons which surely does not sound like anything I have ever heard from the Avett's before.

Paul Newman vs The Demons harkens back to REM, and early nineties rock. Certainly it's background Yeah chorus sounds like a song far from 2012. Truly a fantastic song.

The first single Live and Die is easily likable and certainly could fit on any previous Avett album. Another soon to be classic song entitled " Down with the Shine" shows off the lyrical ability of the brothers as well as their harmonies. It is easy to forecast the popularity of these three songs in concert.

Where the album might suffer a bit is in the uniformity of many of the remaining songs. They are all strong, all offer their own special features but they are quite similar. Songs such as The Once and Future Carpenter, Winter in Our Heart and Through My Prayers are all beautiful songs. If an album had any one of these songs it would be blessed, the effect of having all three however shows the ever so slight danger of The Avett's losing some of the fun dance folk music and not being perhaps just a little too much singalong with lighters ( or if you prefer cell phones) in hand.

The album is an embarrassment of riches most bands would welcome. Still in order to make sure each new fan hears the Avett sound I fell in love with they do need to be careful not to become too one dimensional.

Grizzly Man

I think I might be one of the last people to watch this movie. A documentary by the controversial German filmmaker Werner Herzog the movie primarily uses footage filmed by Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was a man who spent 13 summers in the Alaskan wilderness filming and interacting with bears.

The film has gotten great reviews, still some complain that Herzog intended to make Treadwell look disturbed and not the intelligent, naturalist that he was.

The only answer I can give to that is this is indeed how Herzog portrays him. Interspersed with the footage filmed by Treadwell are interviews taken by Herzog with wildlife officials, friends of Treadwell, and the pilot who yearly flew Treadwell in and out of his remote spots. It was this man that first discovered Treadwell's body in the fall of the fateful year.

Some of the footage that Treadwell shot is amazing. His interactions with bears and foxes are incredible. Touching some of the bears on the nose, cuddling with a fox that became almost tame to him, these are things we can all admire, feel jealous of, and yet at the same time most of realize how foolhardy these decisions were.

With incredible amounts of footage filmed by Treadwell we have no real idea what Herzog did not use. Herzog filmed an informative interview with the mans parents, they miss their son but seemed like they were resigned to the life he led and that the end result while tragic was not entirely unexpected.

As I watch the film what seemed most apparent to me that, whatever good intentions Treadwell started with, he became afflicted with some kind of persecution complex and also felt like his impact in the protecting of the bears was greater than it was.

How much he loved the bears is clear, he often becomes emotional in his speeches before the camera, as he is overcome by the beauty of what he films and his love for his subjects. Yet his diatribes at park officials, his constant referencing to his successful summer spent protecting the bears, and his constant vile language is a bit off putting.

One cannot ignore the many park officials who felt that by teaching bears to interact with humans in anyway, only made it more dangerous for other people who came into contact with them later, presumably by accident. As to his saving the bears perhaps he would have protected the bears, but seeing him hide in the woods while guides tossed rocks at his bears while he hid and whispered about how he needed " to stay hidden" makes one wonder if he was still a little kid playing at hiding from the adults in his life.

That he loved the bears can in no way be doubted, Timothy Treadwell however had some serious issues which he was was projecting onto his relationship with the wild bears of Alaska. Over and over he claimed that he would die for the bears, in the end he did, one cannot really doubt that in a way this might be fitting. Still as the filmmaker and other friends of Treadwell listen to an audio of the attack that led to his death one wonders if at some point he wished he could have made better decisions.

The movie offers natural beauty, it is interesting, if, however, one person walks away thinking that what Mr. Treadwell did is something to be replicated than the film has provided a disservice.

The Station Agent

A while back we watched the Thomas McCarthy movie Win/Win and enjoyed it immensely. In learning about McCarthy we learned about this film, an earlier effort of his, that as his first movie was received very well by the critics.

All of the positive reviews of The Station Agent prove to be nothing more than absolutely correct. This is a fantastic movie. Small in scope but with a quietness that belies how much impact it can have on a person.

Peter Dinklage plays Finbar McBride. Dinklage, for those who do not recognize the name is a little person. After performances in Elf and over the last couple of years with a major role in Game of Thrones Dinklage now has reached such stature that he is now an actor who happens to be a little person rather than a little person who is an actor. He is a brilliant actor.

In the movie Fin is a reclusive, hermit like man who works at a hobby shop. With a love of trains his life is made up of his relationship with his tactiturn friend and boss and a train aficionado group to which he belongs.

His life is changed when his friend dies, and the hobby shop closes. Fin is left however, as an inheritance a small piece of land with an old train depot on it. With no other opportunities seeking solitude Fin moves to Newfoundland, New Jersey to take up residence.

Seeking to be alone he soon finds himself immersed in the lives of Joe, a Cuban American man running a snack track while his father recovers from illness, and Olivia a woman separated from her husband after the sudden death of her child. Throw in a little African American girl who shares Fin's loves of trains, and Michelle Williams as the town librarian who has a problem she has to deal with and you have some acting performances that are not to be forgotten.

