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"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens up between its origins in the kabuki style and its subject of starvation in a mountain village! The village enforces a tradition of carrying those who have reached the age of 70 up the side of mountain and abandoning them there to die of exposure.
Keisuke Kinoshita's 1958 film tells its story with deliberate artifice, using an elaborate set with a path beside a bubbling brook, matte paintings for the backgrounds, mist on dewey evenings, and lighting that drops the backgrounds to black at dramatic moments and then brings up realistic lighting again. Some of its exteriors use black foregrounds and bloody red skies; others use grays and blues. As in kabuki theater, there is a black-clad narrator to tell us what's happening.
This artifice supports a story that contains great emotional charge. Kinuyo Tanaka plays Orin, a 70-year-old widow whose resignation in the face of her traditional fate is in stark contrast with the behavior of her neighbor Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi), who protests violently against his destiny. Their family attitudes are similarly opposed; while Orin's son Tatsuhei (Teiji Takahashi) loves his mother and doesn't have any desire to carry her up the mountainside, Mata's family has already cut off his food, and he wanders the village as a desperate scavenger; Orin invites him in and offers him a bowl of rice, which be gobbles hungrily.
In contrast with her resignation and her son's reluctance to carry out her sentence, Orin's vile grandson Kesakichi (Danshi Ichikawa) can't wait to be done with the old woman, and begins singing a song mocking the fact that she retains, at 70, all 33 of of her original teeth. This is taken up by the villagers, who materialize as a vindictive chorus, their song implying she kept her teeth because of a deal with demons. Eager to qualify for her doom, Orin bites down hard on a stone and when they see her again her mouth reveals bloody stumps.
This harsh imagery contrasts with the way the film is structured around song and dance. Although presented in the kabuki style, it isn't based on an actual kabuki play but on a novel. Kinoshita is correct, I believe, in presenting his story in this stylized way; his form allows it to become more fable than narrative, and thus more bearable.
His sets and backdrops reflect he changing seasons with lush beauty: Spring, summer, the red leaves of autumn, then the wintry snows on the slopes of Narayama. On the mountaintop, blackbirds perch on snowy crags as the camera uses lateral moves to sweep across the desolate landscape. Finally depositing his mother in an empty place on the mountain, Tatsuhei greets the snow with relief: She will freeze more quickly. This he can sing only to himself, because the journey up the mountain has three strict rues: (1) you must not talk after starting up Narayama; (2) be sure no one sees you leave in the morning; (3) never look back. His adherence is in contrast with the adventures of the fearful neighbor Mata, who appears soon after bound head and foot, dragged protesting by his son ("Don't do this!").
Orin's goodness and resignation are at the center of the story. In particuar, notice her kind welcome for Tama (Yuko Mochizuki), a 40-year-old widow she has decided will be the ideal new wife for her widower son. Known for her ability to catch trout when no one else can, she leads Tama through the forest on a foggy night and reveals a secret place beneath a rock in the brook where a trout is always to be found. This secret was never revealed to her first daughter-in-law. She even wants to die before her first grandchild arrives. She wants to rid the village from a hungry mouth.
Some will find Orin's behavior strange. So it is. Perhaps, in the years soon after World War Two, she is intended in praise of the Japanese ability to present acceptance in the face of the appalling. You can attach any set of parallels to Kinoshite's parable and make them work, but that seems to fit.
Keisuke Kinoshita (1912-1998) is of the same generation as Akira Kurosawa. Saying that ideas sprang quickly into his mind, he moved between periods and genres, and made 42 films in the first 23 years of his career. He was immediately attracted to motion pictures; a film was shot in his home town when he was in high school and he ran away to a studio in Kyoto. His family made him return home, but later dropped its opposition to his career plans. Without a college education, he started humbly as a set photographer, and worked his way up, sending in one screenplay after another to the studio chief.
He made dramas, musicals, thrillers, musicals, anything, but he never made another film like "The Ballad of Narayama." In its matter-of-fact juxtaposition of fate and art, it leaves an indelible impression. Tatsuhei's second bride Tama tells him: "When we turn 70, we'll go together up Narayama."
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a new DVD release in the Criterion Collection. Thanks to Wikipedia for some of the research in this article.]]>
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a murder, and the opening shot is of a corpse. Monsieur Hire is a scrawny, balding middle-aged tailor who lives by himself. Alice is a beautiful, tender-hearted 22-year-old blonde who lives alone across the courtyard from Hire in the same apartment building.
On the night of the murder, a slight man was seen by witnesses running toward the building. In his investigation among its residents, a police detective learns that nobody likes Hire. Hire is the first to agree. He admits he seems to strike people oddly. As a neighbor from across the hall peeks at him from his doorway, he asks, "Want a photo?" As he walks through his courtyard, white powder is dumped on his impeccable black suit.
Everything about Hire (Michel Blanc) is impeccable; his suit, his tie, the shine on his shoes, the fringe of his hair so neatly trimmed. Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire) is sunny, open-faced, with a warm smile. One night during a thunderstorm a flash of lightning reveals a man watching her from the shadows of the apartment opposite. This is Hire, who watches her for hour after hour, night after night: Sleeping, waking up, dressing, undressing, ironing her clothes, making love with her lout of a boyfriend, Emile (Luc Thuillier).
What does she do when she discovers this? The screenplay is based on Monsieur Hire's Engagement by Georges Simenon, but it's nothing like his Inspector Maigret policiers, much more of a traditional novel with carefully-observed behavior and details. Simenon was fascinated by peculiarities of human personality, which he described in elegant, simple prose, not unlike Leconte's controlled visual style here.
The film is in color, but Hire's world is black and white: His suits, shirts, the white mice he keeps in little cage in his tailor shop. His skin is so pale he might never go outside in daytime. Alice, on the other hand, likes red: Her clothing, her lipstick, the grocery big of ripe tomatoes she "drops" on a staircase so they roll toward Hire as he opens his door. Does he leap to assist her? No, he simply stands and regards her. What is the purpose of her contrivance?
Another day, she knocks on his door, but he doesn't answer. He must know it's her, because he never has visitors and he must realize she's just left her own apartment. She knocks the next day, and he invites her to visit a restaurant—in a train station, which may be a clue to certain of his thoughts. Eventually he confirms that, yes, he has seen her and her boyfriend making love. And he witnessed something else that he believes explains her sudden and unexpected friendliness toward him.
So it may, at first. But Alice's feelings for him grow more complicated, and she is touched by his declaration of love. Her boyfriend Emile, on the other hand, is a crude physical type whose idea of a perfect date is taking her to a boxing match and ignoring her. Later, when he needs to sneak out of a window quickly, he steps first in a cradle formed by her hands, and then on her shoulders. Hire shares his secrets with Alice. He makes considerable use of prostitutes, he tells her, and as he describes the process of a bordello her face reflects fascination, perhaps that a man like Hire could have such erotic experiences and describe them so sensuously. But he can never visit a prostitute again, he explains, because he has fallen in love with her.
Hire is a man with many secrets. One night in the course of the police inspector's investigation, he takes him along to a bowling alley, where he rolls strike after strike flawlessly, even backwards between his legs, even blindfolded, and is applauded by the regulars who have seen this before. He collects a payment from the owner, joins the cop at the bar, tosses back a shot and says, "You see? I'm not disliked everywhere."
What's going on between Hire and Alice? For that matter, what are her feelings for the boyfriend, Emile? That relationship seems pretty standard for a film noir; he seems to be a witless small-time criminal, and only her loyalty can save him. Her devotion to him is pointless and undeserved, as far as we can see, and although sex figures between them, she's too complex for that to explain everything. She's never met a man whose love for her is more profound and devoted (and obsessive) than Hire's. Emile wouldn't even be able to understand it.
At the center of this film is great sadness, captured in a late fast-motion shot that slows for an instant to show a detail lingered on in heartbreaking slow motion. Then the ending wraps everything up, but not to everyone's satisfaction.
Patrice Leconte, born 1947, is one of the most versatile of French directors. He switches styles and genres from film to film, and you may be a fan of his without realizing it. "Monsieur Hire" (1989) was his first considerable success, premiered at Cannes, which is where I saw it. He also made "Ridicule" (1996), about a provincial landowner during the reign of Louis XVI, who seeks to win the favor of the court by practicing the quick wit much loved by the king; "The Widow of Saint-Pierre" (2000), about a condemned killer awaiting death on a French-Canadian island until an executioner can be imported from Paris; "Man on the Train (2002)" with Jean Rochefortand Johnny Hallyday as a suave provincial gentleman's chance encounter with a thief; and another of my Great Movies, "The Hairdresser's Husband" (1990), again starring Rochefort as a man so enraptured by a small town hairdresser that he marries her, buys her a beauty parlor, and requires only that he be allowed to sit in it, day after day, adoring her.
"I don't think that a filmmaker is manipulating puppets," Leconte told me at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival. "On the contrary, I believe a filmmaker is more like a chemist. You mix elements that have nothing to do with each other and you see what will happen. The starting point for 'The Man on the Train' was the meeting of the two actors. Put in a few drops of Johnny Hallyday, a few drops of Jean Rochefort and look what happens. Sometimes it blows up in your face."
