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Review: Long Shot Settles for Jumbling the Clichés of the Bromance Comedy
As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, the film becomes just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.2.5
Jonathan Levine's Long Shot doesn't so much upend the gendered presumptions of so many bromantic comedies from the aughts as jumble them around a bit. In Fred Flarsky, Seth Rogen plays an underachieving stoner who attracts a woman more than a few rungs above him in social standing and looks. In the latter role is Charlize Theron as the stunning, elegant, and indefatigable Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), America's secretary of state, who surprises everyone by falling in love with a schlub like Flarsky. But instead of presenting the coupling as a miracle that befalls our hero, Long Shot actually develops and convincingly motivates Field's interest in Flarsky, so that the attraction feels both reciprocal and believable—at least, within the confines of the film's Apatowian mix of dick jokes and sentimentality.
As such, Long Shot is neither a pure example of the phallocentric rom-com, nor quite the woke, #MeToo-era film it seems to think it is. Squint hard enough and you might confuse it for Knocked Up. Flarsky only has one friend here, start-up executive Lance (O'Shea Jackson Jr.), but he still serves the same structural role as Rogen's crew of buddies from Judd Apatow's 2007 film, present to provide outlandish one-liners until he's called upon in a crucial moment to deliver sage advice. Like Katherine Heigl's character in Knocked Up, Field has a clique that warns her away from Flarsky, but here it's staff members Maggie (June Diane Raphael) and Tom (Ravi Patel), who aren't just trying to preserve her social status, but save her chances at becoming the first female president of the United States.
Flarsky is a crusading journalist whose lefty, Brooklyn-based news site is purchased by Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), a media mogul with Steve Bannon's face and Roger Ailes's handsiness. Flarsky quits in protest, and Lance offers solace in the form of getting wasted at a World Wildlife Fund event. ("Fuck the animals, they're already gone," Flarsky initially protests, a throwaway line that's funny in the moment but chilling in retrospect, evidencing that apocalypse humor has become both mainstream and flippant.) Lance's hook is that Boyz II Men will be performing at a throwback dance party he knows his fellow elder millennial can't resist, and it's during "Motownphilly" that Flarsky catches Field's eye on the dance floor.
As it happens, the two grew up next door to each other, and Field used to babysit Flarsky, back in the early '90s when harmonic R&B and Flarsky's trademark teal windbreaker were still in fashion. United by their fondly remembered past and their mutual hatred of Wembley, the two reconnect, with Field hiring the freshly unemployed Flarsky to punch up her stump speeches. Field is developing a comprehensive environmental treaty, which she plans to use as a platform from which to launch her presidential campaign, having recently learned that her boss, President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk), the dim-witted TV star who's running the country in the film's barely refracted reality, won't be running for re-election.
The extent to which the film makes a Rogen/Theron romance work is almost as surprising as the Flarsky/Field relationship is to the characters in the film. It's not so much that the actors have immediately apparent chemistry, but that the script gives each of them enough depth that their attraction to the other feels organic. Aiding in this regard is Alexander Skarsgård as Canadian Prime Minister James Stewart, a Justin Trudeau caricature who functions as a foil to Rogen's intelligent and committed lefty; sexy but daft, vaguely liberal but deeply compromised, Stewart flirts with Field because it bumps their respective poll numbers up. Theron also gives a versatile performance, and despite Field's serious-mindedness, she isn't shoehorned into constantly playing straight (wo)man to Rogen's antics, particularly in the couple's familiar-feeling, but nevertheless amusing, drug-fueled romp in Parisian night clubs.
Through the unlikely coupling of Flarsky and Field, the film stages a fantasy reconciliation between the left and centrist wings of the Democratic Party, with Flarsky cast as the stubborn ideologue and Field as the essentially noble politician so focused on her career that she's willing to let go of some of her convictions. For all its attunement to current political discourse, however, Long Shot's satire is by and large superficial, more on the order of clever references than incisive observations. The film's nods to the multifold crises of American democracy have essentially the same status as its references to Encino Man and Pretty Woman, provoking laughs of recognition rather than delivering cutting takedowns. Intermittent clips from Wellby's Fox and Friends-style political commentary show, featuring an underutilized Claudia O'Doherty as the sole woman beset on all sides by her co-hosts' adolescent misogyny, are both too obvious and too close to the real thing to elicit deep laughs.
The film's satirical perspective is further muddled by a late-film scramble not to alienate every Republican viewer—and by some conspicuous "borrowing" from a decidedly sharper media property about a powerful, Hillary-esque politician. Tom, Field's bag man, and Maggie, her prospective campaign manager, are watered-down versions of their counterparts on HBO's acerbic Veep. (Long Shot even cribs a joke from that show's first season involving diarrhea and a limousine, and nabs recurring Veep guest star Randall Park for a brief cameo.)
The film dials up Veep's already exaggerated carnival of political snafus an additional notch, and while Long Shot is often funny, it's never sharp. By the end, the bounds of what's politically possible have been stretched so thin that the film enters the realm of pure fantasy. As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, Long Shot becomes, like Field's compromised environmental initiative, just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.