Nothing is forced in this movie, it comes at its own pace. Patricia Clarkson as the grieving mother Olivia offers a performance that you can feel the pain dripping from. In watching the movie and seeing the unlikely friendship develop between Joe, the fast talking, always upbeat and chatty, Cuban American, Olivia, the distraught mother, and Finn, the quiet lonely man who just happens to be a dwarf, I told my wife this movie might illustrate better than any I have ever seen how many lonely people there are in this world, that on some level each of us is hurting or hurt.

I cannot reccomend this movie highly enough.

Sideways

When you watch an old movie from the era when you were not really watching movies yet it is one thing, you have an excuse for missing it the first time around. When you are my age and watch a movie from eight years ago, sometimes you wonder where you were.

This 2004 movie was released to almost universally positive reviews. The film won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and all the actors and actresses were lauded for their performances.

For all that the movie is small and self contained. Paul Giamatti plays Miles Raymond, a writer who cannot get published, a self professed wine aficionado, and a middle school English teacher. In the course of the movie he comes to the realization that his ex wife is not coming back to him. How he comes to realize this is more painful than most of the ways in which one could.

Thomas Haden Church plays Jack Cole. Jack was the college roommate of Miles and is now an actor who is about to be married. The two men take a week together in the wine country of California. They, however, have different reasons for the trip. For Miles it is a chance to get away, enjoy some wine, and spend time with his friend. Jack wants only to have some last sexual fling before his impending marriage.

Their trip, the people they meet, and the conflicts that develop show lonely people trying to make the best of a world that continually disappoints.

Giamatti might well be incapable of a bad acting performance, Church, who I last saw in Wings ,is much stronger than one would expect and Virginia Madsen playing a love interest of Miles is as always perfect.

Another of the nothing movies as in " What happens in the movie?" with the usual response being Nothing really this movie shines. Proving again that things do not need to blow up, we don't need models we just need a good story we can relate to and good acting. This movie serves that up in big servings.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

About an hour ago I finished this classic Dickens novel. I have now worked my way through three of the Dickens classics and I can honestly say that these books are timeless.

There is a reason that outside of Shakespeare the works of Charles Dickens are redone, reinvented, and reinterpreted, more than any other author. They hold up.

This book was just a side read for me over the last couple of months so I took the opportunity to savor it, sips at a time as it were.

Just this morning when the narrator Copperfield talks about what a fine jail has been built in London in his absence and comments of the protests that would come about had the money for that fortification been diverted for a fine school and you can see that, sadly, the more things change the more they stay the same.

The characters in this book, from Mr. Micawber, Agnes, Peggotty, Ham, Traddles to the wicked Uriah Heep make this book soar. Some say this is Dicken's most autobiographical novel, if so he certainly new some interesting and unique people.

Being provincial Americans we often point to Mark Twain as the great writer of the nineteenth century. Twain was talented, but for me though it is no contest. Dickens was and remains the true giant.

I must say I am sorry to Mrs. Bagley. My Junior High English teacher exhorted us to read these books, and in high school Mr. Peaco said the same. I,like many of you with your teachers, ignored their directives. They now rest in peace but I hope they hear me tell them they were correct, we all should read these books.

Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and now David Copperfield. Dickens was a genius.

Outsourced

This movie takes on the subject of American jobs being outsourced to India. And it is a comedy. The challenge is not an easy one.

Still the movie has us meet Todd, a Call Center Manager in America who is told that his company is closing his office. Todd however is told that he can go to India and train his replacements. Todd, does not really want to do this but is convinced to do so as his stocks in the company have not yet vested.

Arriving in India he finds the challenge before him to be extreme. The employees do not perform as the American employees do and have to deal with the persistent anger from American consumers.

Soon enough Todd has the employees performing well. He soon also finds himself not considering his assignment a sentence but instead actually immerses himself in the Indian culture. He begins to enjoy his time and appreciate his employees. He tells them that they can personalize their desks and they respond in much the way Americans would. He finds that they are interested and place value in the products that they are answering inquiries on. Basically the products are cheesy gifts and assorted crap but still they find anything that they picture as Americanized to be having value.

Over time Todd develops a relationship with both is subordinate who he is training to run the shop, a man who looks forward to the supervisory position to allow for him to take the wife of his dreams, as well as with a young, strong minded Indian woman who works and strives hard to better herself.

Eventually one of those relationships becomes romantic, with the girl of course, and after an awkward consumation at a Hotel called Kama Sutra, Todd discovers that the young lady is engaged in an arranged marriage.

The movie is not entirely predictable. Comedy or not it puts a face to the folks we find it too hard to hate on the other end of our phone calls. We all know on some level that any anger we feel about Outsourcing should not be at employees but the Americans who send the jobs away.

If this movie helps that message be delivered if even on a subliminal level that too is a service.

A cute movie available on streaming from Netflix.