I asked him an obligatory question about the French New Wave and he said, "Well, I didn't know Truffaut at all. I never met him, because he died too early probably. One of the things that I loved most about Truffaut was that he loved movies. And I would like that on my tomb: This man loved to make movies. "
My interview with Leconte at Toronto.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder premiered "Veronika Voss" in February 1982, at the Berlin Film Festival. It was hailed as one of the best of his 40 films. Late on the night of June 9, 1982, he made a telephone call from Munich to Paris to tell his best friend he had flushed all his drugs down the toilet — everything except for one last line of cocaine. The next morning, Fassbinder was found dead in his room, a cold cigarette between his fingers, a videotape machine still playing. The most famous, notorious and prolific modern German filmmaker was 36.
Does this film represent a premonition of his own death? It tells the story of a German actress who worked tirelessly and achieved great fame, but began depending on drugs and alcohol and eventually became so addicted that she sold her body and soul for drugs. Her fortune spent, her marriage destroyed, she began to live as an inpatient in the clinic of a sinister Berlin woman who billed herself as a psychiatrist but was also a Dr. Feelgood who strung along her patients on morphine and controlled them by withholding their supply. Their arrangement was that after Veronika Voss's death, her suburban villa and its art treasures would be inherited by the doctor.
The film opens in 1955 with Voss (Rosel Zech) looking at one of her own pre-war classics (that's Fassbinder himself in the audience, leaning on the seat-back behind her). There was a time when she was welcomed in the offices of producers, greeted by headwaiters, recognized on the street. That time has passed, and it is painful to hear her remind people who she is — or was. One night, drinking without funds in a cabaret, she falls into conversation with a soft-faced sportswriter named Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), who is old enough to remain under her spell. She grandly says she will pick up the check, then "allows" him to do it, and invites him to come home with her. All the furniture in her villa is covered in white sheets, the electricity is disconnected, and she has them light candles "because they are so much more flattering to a woman." The star struck journalist has without realizing it walked into the last act of Veronika Voss's life.
Ending their evening suddenly, Veronika demands to be taken to the clinic of Dr. Katz (Annemarie Duringer), one of the stylish lesbians often found in Fassbinder films ("The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant"). This clinic could be imagined as the setting for a bizarre Fred Astaire dance number. It's all blindingly white — walls, floors, furniture, grand staircases, everyone's clothing. In an eerie touch, a wall of windows looks upon a waiting room, where other patients peer in needfully. Katz lives with a woman apparently her lover, and another constant companion is an African-American G.I. and drug dealer (Günther Kaufmann). This man is in the background of countless shots, never says anything, lurks when needed like a security guard, and was Fassbinder's sometime lover and an actor in many of his films (including the one he made just before his one, "The Marriage of Maria Braun").
We observe Veronika's frantic relationship with Katz, who berates her sadistically, and extracts details of the hours with Robert Krohn. Finally Veronika is shown to her narrow, cell-like room, and given the drugs she craves. In this room, and throughout the clinic, we hear incongruous American country & western songs ("The Battle of New Orleans," "16 Tons"). In "Maria von Braun," where Günther Kaufmann plays Maria's G.I. lover, similar music is heard, probably via Armed Forces Radio, a reminder of the presence of American occupying forces in postwar Germany. At Veronika's own "farewell" party, she performs "Memories Are Made of This," in a low, throaty torch-song voice perhaps intended to remind us of Marlene Dietrich. Indeed, Fassbinder's focus on Rosel Zech's reminds me of von Sternberg's Dietrich in "The Blue Angel."
When Robert Krohn returns that day to his own apartment and girlfriend Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), he is almost proud to tell her where he spent the night, and she, also a writer for the newspaper, accepts this as an expression of his nature; she wants to know what Voss was like. Krohn, whose beat is hockey, convinces his editor he has lucked upon a major scoop about the decline and fall of a star.
Throughout Fassbinder's work we find such figures, great stars, mannered, decadent, in various stages of their decay. This film was inspired by the real life of Sybille Schmitz, a German star of the 1930s who also fell athwart of a clinic supplying drugs. Many critics look at Veronika Voss and are reminded of Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard." Perhaps the association is intentional. When Veronika finally, with great difficulty, wheedles a bit part from her former agent, the director of the scene (Volker Spengler) wears glasses and has his hat pushed back on his head, Wilder-style. She only has two lines in her scene, but blows them again and again. She's rattled and craves a fix. She is watched by Robert Krone and by her ex-husband Max Rehbein (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who wearily explain to the sports writer that his former wife is a hopeless addict.
Two other patients of Dr. Katz figure importantly: A sweet elderly couple named the Treibels. Their story figures tragically in the history of Germany, as you will find. The psychiatrist, indeed, seems poised at the center of a cynical web of postwar corruption, including drug authorities and the police; when they twitch the web, she senses it immediately.
Fassbinder (1945-1982) was an immensely productive filmmaker. In his 37 years he directed 40 features, 24 stage plays and two long TV miniseries (notably "Berlin Alexanderplatz"). His death seems to have interrupted this flow in mid-stream. Powerfully influenced by the heavily stylized works of the German-Danish-American director Douglas Sirk ("Written on the Wind"), he may have worked at a feverish pace but his films always look carefully planned. In this film, for example, he evokes period b&w with a diversity of wipe shots, iris shots, pans, tracking, and the careful positioning of foregrounds. In other films he often uses zooms-in to underline dramatic points. His films are visually mannered, formal, and far from seeming improvised; the visual strategy of "Veronika Voss" suggests he was moving even closer toward the classic Hollywood style.
What an impression he made when he was alive! At Cannes every year he seemed to have at least one film, and you would see him at Le Petit Carlton, the famous bistro behind the Palais du Festival, on rue Felix-Faure, behind the Hotel Carlton. Fassbinder and his posse would be gathered inside, close inside the doorway. looking as discontented as usual. In August of 1983 at the Montreal Film Festival, as his close friend the director Daniel Schmid and I both served on the jury of the World Film Festival, the ghost of Fassbinder seemed almost like another presence in the city, Fassbinder had attended the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, nine months before his death, I remember him at dinner, unshaven, defensive, always smoking, ignoring the food and ordering a bottle of Cognac to be placed before him.
During the last weeks of his life, Schmid said, during those sad telephone calls at three in the morning, Fassbinder often repeated the same thing. "He would shout at me: How are you able to just sit there and look outside the window? How can you? How can you just sit on a rock and look at the sea? How can everybody else be so lucky?"
"Veronika Voss" is on DVD in the Criterion Collection, and streaming on Hulu Plus. Also in my Great Movies Collection are reviews of Fassbinder's "Ali — Fear Eats the Soul," a re-working of Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows," and Sirk's "Written on the Wind." At least a dozen other Fassbinders are reviewed on this site.]]>
In a vast Spanish plain, harvested of its crops, a farm home rests. Some distance away there is a squat building like a barn, apparently not used, its doors and windows missing. In the home lives a family of four: two little girls named Ana and Isabel, and their parents, Fernando and Teresa. He is a beekeeper, scholar and poet who spends much time in his book-lined study. She is a solitary woman who writes letters of longing and loss to men not identified. The parents have no conversations of any consequence.
It's an exciting day in the village. A ramshackle truck rattles into town announced by scampering children, who shout, "The movies! The movies!" A screen and projector are set up in the public hall, and an audience of kids and old women gather to see "Frankenstein" (1931).
For the children, the movie had might as well only be about the monster, so tellingly performed by Boris Karloff. The creature comes upon a farmer's young daughter tossing flowers into a pond to watch them float. Perhaps because of censorship, the film cuts directly from this to the monster mournfully carrying the child's drowned body through the village. Perhaps because of censorship, we don't see that he did not drown her, but threw her in with delight, thinking she would float as well. For the two girls, especially Ana (Ana Torrent), this makes a dramatic impression.
Her misunderstanding of the scene will shape the events to follow in Victor Erice's "The Spirit of the Beehive" (1973), believed by many to be the greatest of all Spanish films. Although the time is not specified, it would have been clear to Spanish audiences that the film is set soon after the end of the Spanish Civil War, which began Franco's long dictatorship — so soon after that the same day, a wounded opponent of the regime takes refuge in the barn-like outbuilding.
Only a few years separate Ana and Isabel (Isabel Telleria), but they form that important divide where Ana depends on her big sister to explain mysteries. The little girl runs carefree all over the farmlands, and in the barn she discovers the wounded soldier. That night, her eyes wide open in the dark, she asks Isabel to explain why the creature drowned the little girl. "Everything in the movies is fake," she's told. "It's all a trick. Besides, I've seen him alive. He's a spirit." That of course serves for Ana as a possible explanation for the wounded man, and the next day, she sneaks him some food and water, and her father's coat.
What follows is considered a coded message about Franco's fascist regime, but it's not for me to connect the dots. I relate to it more strongly as a poetic work about the imagination of children, and how it can lead them into mischief and sometimes rescue them from its consequences.
"The Spirit of the Beehive" is one of only three features and a short subject directed by Erice (born 1940). Like such films as Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), it is a masterpiece that can only cause us to wonder what we lost because he didn't work more. It is simple, solemn, and in the casting of young Ana Torrent, takes advantage of her open, innocent features. We can well believe her when she accepts her sister's explanation, which goes far to account for her behavior later in the film.
This is one of the most beautiful films I've seen. Its cinematographer, Luis Cuadrado, bathes his frame in sun and earth tones, and in the interiors of the family home, he creates vistas of empty rooms where footsteps echo. The house doesn't seem much occupied by the family. The girls are often alone. The parents also, in separate rooms. Many of the father's poems involve the mindless churning activity of his beehives, and the house's yellow-tinted honeycomb windows make an unmistakable reference to beehives. Presumably this reflects on the Franco regime, but when critics grow specific in spelling out the parallels they see, I feel like I'm reading term papers.
More rewarding is to read the surface of the film. When Ana's good intentions to the "spirit" are misinterpreted, and when she is linked to the wounded man by her father's pocket watch, this sets up a situation that could be dangerous for both father and daughter. When she runs away and inspires a search — the lanterns of volunteers bobbing through the night — we feel how the behavior of innocent children can lead them into trouble. In a later scene when Ana plays a trick on Isabel, the older child also discovers how her myth-making has repercussions.
Ana Torrent starred in another notable Spanish film, Carlos Saura's "Cria Cuervos" (1976). She has gone on to a successful career, making 45 films and TV series, including Saura's "Elisa, My Life" (1977), his first film after Franco's fall. But child actors are often bathed in a glow of enchantment that no later role will quite capture.
Note: "The Spirit of the Beehive" is on DVD in the Criterion Collection and is streaming on Hulu Plus. Also in my Great Movies Collection: "The Night of the Hunter."]]>
It's well known that David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." was assembled from the remains of a cancelled TV series, with the addition of some additional footage filmed later. That may be taken by some viewers as a way to explain the film's fractured structure and lack of continuity. I think it's a delusion to imagine a "complete" film lurking somewhere in Lynch's mind — a ghostly Director's Cut that exists only in his original intentions. The film is openly dreamlike, and like most dreams it moves uncertainly down a path with many turnings.
It seems to be the dream of Betty (Naomi Watts), seen in the first shots sprawled on a bed. It continues with the story of how Betty came to Hollywood and how she ended up staying in the apartment of her aunt, but if we are within a dream there is no reason to believe that on a literal level. It's as likely she only dreams of getting off a flight from Ontario to Los Angeles, being wished good luck by the cackling old couple who met her on the plane, and arriving by taxi at the apartment. Dreams cobble their contents from the materials at hand, and although the old folks turn up again at the end of the film their actual existence may be problematic.
The movie seems seductively realistic in several opening scenes however, as an ominous film noir sequence shows a beautiful woman in the back seat of a limousine on Mulholland Drive — that serpentine road that coils along the spine of the hills separating the city from the San Fernando Valley. The limo pulls over, the driver pulls a gun and orders his passenger out of the car, and just then two drag-racing hot rods hurtle into view and one of them strikes the limo, killing the driver and his partner. The stunned woman (Laura Elena Herring) staggers into some shrubbery and starts to climb down the hill — first crossing Franklin Dr., finally arriving at Sunset. Still hiding in shrubbery, she sees a woman leaving an apartment to get into a taxi, and she sneaks into the apartment and hides under a table.
Who is she? Let's not get ahead of her. The very first moments of the film seemed like a bizarre montage from a jitterbug contest on a1950s TV show, and the hotrods and their passengers visually link with that. But people don't dress like jitterbuggers and drag race on Mulholland at the time of the film (the 1990s), not in now-priceless antique hot rods, and the crash seems to have elements imported from an audition, perhaps, that will later be made much of.
I won't further try your patience with more of this mix-and-match. Dreams need not make sense, I am not Freud, and at this point in the film it's working perfectly well as a film noir. They need not make sense, either. Conventional movie cops turn up, investigate, and disappear for the rest of the film. Betty discovers the woman from Mulholland taking a shower in her aunt's apartment and demands to know who she is. The woman sees a poster of Rita Hayworth in "Gilda" on the wall and replies, "Rita." She claims to have amnesia. Betty now responds with almost startling generosity, deciding to help "Rita" discover her identity, and in a smooth segue the two women bond. Indeed, before long they're helping each other sneak into apartment #17. Lynch has shifted gears from a film noir to a much more innocent kind of crime story, a Nancy Drew mystery. When they find the decomposing corpse in #17, however, that's a little more detailed than Nancy Drew's typical discoveries.
What I've been doing is demonstrating the way "Mulholland Dr." affects a lot of viewers. They start rehearsing the plot to themselves, hoping that if they retrace their steps they can determine where they are and how they got there. This movie doesn't work that way. Each step has a way of being like an open elevator door with no elevator inside.
Unsatisfied by my understanding of the film, I took it to an audience that hadn't failed me for 30 years. At the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I did my annual routine: Showing a title on Monday afternoon, and then sifting through it a scene at a time, sometimes a shot at a time, for the next four afternoons. It drew a full house, and predictably a lot of readings and interpretations. Yet even my old friend who was forever finding everything to be a version of Homer's Odyssey was uncertain this time.
I gave my usual speech about how you can't take an interpretation to a movie. You have to find it there already. No consensus emerged about what we had found. It was a tribute to Lynch that the movie remained compulsively watchable while refusing to yield to interpretation. The most promising direction we tried was to delineate the boundaries of the dreams(s) and the identities of the dreamer(s).
That was an absorbing exercise, but then consider the series of shots in which the film loses focus and then the women's faces begin to merge. I was reminded of Bergman's "Persona," also a film about two women. At a point when one deliberately causes an injury to the other, the film seems to catch on fire in the projector. The screen goes black, and then the film starts again with images from the earliest days of silent film. What is Bergman telling us? Best to start over again? What is Lynch telling us? Best to abandon the illusion that all of this happens to two women, or within two heads?
What about the much-cited lesbian scenes? Dreams? We all have erotic dreams, but they are more likely inspired by desires than experiences, and the people in them may be making unpaid guest appearances. What about the film's material involving auditions? Those could be stock footage in any dream by an actor. The command about which actress to cast? That leads us around to the strange little man in the wheelchair, issuing commands. Would anyone in the film's mainstream have a way of knowing such a figure existed?
And what about the whatever-he-is who lurks behind the diner? He fulfills the underlying purpose of Lynch's most consistent visual strategy in the film. He loves to use slow, sinister sideways tracking shots to gradually peek around corners. There are a lot of those shots in the aunt's apartment. That's also the way we sneak up to peek around the back corner of the diner. When that figure pops into view, the timing is such that you'd swear he knew someone — or the camera — was coming. It's a classic BOO! moment and need not have the slightest relationship to anything else in the film.
David Lynch loves movies, genres, archetypes and obligatory shots. "Mulholland Drive" employs the conventions of film noir in a pure form. One useful definition of noirs is that they're about characters who have committed a crime or a sin, are immersed with guilt, and fear they're getting what they eserve. Another is that they've done nothing wrong, but it nevertheless certainly appears as if they have.
The second describes Hitchcock's favorite plot, the Innocent Man Wrongly Accused. The first describes the central dilemma of "Mulholland Dr." Yet it floats in an uneasy psychic space, never defining who sinned. The film evokes the feeling of noir guilt while never attaching to anything specific. A neat trick. Pure cinema.
This film is streaming on Netflix Instant. Also in my Great Movies Collection: "Persona."
You can comment under my related blog post on the film, here.]]>
Here is the saddest film I have ever seen about the life of a woman. It begins on a chill dawn when the heroine wanders, her face behind a fan, until encountering some of her fellow prostitutes. "It's hard for a 50-year-old women to pass as 20," she observes. She says it has been a slow night: She was only picked up by an old man, who took her into a candlelit room filled with young men. "Look at this painted face!" he told them. "Do you still want to buy a woman?" To be held up as a moral spectacle is a cruel fate for a woman who has been treated immorally almost every day of her life, and who has always behaved as morally as it was within her power to do.
The women find a friend who has built a fire, and huddle around it. "I heard you served at the palace," another prostitute says. "What has led to your ruin?" Saying "do not ask about my past," she walks away from them and wanders into a Buddhist temple. One of the images of the Buddha dissolves into the face of a young man, and then a flashback begins that will tell Oharu's life from near the beginning.
Her life is the fate in microcosm of many Japanese women for centuries, in a society ruled by a male hierarchy. Kenji Mizoguchi, its director, was as sympathetic with women as any of his contemporaries, even Ozu, who whom he is often ranked. He made prostitutes a frequent subject, as in his "Street of Shame" (1956). He was known to frequent brothels, not simply to purchase favors, but to socialize with their workers; it made a great impression on him that his own sister, Suzo, who raised him, was sold by their father as a geisha. The same thing happens to Oharu in this film.
The character is played by Kinuyo Tanaka, who appeared in 14 of his films, and this one, made in 1952, helped redirect her career from early years as in ingénue toward more challenging roles. One of her strengths as Oharu is her success at playing the same character over a period of 30 years.
As Oharu's flashback begins, we learn she was born in respectable circles, and was a lady in waiting at the court when she and a young page (Toshiro Mifune) fell in love. This was forbidden, the page was condemned to death, and Oharu and his family were exiled. Her father never forgives her for this, and indeed after the scandal she becomes unmarriagable in respectable circles. There is a brief respite when he is able to sell her as a concubine into the household of Lord Matsudaira. Her duty there is to bear him an heir, which she does, but then is coldly sent back into poverty and prostitution. Her father, who now considers her entirely in terms of her wage-earning ability, sells her as a courtesan, at which she balks, and finally sells her into service as a maid to a lady who uses elaborate wigs to conceal from her husband that she is half-bald. She loses this job because one of her employer's customers recognizes her from the shimabara (red-light district) and makes crude jokes which reveal her background.
Now comes a deceptive respite from her misery. She meets a nice man, a maker of fans, and settles in peacefully, but he is killed. She receives no legacy. In a convent, she tells the superior she wanted none: "All I want is to be a nun and be near to Buddha." In the convent, there is an ambiguous scene. A man who knew her comes to demand repayment for a gift of cloth she was given, and in a fury she strips off her clothing and hurls it at him. Her nudity is reflected only in the man's eye, but the discovery of this event leads to her banishment from the convent.
All of this time she dreams of seeing the son she gave birth to, but when this finally happens she is allowed only to get a glimpse of him sweeping past as a grand man, oblivious to her existence. That brings us back to her current life, as a cold, hungry, unsuccessful prostitute.
Although a good deal of the film is shot in a straightforward way, some of it from Ozu's favorite the point of view of a person seated on a tatami mat, Oharu is often seen from a high-angle view well above eye level. In camera grammar this tends to diminish and objectify the subject, and Oharu increasingly comes to seem less like an autonomous character and more like a subject for study--and pity.
"As the story goes," the superior told her on arrival at the convent, "the morning's pretty face is a corpse by evening."
The story as I have outlined it sounds like a lurid melodrama, but "Life of Oharu" studiously avoids taking advantage of the sensational aspects of her life. It is all told as a sad memory of fate, and paced by Mizoguchi to avoid any sensational story climaxes. His attentive use of period locations, costumes and rituals makes his heroine's experiences more like enactments of a ritual. A great deal of the story's pathos comes from the fact that no one except Oharu knows the whole of her life history; she is judged from the outside as an immoral and despicable women, and we realize this is no more than the role society has cast her in, and forces her to play.
We watch the film in disbelief. Surely no women could have such misery thrust upon her through no fault of her own? Mizoguchi makes no attempt to portray any male character--even the father--as a self-aware villain. The men behave within the boundaries set for them and expected of them by the traditions of their society. Even the fan maker does so, but because of the independence given him by his occupation, society allows him more choice--or perhaps simply doesn't care.
Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) is today named as one of the three greatest Japanese directors, along with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Kurosawa, considered the most "western" by the Japanese, was the first to gain world wide fame, with such readily accessible films as "Rashomon," "The Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo." Ozu was considered "too Japanese," until the critic Donald Richie famously took a group of his films to the Venice Film Festival, and found, as he expected, that they had a universal appeal. (My feeling is that the more specific a film is, the more widely it may be understood).
Mizoguchi won Western praise earlier than Ozu. His "Ugetsu Monogatari" (1953) won the Venice Film Festival, and twice appeared on Sight & Sound magazine's ten-yearly poll of the greatest films of all time, which pointed me to him in the early 1970s. But it was "Life of Oharu" that he considered his best film, perhaps because it drew from roots in his own life.
The most influential Western writing on Mizoguchi is an essay by Robert Cohen titled "Why Does Oharu Faint?" The British critic who signs as "Kubla Khan" writes of it: "Oharu faints thrice in 'The Life of Oharu,' and on all occasions, wakes up feeling kinder and more forgiving… Cohen says that Oharu's spiritual transcendence is gained after 'she abandons her gender identity and sexuality,' and in a sense, her victory is only pyrrhic." He adds that is "is far more interesting and appealing than any spiritual excuse that could account for how Oharu has become a saintly character and her fainting spell at the beginning and in the end is more a physical and psychological surrender to the awful life that she has lead till then."
Years before the rise of feminism in the West, the great directors of Japan were obsessed with the lives of women in their society. No woman in a Japanese film that I have seen is more tragic and unforgettable than Oharu.
The film's Criterion edition is streaming on Hulu Plus. It can be viewed in in nine parts via non-Criterion but quite good edition on YouTube. Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu" and "Sansho the Bailiff" are also written about in my Great Movies Collection, which includes many titles by Ozu and Kurosawa.
In France, the afternoon hours from five to seven are known as the hours when lovers meet. On this afternoon, nothing could be further from Cleo's mind than sex. She is counting out the minutes until she learns the results from tests she believes will tell her she is dying from cancer. Agnes Varda's "Cleo from 5 to 7" is 90 minutes long, but its clock seems to tick along with Cleo's.
Varda is sometimes referred to as the godmother of the French New Wave. I have been guilty of that myself. Nothing could be more unfair. Varda is its very soul, and only the fact that she is a woman, I fear, prevented her from being routinely included with Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer and for that matter her husband Jacques Demy. The passage of time has been kinder to her films than some of theirs, and "Cléo from 5 to 7" plays today as startlingly modern. Released in 1962, it seems as innovative and influential as any New Wave film.
Cléo (Corinne Marchand) is a fresh-faced, perky young pop singer who has yet to experience great fame, although she has a few songs on the radio and on juke boxes. Wandering into a cafe, she plays one of her songs and we overhead a woman complaining to her table companion about the "noise." I don't know if Cléo hears that, even if we do. One of the devices in the film is to note the casual conversations of other Parisians that take place near Cléo as she passes her time. In another cafe, two lovers are breaking up, for example.
There is something psychologically accurate about this. When you fear your death is near, you become aware of other people in a new way. Yes, you think of the others, you think your life is going on its merry way, but think of me--I have to die. Cléo's awareness of that deepens a film that is otherwise about mostly trivial events.
She begins at 5 p.m, for example, by visiting a reader of the Tarot deck. The cards are seen in color in an otherwise b&w film. We aren't Tarot readers, but they look alarming to us. The Hanged Man and Death make their ominous appearances, and the Tarot reader reassures Cléo, as such readers always do, that the cards "can mean many things." Later, when Cléo asks for her palm to be read, the reader looks at it and says, "I don't read palms." Not a good sign. Cléo seems a shallow enough woman that these portents depress her.
Wandering through Paris accompanied by her maid, she stops in a hat shop and tries on many hats, which are reflected back at her in countless mirrors. Which look will she adopt for the moment? It is a summer day, and yet she chooses a black fur hat, which crowns her head as a storm warning.
Cléo and the maid return to her apartment, which contains a piano, a bed, two tussling kittens and a lot of empty space. She occupies the bed as a sort of throne, and receives her lover (José Luis de Vilallonga) in a scene that for both of them is clearly more ceremony than passion. One meets one's lover between 5 and 7? Very well then, they will behave as expected. Also in attendance is Bob, her rehearsal pianist, played by Michel Legrand, the film's composer.
It is clear in her behavior with lover and pianist that Cléo is enacting a superficial pop heroine, an inconsequential and trivial young women, all style and pose. The two kittens, which Varda somehow succeeds in including within the frame, are like props in a silly musical. And yet all this time Cléo's awareness of her mortality vibrates like a soft bass drum beneath the surface. As she plays singer, lover and shopper of hats, she is playing always a woman who expects to be told she has stomach cancer.
The role is more difficult than it might appear, and Corinne Marchand better in it than she may have been credited for. What she does here is as extraordinary in its own way as Anna Karina's unforgettable character in Godard's "My Life to Live." It is tricky enough to play a sprite who skips lightly through life, but how in doing that do you communicate your awareness of mortality? (Both Godard and Karina appear in cameos in a brief silent film sequence, shown in a clip below.)
Unlike most of the New Wave directors, Varda was trained not as a filmmaker or as a critic, but as a serious photographer. Try freezing any frame of the scenes in her apartment and you will find perfect composition--perfect, but not calling attention to itself. In moving pictures, she has an ability to capture the essence of her characters not only through plot and dialogue, but even more in their placement in space and light.
While many early New Wave films had a jaunty boldness of style, Varda in this film shows a sensibility to subtly developing emotions. Consider the sequence near the end. she wanders into a deserted area of a park and encounters the young soldier Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller). They speak. They walk, they travel by bus, they walk again. Observe with what enormous tact and restraint he speaks to her. He doesn't know of her day's health worries, but he has worries of his own, and Varda's dialogue allows an emotional bridge to exist between them. Then Cleo is told her test results with almost cruel informality by her doctor. Then she and the soldier talk a little more. If you want to consider the differences between men and women, consider that what Antoine says here was written by a woman, and many men would have found it out of reach.
Agnes Varda, born 1928, is one of the nicest people I have ever met. There's no other way to put it. "Saint Agnes of Montparnasse," I called her, in blog entry I wrote in 2009.
In her magnificent autobiographical film "The Beaches of Agnes" (2009), she comes walking toward us on the sand in the first shot, describing herself as "a little old lady, pleasantly plump." Well, she isn't tall. But somehow she isn't old. She made this film in her 80th year, and looked remarkably similar to 1967, when she brought a film to the Chicago Film Festival. Or the night I had dinner with her, Jacques and Pauline Kael at Cannes 1976. Or when she was at Montreal 1988. Or the sun-blessed afternoon when we three had lunch in their Parisian courtyard in 1990. Or when she was on the jury at Cannes 2005.
Her face is framed by a cap of shining hair. Her eyes are merry and curious. She is brimming with energy, and in "The Beaches of Agnes" you will see her setting up shots involving mirrors on the beach, or operating her own camera, or sailing a boat single-handedly down the Seine under the Pont Neuf, her favorite bridge.
And she has given us the most poetic shot about the cinema I have ever seen, where two old fishermen, who were young when she first filmed them, watch themselves on a screen. Yes, and the screen and the 16mm projector itself are both mounted on an old market cart that they push through the nighttime streets of their village.
That shot made near the end of her career contains the mystery of cinema. She filmed these men when they were young, and now half a century has passed for all of them, and the shot endures. You sense the same life and sympathy in "Cléo from 5 to 7," where she sees the surface so clearly, and what is under it still more clearly. The film is on DVD in the Criterion Collection, and is streaming on Hulu and Hulu Plus.
My blog entry Saint Agnes of Montparnasse.
Viewing Hiyao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" for the third time, I was struck by a quality between generosity and love. On earlier viewings I was caught up by the boundless imagination of the story. This time I began to focus on the elements in the picture that didn't need to be there. Animation is a painstaking process, and there is a tendency to simplify its visual elements. Miyazaki, in contrast, offers complexity. His backgrounds are rich in detail, his canvas embraces space liberally, and it is all drawn with meticulous attention. We may not pay much conscious attention to the corners of the frame, but we know they are there, and they reinforce the remarkable precision of his fantasy worlds.
"Spirited Away" is surely one of the finest of all animated films, and it has its foundation in the traditional bedrock of animation, which is frame-by-frame drawing. Miyazaki began his career in that style, but he is a realist and has permitted the use of computers for some of the busywork. But he personally draws thousands of frames by hand. "We take handmade cell animation and digitize it in order to enrich the visual look," he told me in 2002, "but everything starts with the human hand drawing."
Consider a scene in "Spirited Away" where his young heroine stands on a bridge leading away from the magical bathhouse in which much of the movie is set. The central action and necessary characters supply all that is actually needed, but watching from the windows and balconies of the bathhouse are many of its occupants. It would be easier to suggest them as vaguely moving presences, but Miyazaki takes care to include many figures we recognize. All of them are in motion. And it isn't the repetitive motion of much animation, in which the only idea is simply to show a figure moving. It is realistic, changing, detailed motion.
Most people watching the movie will simply read those areas of the screen as "movement." But if we happen to look, things are really happening there. That's what I mean by generosity and love. Mikayazi and his colleagues care enough to lavish as much energy on the less significant parts of the frame. Notice how much of the bathhouse you can see. It would have been quicker and easier to show just a bridge and a doorway. But Miyazaki gives his bathhouse his complexity of a real place, which possesses attributes whether or not the immediate story requires them.
The story of "Spirited Away" has been populated with limitless creativity. Has any film ever contained more different kinds of beings that we have never seen anywhere before? Miyazaki's imagination never rests. There is a scene where the heroine and her companion get off a train in the middle of a swamp. In the distant forest they see a light approaching. This turns out to be an old-fashioned light pole that is hopping along on one foot. It bows to them, turns, and lights the way on the path they must take. When they arrive at a cottage, it dutifully hangs itself above the gate. The living light pole is not necessary. It is a gift from Miyazaki.
His story involves a 10-year-old girl named Chihiro, who isn't one of those cheerful little automatons that populate many animated films. She is described by many critics as "sullen." Yes, and impatient and impetuous, as she's stuck in the back seat during a long drive to a house her parents want to examine. Her father loses the way in a dark forest, and the road seems to end at the entrance to a tunnel. Investigating it, they find it leads to an abandoned amusement park. But at dusk, some of the shops seem to reopen, especially a food shop whose fragrances steam into the cool air. Her parents fall eagerly upon the counter jammed with food, and stuff their mouths. Chihiro is stubborn and says she isn't hungry. Her parents eat so much they double or triple in size. They eat like pigs, and they become pigs. These aren't the parents of American animation, but parents who can do things that frighten a child.
The amusement park leads to a gigantic floating bathhouse, whose turrets and windows and ledges and ornamentation pile endlessly upon themselves. A friendly boy warns her to return, but she is too late, and the bathhouse casts off from the shore. Chihiro ventures inside, and finds a world of infinite variety. She cannot find her way out again. The boy says everyone must have a job, and sends her to Kamaji, an old bearded man with eight elongated limbs, who runs the boiler room. He and a young girl advise her to apply to Yubaba, who owns the bathhouse. This is a fearsome old witch who exhales plumes of smoke and a cackling laugh.
This is the beginning of an extraordinary adventure. Chihiro will meet no more humans in the bathhouse. She will be placed under a spell by Yubaba, who steals her name and gives her a new one, Sen. Unless she can get her old name back again, she can never leave. One confusing space opens onto another in the bathhouse, whose population is a limitless variety of bizarre life-forms. There are little fuzzy black balls with two eyeballs, who steal Sen's shoes. Looming semi-transparent No Faces, who wear masks over their ghostly shrouds. Three extraordinary heads without bodies, who hop about looking angry, and resemble caricatures of Karl Marx. There is a malodorous heap of black slime, a river creature whose body has sopped up piles of pollution. Shape-shifting, so common in Japanese fantasy, takes place here, and the boy who first befriended her is revealed as a lithe sea dragon with fierce fangs.
Sen makes her way through this world, befriended by some, shunned by others, threatened by Yubaba, learning as she goes. She never becomes a "nice girl," but her pluck and determination win our affection. She becomes determined to regain her name and return to the mainland on a daily train (which only runs one way). She wants to find her parents again.
Miyazaki says he made the film specifically for 10-year-old girls. That is why it plays so powerfully for adult viewers. Movies made for "everybody" are actually made for nobody in particular. Movies about specific characters in a detailed world are spellbinding because they make no attempt to cater to us; they are defiantly, triumphantly, themselves. As I watched the film again, I was spellbound as much as by any film I consider great. That helps explain why "Spirited Away" grossed more than "Titanic" in Japan, and was the first foreign film in history to open in the U. S. having already made more than $200 million.
I was so fortunate to meet Miyazaki at the 2002 Toronto film festival. I told him I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or sigh, or gaze at a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.
"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called 'ma.' Emptiness. It's there intentionally." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is 'ma.' If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness."
I think that helps explain why Miyazaki's films are more absorbing than the frantic action in a lot of American animation. "The people who make the movies are scared of silence" he said, "so they want to paper and plaster it over," he said. "They're worried that the audience will get bored. But just because it's 80 percent intense all the time doesn't mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying emotions--that you never let go of those.
"What my friends and I have been trying to do since the 1970's is to try and quiet things down a little bit; don't just bombard them with noise and distraction. And to follow the path of children's emotions and feelings as we make a film. If you stay true to joy and astonishment and empathy you don't have to have violence and you don't have to have action. They'll follow you. This is our principle."
He said he has been amused to see a lot of animation in live-action superhero movies. "In a way, live action is becoming part of that whole soup called animation. Animation has become a word that encompasses so much, and my animation is just a little tiny dot over in the corner. It's plenty for me."
It's plenty for me, too.]]>
Sean Penn's "The Pledge" begins when it seems his protagonist's career is ending. Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a Nevada police detective whose retirement party is interrupted by news of the brutal murder of a young girl. Across the noisy room he senses a shift in tone, and joins a conversation between his chief and the man who will be taking over his job. Then he goes along to the murder scene, perhaps out of habit or because he hasn't officially retired. The little girl in a red coat is a pitiful sight with her blood staining the snow.
Jerry is angered at the poor preservation of the crime scene, and at the general reluctance of the cops to notify the girl's parents. Hell with it. He'll do it himself. We see him slowly approach them across a floor covered with agitated turkey chicks. Penn holds his camera at a distance as Jerry breaks the news to the parents, whose anguish is apparent. Later, inside their house, he reassures them the killer will be found. The mother (Patricia Clarkson) holds up a crucifix made by her daughter, and asks for his solemn pledge. He gives it. He will not rest until then.
The scene plays exactly like that. But later, thinking back to it, perhaps we sense a deeper level. Jerry Black is twice-divorced, childless, a career cop who now allegedly looks forward to spending the rest of his life fishing. But he was drawn to the news of the murder, drawn to the crime scene, drawn to be the one who informs the parents, and now he vows to solve the crime. What happened to his fishing trip? This is a man who is holding onto his identity with a desperate grip.
That determination is at the core of "The Pledge," which seems to follow the form of a police procedural and then plunges deeper into the mysteries of innocence, evil, and a man's need to validate himself. At some point we realize that retirement, for Jerry, is a form of defeat and death. When the girl's mother says, "There can't be such devils out there," look at his eyes as he tells her, "There are such devils." He has been working against them for his entire life, and now he must find this one to save himself.
He looks through the one-way glass at the interrogation of the prime suspect, a retarded American Indian named Toby (lank-haired Benecio Del Toro). The questions come from Krolak (Aaron Eckhart), who will take over Jerry's job. He coaxes and coos in Toby's ear, seducing a confession, and when he gets one he throws up his hands in victory like a football coach. Jerry is appalled: The Indian clearly has no idea what he is saying. And then, a few seconds later, Toby kills himself and the case seems closed.
"The Pledge" may be Nicholson's finest performance. Here are none of the familiar signals of his more popular performances, none of the relish of characterization, none of the sardonic remove. We see a lonely man, aging, whose attempts to go through the motions of retirement fail. He stays on the case. After leaving the force he uses a map to triangulate three crime scenes where, over a period of years, young girls, all of them wearing red, have been killed. At a crossroads he finds a small country store and gas station with an apartment upstairs. He walks in and makes the owner (Harry Dean Stanton), an offer too good to refuse.
If the three crimes were committed by the same man, that man must pass here. From a friend of the murdered girl, he obtained a drawing of a man she has met, a "giant," who gave her "porcupines" and drove a big black car. He grows intense every time a black car pulls in. At a local tavern, he becomes friendly with Lori, the barmaid (Robin Wright Penn), and when she turns up battered one day, he takes her in. She and her young daughter can live with him. No strings attached.
We are afraid to draw an obvious conclusion. Is Jerry going to use the little girl as bait? Is one child to be put at risk in his determination to avenge another one? Sean Penn never underlines this. Indeed, his film is so intimately involved with the daily details of life that there's a good stretch when we aren't really focusing in those terms. We fall into the rhythms of life in rural Nevada, outside Reno. We fall into the routine of the new household that has been formed. Jerry, who never had a child, reveals himself as a good father, reading bedtime stories, keeping a cautious eye on the girl. He never informs Lori of the murder case, but uses his background as a cop to explain his deep concern for the girl's safety.
Sean Penn shows himself in this film as a sure-handed director with great empathy for performance. He peoples his cast with great actors (Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave, Tom Noonan, Michael O'Keefe, Mickey Rourke, Lois Smith, Sam Shepard, Del Toro, Stanton, Clarkson, Eckhart). That he and Nicholson were able to attract such names for small roles speaks for itself. But Penn uses them for what he knows about them, not for their face value, and the presence of actors with real weight brings importance to roles that are "supporting" but not minor. Robin Wright, then Penn's wife, is pitch-perfect as a weary working woman who seeks safety and affection for herself and her child.
Penn and his cinematographer, Chris Menges, fill the frame with so many local details that the film doesn't seem to be insisting on an agenda. It emerges from the situation. A scene set at a local crafts fair, for example, involves people we know, others we don't know, and then a shot that reminds us of Hitchcock: A single pink balloon, floating free above the crowd. A later scene, of a police stake-out in the woods, is staged and acted with cold precision, although we can hardly believe what we're seeing.
Penn relentlessly draws the focus closer to the Jerry Black character. The edges of the frame tighten on him. The film hasn't been about murder but about need. Everything he has seen and everything he has done has been driven by his need, to prove himself still a good detective. Still a man.
"The Pledge" was Penn's third film as a director. "The Indian Runner" (1991) starred David Morse and Viggo Mortensen as brothers -- one a deputy sheriff, the other a troubled hothead. "The Crossing Guard" (1995), starred Nicholson as a man whose daughter has been killed by a drunken driver. He confronts his ex-wife (Anjelica Huston) and her new husband vows that now the driver (David Morse) is out of prison, he will find him and kill him. He shouts at Mary's new husband: "Man to man -- when she picks up the paper and reads that he is dead -- look at her face and see if you don't see pride and relief. Pride. And relief." Freddy's motivation is not revenge, but the need to impress his former wife.
These three films are not really about the events in the plot. They are about the need of a central character to persevere in the face of failure and even madness to complete a task he has set himself.
Now consider Penn's fourth film, "Into the Wild" (2007), the American Film Institute's film of the year. Emile Hirsch gave a powerful performance that evoked our growing dread. He played a 20-year-old who rebelled against his parents and his life, and started driving west and north until he disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness. He was not seeking death. He wanted to prove he could live off the land, and survive.
This film, too, showed Penn embedding his protagonist in a cast of stars in small roles: Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, Hal Holbrook, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Kristen Stewart. These are never "cameos," but require the actors to do their very best work in a short time.
All of these films show a man determined to prove something, at whatever cost. He is not proving it to others. He is proving it to himself. Penn wrote the screenplays for all but "The Pledge"; for "Into the Wild," he began with a true-life book by Jon Krakauer. What does the theme mean for Penn? I would not venture to say. He is not only as good as any living actor, he has also steadily been growing as a great director of actors. One of the reasons "The Pledge" is so important is that he asked his friend Jack Nicholson to follow him into the wild, and they proved something.]]>
It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining. "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game" are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be. But although "Rules" contains scenes of delightful humor, neither suggest the Renoir who made "Boulu Saved from Drowning" (1932), or "French Cancan" (1954), "French Cancan" a delicious musical comedy that deserves comparison with the golden age Hollywood musicals of the same period.
In them one can sense the cherub that his father, Auguste Renoir, painted more than once. That same twinkle is captured in the photographs taken later in his life. Some people are essentially happy, and it shows in their faces. Renoir lived to be 84, his last years at home in Beverly Hills, where he was interviewed by a parade of worshipful young critics. He won an honorary Academy Award in 1975. He had moved to America after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. Although most of his great films were made in the 1930s, in the 1950s he returned to France to make a remarkable trilogy which were all in Technicolor and all musical comedies: "The Golden Coach" (1955), named by Andrew Sarris as the greatest film ever made; "French Cancan," and "Elena and Her Men" (1956).
"French Cancan" uses one of the most familiar of musical formulas, loosely summarized as, "Hey, gang! Let's rent the old barn and put on a show!" In this case he was inspired by the origins of the Moulin Rouge, the Montmartre cabaret theater which to this day still has success with the kinds of shows it opened with. It is a backstage story centering in the life of the (fictional) impresario Henri Danglard, a womanizer whose career was a series of narrow escapes from bankruptcy.
For his Danglard, Renoir cast Jean Gabin, the greatest of all French leading men, whose genius, like that of so many stars, involved never seeming to try very hard, and simply reflecting his own inner nature. It was their fourth film together, and after the weighty characters Gavin played in "The Lower Depths" (1936), "Grand Illusion" (1937) and "Le Bête Humaine" (1938), a complete change of tone. Danglard is the always insolvent owner of the Chinese Screen, which headlines the infamous courtesan La Belle Abbesse (Maria Felix) as a sultry belly dancer, known to all as Lola, his mistress.
One night he goes out slumming with Lola and some friends, and in a Montmartre dive sees the patrons doing a jolly can-can. This scene, early in the film, has a freshness that delights; it feels almost plausible, not staged, although it surely is. And it establishes two key characters, the pretty bakery girl Nini (Françoise Arnoul) and her possessive lover Paolo (Franco Pastorino). When Lola haughtily declines to dance, Danglard asks Nini to be his partner, inflaming the jealousy of both Lola and Paolo and giving him an inspiration. The Chinese Screen is failing, and falling into the hands of his creditors. He will open a new theater, and revive the can-can, an old-fashioned dance from the 1870s, renaming the "French Cancan" as a strategy to make it sound more exotic--not to the French, but, as we see on opening night, to American tourists and Russian sailors.
Danglard is a man who faces emergencies with serenity. His face never betrays concern. He occupies a series of unpaid hotel suites, always alert to find a financial backer, and not above offering Lola herself as the prize to one rich prospect. He makes no pretense no faithfulness, to her or anyone else, and makes it clear that his only loyalty is to the stage. The three 1950s musical comedies are often described as Renoir's "art trilogy," and this one is most single-mindedly dedicated to the bond between performer and audience.
"French Cancan" was entirely shot on sound stages, including one big set of a Montmartre street scene, with stone steps leading up to a little square above where we find the bakery that employs Nina. (This square providentially opens onto a charming little grassy area for a romantic scene, although such a space is unimaginable in such a crowded part of the city.) A cafe on the street provides the setting for a chummy older couple who observe and comment on all the activity, and are covered with dust when Danglard's workmen detonate explosives to bring down the White Queen, a failing club which is destined to provide the land for the Moulin Rouge.
The stairs up to Nini's bakery are well-traveled by three hopeful lovers: Not only Danglard and of course Paolo, but Prince Alexandre (Giani Esposito), the unimaginably rich heir to a kingdom obscurely located somewhere in the Middle East. Fidelity is much valued by Paolo and Alexandre, but in the cases Danglard and Nini, if they can't have the one they love, they love the one they're with. These revolving romantic subplots provide Renoir with love scenes verging on farce, especially as Danglard, always with an eye out for the main chance, realizes that Nini might be useful in coaxing funds out of the Prince.
In the meantime, construction advances on the Moulin Rouge, despite troubles; a government official arrives for the dedication of the new foundations, and Lola, enraged to find Nini there, attacks her. What results is one of those movie scenes, much beloved in the taverns of Westerns, in which everybody in the room inexplicably joins in and starts pummeling each other. Danglard ends up being pushed into a pit.
His complete attention is now devoted to holding auditions and putting together a show. Great charm enters in the person of a elderly dance coach (Lydia Jeanson), who danced the can-can as a girl and now teaches the hopefuls that Danglard has recruited. Although I once attended the Moulin Rouge, as a sin-seeking college student, I thought of the can-can more as spectacle than effort, and those rehearsal sessions establish what very hard work it is.
Two of the film's best sequences take place backstage on opening night. One involves Nini realizing that the heartless Danglard, having exploited her prince, still has a roving eye. The other involves the drama when she locks herself in her dressing room and threatens the evening's big can-can number. No entreaties will budge her--not even those of her mother. Then Danglard winds up and delivers an extraordinary speech, unlike anything he has said before, in which he explains to Nini that trifles like love and money mean nothing to a true performer. For such a person, nothing matters but winning the will of the audience by putting on a show. I can imagine Ethel Merman delivering such a speech, but from the lips of Jean Gabin, who probably played more murderers than anything else, they are astonishing. You have the feeling that Gabin, and through him Renoir, are speaking from the heart.
That compulsion to go on with the show is the driving engine in "French Cancan," and helps explain why it's more fictive than a more routine musical (such as, oh, say "There's No Business Like Show Business"). This is a musical and a comedy, but it's something more, a portrait of an impresario for whom opening theater and producing a show are the highest goals in life.
Gabin has a late scene when he's along backstage, sprawled exhausted in a big prop chair, hearing the orchestra and the applause from behind the curtain. He lifts his hands as if to conduct, and we realize this is as happy as he'll ever be in his life, or ever hope to be. It reminded me curiously of a scene he has in Jacques Backer's "Touchez pas au Grisbi," a film he also made in 1954. In that one, as a failing gang leader, he's alone in a room an has a monologue about an ungrateful pal who has let him down: "There's not a tooth in his head that hasn't cost me a bundle." One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.
"French Cancan" is streaming on Hulu, and is on Criterion DVDs. Also in my Great Movies Collection: "Grand Illusion," "Rules of the Game" and "Touchez pas au Grisbi."]]>


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Selling your home is a tough thing to do. Most sellers want to sell their home as quickly as possible. And, of course, they want to sell it at the highest price possible. That sounds simple, but it is not. It takes the help of a good real estate agent to aid in setting the price, preparing the home, and marketing the home effectively to attract buyers. Once you are ready to get started, your real estate agent will help you:
- Strategically set the list price
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- Negotiate the offer that is best for you
- Complete all of the required agreements to finalise the deal
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Each step has many important factors to consider. It is critical to work with someone up-to-date on the current market conditions and legalities to save yourself time and potentially costly mistakes.
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ST. LOUIS (AP) — Only one of the eight lawsuits filed against Mallinckrodt chemical company by people who believe they got cancer from living near radioactive contamination in north St. Louis County will move forward.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that U.S. District Judge Audrey Fleissig on Wednesday dismissed claims of negligence, emotional distress and liability.
The only case not dismissed involves injuries caused by exposure to nuclear materials. For that one, Fleissig said attorneys and residents have until May 10 to show the injuries occurred within the statute of limitations — five years.
Last week, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services released results of a study that found no cancer cluster. But many say the study was flawed because it looked at current residents, not those who lived there before remediation began in the 1970s.
Most of those who are sick believe their illnesses are from living near and playing in Coldwater Creek in the 1960s and 1970s.
St. Louis attorney Stephen Jeffery, who represents DJR Holdings and the Jarboe company, the current owners of the contaminated land, sympathized with the residents' health problems but was pleased by the ruling.
"My clients don't feel like they have really done anything to cause any harm to the plaintiffs," Jeffery said. "They've never had anything to do with the contamination and participated with the federal government in trying to get it cleaned up."
Attorneys for residents did not respond to requests for comment. Attorneys for Mallinckrdt, now known as Covidien, also did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Mallinckrodt produced material for atomic bombs during the Cold War era. Radioactive byproducts were dumped at an open storage site near Lambert Airport and buried near Coldwater Creek.
The Army Corps of Engineers has nearly completed its cleanup of the airport waste sites and the creek.
Former Mallinckrodt workers have been awarded compensation if they developed one of 22 cancers — they are eligible for payment of medical expenses plus $150,000. Residents' lawsuits seek similar compensation.
Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com


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Spike Vgas
Spike VGAs renamed VGX, dated for December
The Spike Video Game Awards, where we're likely to find out more details on much of the new PlayStation 4 content revealed today, have been slapped with a new name and a release date.
Spike Vgas headlines
Car Crash: Why VGAs are in a serious need of change
The 2011 Spike VGAs were meant to celebrate the year's best games and hype future releases. Instead, Johnny Cullen argues, they played to stereotypes in the worst possible way.
New Wake and BioWare, MGS Rising locked for VGAs
Spike's announced in a release this evening the next game from BioWare will be among several announces for the Spike Video Game Awards on December 10.
Spike teams up with Philo for tonight's VGAs
Spike TV and Philo have teamed up for the Video Game Awards for tonight's broadcast so that you can check in with your friends while watching the show.
VGAs - Who won what
Reveals aside, you probably want to know who actually won what at the VGAs this year. See below. For all the rest of the news from the awards, hit this. Thanks for the list, Kotaku, and to bobbymington for the heads up. Game of the Year: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Studio of the Year: Rocksteady […]
VGAs - All the news and movies in one place
Below's a list of all the reveals and news that came out of the Spike VGAs at the weekend. Big stuff there. Be sure to watch all the video. You can get all the news and general bits of gossip from the liveblog. Spec Ops: The Line announced and trailered VGAs – Who won what […]
VGAs - Force Unleashed II announced, trailered
Missed this one yesterday. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II was announced and trailered at the VGAs over the weekend, as you can see after the break. It's CG-only, showing the Apprentice facing off against large, nasty things in an arena. Have a watch. It's out next year.
VGAs - True Crime trailered, United Front developing
Activision trailered a True Crime reboot at the VGAs last night, as you can see after the break. Canadian developer United Front's doing the work. It's the same outfit behind ModNation Racers. The new game's set in China, featuring an undercover cop against the Triads. For those that may not remember, True Crime: Streets of […]
VGAs - Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands movie shows movie themes
The first Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands trailer debuted at the VGAs last night – watch it after the break – showing what very much looks to be a vehicle tie-in for the upcoming Jake Gyllenhaal movie. The Prince looks like Jake's in-film character, most obviously. Rewinding's still there as well, as you can […]
VGAs - First Crackdown 2 gameplay trailer reveals glide suit
Ruffian put out a first proper gameplay trailer of Crackdown 2 trailer at the VGAs last night, showing agents gliding, co-oping and smacking the shit out of people with sign posts. Is it good? It is. The game's out next year, 360-only. Hit the link to see why you should be excited. Get all the […]
Spike Vgas latest
VGAs – Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands movie shows movie themes
VGAs – First Crackdown 2 gameplay trailer reveals glide suit


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A new study shows that eating fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, cod, and herring can cut heart attack and stroke risk in young women, even if their intake doesn't reach recommended daily levels. You've probably already heard that fish is good for your heart, but most studies focused on men or older women, so it's good to know that younger women can benefit too. This news comes just in time for everyone to have a heaping helping of holiday lutefisk.
Image via picturepartners/Shutterstock.com


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Okay, okay, I promise this is the last car or transportation related tutorial that will fall in the 'for kids' section for a bit. Before I do though I want to make sure that there is not only a plane tutorial for kids, but I also wanted to provide a lesson on "how to draw a jet for kids", step by step. Jets are very popular air crafts that kids, (especially boys) love and want to one day learn how to fly. I tried making a kiddie version of the jets that are in Top Gun, you know that movie with Tom Cruise as Maverick and his wing man Goose. Anyways, I really like how this jet came out and I'm sure you will enjoy it too. Be sure to let me know if you enjoyed this tutorial by leaving a comment, rating and you can even fav this jet. I will return in a bit once again so be sure to stay tuned in.
DragoArt members upload artwork and drawing tutorials! They are also allowed to leave comments on tutorials, profiles, etc. Many more features, as well; it's way better than just being a boring guest! Register Now!


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Accepted Insurance
It is the philosophy of OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians that all patients receive the best possible care and service. Therefore, your complete understanding of our financial policy as it relates to your financial obligations is an essential part of our philosophy. Please read this thoroughly.
Many changes have taken place in the health insurance industry in recent years. Services once covered in full are now partially covered, covered only under certain circumstances, or in some cases not covered at all. It is your responsibility to know your plan benefits, please check with your insurance company regarding possible coverage exclusions.
Payment for all services provided by our practice is due in full at the time the services are rendered. Exclusions to this policy are those patients with insurance, Medicare, Medicaid or confirmed Worker's Compensation patients. Free or reduced care is available through our Charity Care Program to patients who demonstrate a financial hardship and do not meet all of the eligibility requirements necessary to receive assistance from other federal and state benefit programs. For further information, please contact the Billing Department at 740-615-1324.
If you are a member of a health care organization that OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians participates with, we will file your visit with this organization and your copayment is collected at the time you arrive for your appointment. If OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians does not have a contractual agreement with your insurance carrier, we will bill available insurance carriers as a courtesy to you if an insurance card is provided to us at the time of service.
You will be billed in full for any services that your health plan deems to be a non-covered service or any balance due after we have received payment from your insurance carrier. All patient balances are payable upon receipt of the statement.
It is our policy that any patient at the age of eighteen years or older will be financially responsible for all charges incurred. For any patient under the age of eighteen, the parent who accompanies the minor for their visit will be financially responsible for all charges incurred.
OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians accepts Cash, Personal Checks, Money Orders, Travelers Checks, ATM Debit cards, Mastercard and Visa for services rendered.
If you fail to pay your co-payment at the time of service, you will be charged a $15.00 billing fee.
A $35 Returned Check Fee will be assessed to the account for every check returned to OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians for insufficient funds.
Refunds will be issued to guarantors. If the guarantor has an outstanding balance on another account, a refund will not be issued and the credit will be transferred to the account with the outstanding patient balance.
OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians reserves the right to turn any patient over to collections if it is deemed that the account has been in default of the payment obligations or compliance of this policy. A fee will be assessed to all accounts sent to a collection agency.
In the event you are unable to make your scheduled appointment, please cancel at least 24 hours prior to the appointment. OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians reserves the right to bill our standard office visit fee for non-compliance to this policy.
Telephone prescription refills may be charged a $10.00 fee, if refills are not requested at the time of the office visit. The staff of OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians believes that open and honest communication is imperative for you to receive the best care. If you have any questions about your financial obligation or health care needs, please feel free to discuss them with one of our staff members.
The physicians of OhioHealth Obstetrics & Gynecology Physicians choose to practice with Grady Memorial Hospital to ensure the highest quality care for all your personal healthcare needs.
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Our location is conveniently located on West Central Avenue, a half block east of Grady Memorial Hospital.
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Encounter the delectable food and wine of Scossa Restaurant &
Lounge where you will savour the classic Northern Italian cuisine
created by Chef Giancarlo Tondin. With an emphasis on quality, only
the freshest ingredients are selected to create cuisine that reinvigorates
traditional Italian recipes.
Experience the sophisticated chic décor and lively ambiance
of the Scossa dinning room, bar and lounge and enjoy the picturesque charm of Easton's
historic town center.
While coat and tie are not required, attractive attire will fit
perfectly with the cosmopolitan style at Scossa
Holiday Parties
For large groups, please call the restaurant.
NEW Italian Tapas Menu
Available at the bar from 4pm
Any 3 items only $12.50!
Our Hours
DINNER - view menu
All days - 4pm til close
LUNCH - view menu
Thursday - Sunday, 11:30am to 3pm
Monday - Wednesday Closed
All Drinks 30% OFF
at the Scossa Bar
Mon - Fri 4pm - 7pm
Monday - Friday: 4pm to 7pm
30% Off Drinks
- Bar only
» view events
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New ZAGAT 2011 Review!
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French artist Bastien Vives, whose cosmopolitan video game art does little to dispel French stereotypes, returns this week with a batch of terrific fan art.
It's not all video games - Disney features prominently - but you can excuse that when his Ninja Turtles characters (turtle or otherwise) are so, well, sexy.
lundi... lorsque ce n'est pas de l'archéologie, mais une course contre le mal. [comme quoi]


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Use a strong lifting program to identify weak points then remediate. Don't be too proud to see a massage therapist, Ortho, PT, etc. I have a knee and shoulder injury that give me problems but I have a weight program in the gym that keeps me in shape and helps me work out the little kinks so I don't tweak something kiting.
No guarantees in this sport, but being good at any discipline is 99% time on the water, 1% everything else.


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Security forces tried to restrict coverage of the country's civil unrest by attacking journalists covering pro-reform protests, often confiscating or destroying their equipment. Authorities raided the office of a news website in April, destroying equipment and threatening staff members. The same month, Al-Jazeera received a series of threats that its offices and journalists would be attacked if the network did not tone down coverage of the protests; the network's Amman bureau chief said he had received death threats by telephone and social media. Other attacks included the hacking of a news website in February for refusing to take down a critical statement from a group of Jordanian tribesmen calling for political and economic reforms. In an Orwellian maneuver, the lower chamber of parliament passed a bill in September that was marketed as fighting corruption. In fact, some provisions would accomplish the opposite: They would impose heavy new fines against journalists who report on corruption without "solid facts." Facing heavy opposition from journalists, the upper chamber sent the bill to committee for further review. Despite a long list of press freedom abuses, Jordanian leaders escaped criticism from the United States, which sought to maintain close relations with the kingdom.
On September 27, the chamber of deputies passed a measure billed as "anti-corruption" that would impose fines ranging from 30,000 to 60,000 dinars (US$42,300 to US$84,600) for public accusations of corruption "without solid facts." The legislation did not define what constituted "solid facts." The upper house sent the bill to committee in late year. Other countries in the region adopted press legislation in 2011 that was portrayed as reform but actually imposed new penalties for critical reporting.
Between February and July, a period of intense political unrest, CPJ recorded at least 70 direct attacks on journalists and news stations. Security forces assaulted journalists at protests, raided a news station, and threatened other journalists for their news coverage, CPJ research shows.
Attacks between February and July:
43: Assaults
23: Seizures or destruction of equipment
2: Threats
1: Office raid
1: Website hacked
At a July demonstration in Amman, security forces beat 16 journalists wearing orange "press" vests, CPJ research shows. The vests, provided by the Public Security Directorate, were supposed to distinguish journalists from demonstrators and provide a greater level of safety. Jordan's royal court said it would cover the cost of medical treatment for the injured journalists.
Of the injured journalists:
2: Suffered broken bones
1: Underwent surgery
The targeted journalists worked for a variety of organizations, including:
--The New York Times
--Agence France-Presse
In April, 52 Jordanian journalists issued a statement expressing support for Al-Jazeera journalists threatened with attack for their coverage of the unrest.
Social media played a pivotal role in galvanizing the Arab public for mass protests against their repressive regimes. Jordanian agents hacked a website in reprisal for its publication of a pro-reform statement. With about 1.9 million users, Jordan has high Facebook penetration in the region, based on the social media site's data and population statistics from the U.N. Population Fund.
Facebook use in the region:
United Arab Emirates: 2.6 million users, 57 percent of the population
Bahrain: 303,000, 37.5 percent
Lebanon: 1.29 million, 30 percent
Jordan: 1.9 million, 29 percent
Tunisia: 2.7 million, 26 percent


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All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws.
Total or partial reproduction of the contents of this site, even quoting the source,is prohibited without written autorization.


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Boost your donations by 25% at no cost to you!
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©Brenda Coffee. All rights reserved.
Have you ever read the ingredients on the back of your shampoo bottle, your jar of moisturizer or the hand lotion you use? Chances are most of those ingredients you can't even pronounce. More importantly, most of them are chemicals you don't want in your blood stream. Regardless of whether you're male or female, or if you've had breast cancer, you might consider avoiding a class of chemical ingredients called parabens.<PREVIEWEND>
Methylparaben, ethylparaben, propylparaben and butylparabens are commonly used as preservatives in most of our personal care products. Manufacturers use parabens because they allow everything from toothpaste, to makeup base, to stay on store shelves longer. As informed consumers, however, we should be aware that parabens are known to cause breast cancer cells to grow and proliferate in laboratory environments. Because parabens can mimic estrogen, a hormone known to play a key role in some breast cancers, women who've had estrogen positive breast cancer should avoid all forms of estrogen in an effort to lessen risk of recurrence. Many say that should include parabens.
Just as "we are what we eat," we are also a receptacle for the chemicals we put on our body. According to Mercola.com, the body can absorb as much as five pounds of cosmetic chemicals every year. Parabens are absorbed through the skin and into our gastrointestinal tract and our blood stream. The January-February 2004 issue of the Journal of Applied Toxicology reported measurable amounts of six different parabens from biopsy samples of breast cancer tumors. Because of their estrogenic properties, parabens can also affect male reproductive glands. The January 2009 issue of Reproductive Toxicology reported a probable link between parabens and the possible decrease in sperm production in males.
Studies are beginning to show that a lifelong exposure to estrogen may increase our risk for breast cancer. Many scientists are wondering if the cumulative effects of estrogenic parabens in our personal care products may explain why more girls are reaching puberty younger and younger, some as early as eight, and why more girls are being diagnosed with breast cancer.
So now that you know about parabens, what do you do about them? For starters, read the labels on everything from deodorant to your favorite beauty products. If possible, only buy products that say "Paraben Free" on the label. Most paraben free products can be found in stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts and Trader Joe's. If you don't have a store that carries paraben free products in your area, you can purchase many of them through the RETAIL THERAPY link on BreastCancerSisterhood.com.
I thought I'd share some of my favorite all natural, paraben free skin care lines, and believe me, I've tried them all. I love, love, love Ann Webb's Skin Organics. Her Unscented Body Cream and Olive Eye Cream are amazing! I also like a skin care line called MyChelle Dermaceuticals, particularly their Unscented Honeydew Cleanser & Makeup Remover. Another great product line is Dermaé Natural Bodycare, particularly their Microdermabrasion Scrub, Hyaluronic Acid Day Crème and their Hyaluronic Acid Night Crème. If you'd like a good paraben free shampoo, try Hugo Naturals Red Tea & Ylang-Ylang. I have fine hair and Hugo's shampoo doesn't weigh it down.
Since I go out of my way to avoid parabens, I am dismayed to learn methylparabens are also found naturally in plant sources like blueberries. Because blueberries are one of the richest sources of anti-oxidants, I eat a half pint of blueberries on my cereal every day. Even though blueberries only contain minute amounts of parabens, I am a wee bit conflicted by this information.
If we care enough about the land to be vigilant about toxic spills, separate our trash—aluminum from plastic and paper—then doesn't it make sense to honor ourselves even more by avoiding harmful chemicals we put on and into our bodies? While everything in moderation is a good rule of thumb, I've never been a moderate kind of girl, so this blueberry thing has me considering… Oh, my stars! I nearly said moderation!
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