Cast: Charlize Theron, Seth Rogen, June Diane Raphael, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Ravi Patel, Bob Odenkirk, Andy Serkis, Randall Park, Tristan D. Lalla, Alexander Skarsgård Director: Jonathan Levine Screenwriter: Liz Hannah, Dan Sterling Distributor: Summit Entertainment Running Time: 125 min Rating: R Year: 2019 Buy: Video
Review: Benh Zeitlin's Wendy Is a Half-Hearted Spin on Peter Pan
Wendy veers awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never accruing any lasting emotional impact.2
Like Beasts of the Southern Wild before it, Wendy unfolds through the eyes of a child. Benh Zeitlin's sophomore feature puts a new spin on Peter Pan, and not only because it takes on the perspective of a 10-year-old Wendy Darling (Devin France). The film's modern-rustic settings and costumes and relative lack of fantastical elements—notwithstanding the presence of a majestic, glowing sea creature, referred to as "mother," who may hold the secret to reversing time—also play a large part in re-envisioning J.M. Barrie's classic. But Zeitlin's brand of magical realism strains in its conflicting desires to both demystify Neverland (never mentioned by name in the film), chiefly by grounding it in a rather prosaic reality, and imbue the story with all the enchanting qualities we've come to expect from fantasies of everlasting childhood. Like its version of Peter (Yashua Mack), Wendy wants to fly, yet, because of its self-imposed restrictions, it never quite gets off the ground.
Across this tale of a child lurching toward adulthood, there's a sense of wonder and awe to the sea creature's brief appearances, and to Wendy's initial encounters with the free-spirited Peter, who playfully eggs her on from atop the train that regularly roars across the barren, rural locale that houses her family's rundown diner. But Wendy's whimsical flourishes, from Dan Romer's incessantly rousing score to Wendy's breathy and all-too-mannered voiceover, brush awkwardly against the film's dour conception of a Neverland drained of all its magic and grandeur. Despite this, Zeitlin strives to capture an unbridled sense of childlike exuberance as kids cavort around the rugged cliffside vistas of the remote volcanic island that Peter calls home. But lacking any of the mystical features typically associated with them, Peter and his cohorts' behaviors appear overly precocious to the point of ludicrousness; it's almost as if they're performing a twee, optimistic rendition of Lord of the Flies.
Unlike Quvenzhané Wallis, whose magnetic presence imbued Beasts of the Southern Wild with a pervasive warmth and soulfulness, Mack is an unfortunately listless presence as Peter. Several years younger than Wendy and her twin brothers, Douglas (Gage Naquin) and James (Gavin Naquin), Peter appears, more often than not, like a six-year-old playing dress-up. His utter lack of charisma and gusto renders him an ill-fitting avatar for boisterous youthfulness, while his occasionally domineering, yet still unimposing, demeanor hardly makes him out to be the inspirational figure that the film ultimately wants him to be. Not only does he allow one boy to drown at one point, he chops off the hand of another to prevent him from aging.
Such events position Wendy as a twisted take on Peter Pan, but these moments are never given room to breathe. Rather, they're uniformly undermined by the film cutting back to the idyllic adventures of children, in lockstep with Zeitlin's relentless pursuit of galvanizing his audience through a gleefully idealized vision of the world. This jarring intrusion of darker elements into the story makes for bizarre clashes in tone, leaving Wendy to veer awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never to accrue any lasting emotional impact. When Peter buoyantly declares that "to grow up is a great adventure," one is left to wonder not only why the boy who never grows up would, out of nowhere, embrace this worldview, but why Wendy, or any of the other children, would want to follow such a troubling figure on that journey.
As Wendy stumbles into its final act, where adult pirates attempt to use Wendy as bait to catch the giant sea creature, it becomes even more convoluted, contradictory, and murky in what it's trying to say about growing up. Wendy eventually begins to stand up to and question Peter, both for his mistreatment of her brother and his harshness toward the adults Peter has excommunicated to an impoverished community on the outskirts of the island. But no sooner does she chide Peter than she's back on his side, cheering him on as he fights off an admittedly cleverly devised Captain Hook. It's as if she, much like the film, can't seem to settle on whether Peter's a hero or a borderline psychopath, or if childhood is a magical time to live in permanently or a necessary step on the way to adulthood. Rather than meaningfully subverting audience expectations, Wendy instead plays like a half-hearted twist on the familiar tale that ultimately doesn't change the moral at the core of countless other Peter Pan adaptations: childhood is magical, and growing up is scary but inevitable.
Cast: Tommie Lynn Milazzo, Shay Walker, Devin France, Stephanie Lynn Wilson, Ahmad Cage, Gage Naquin, Krzysztof Meyn, Gavin Naquin, Romyri Ross Director: Benh Zeitlin Screenwriter: Benh Zeitlin, Eliza Zeitlin Distributor: Searchlight Pictures Running Time: 112 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2020
Review: Philippe Garrel's The Salt of Tears Forecloses Feeling for the Sake of Fantasy
Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple without humor or wit.1.5
Two strangers, a man and a woman, meet at a bus stop in Paris. He's from the countryside and has come to the city to live out his father's dreams, which in Philippe Garrel's The Salt of Tears means taking an entrance exam for a top carpentry school. He insists on seeing her again, and they meet for coffee after his test. They want to make love but have nowhere to go; he seems upset that she can't host, and ends up taking her to his cousin's place. She isn't comfortable with all his touching, perhaps afraid that if he makes love to her right away he'll have no reason to come back. Indeed, she seems more invested in the future of their encounter, what it can become, than in the encounter itself, whereas he sees no reason for her to stay if she won't put out. By the time he kicks her out, she's already in love.
The strangers' names are Luc (Logann Antuofermo) and Djemila (Oulaya Amamra), but they might as well be called Man and Woman. That's because The Salt of Tears unfolds like an archetypal narrative of heterosexual impossibility where Luc is the everyman and Djemila is interchangeable with Geneviève (Louise Chevillotte), Luc's subsequent fling, or whatever woman comes next. He seems fond of collecting rather than replacing lovers. In the course of his brief encounters, which are nevertheless always long enough for the women to get attached and promptly burned, Luc is inoculated from heartache. His only emotional allegiance seems to be to his father (André Wilms), which tells us a thing or two about heterosexuality's peculiar tendency to forge male allegiances at the expense of women, who circulate from man to man, father to husband, husband to lover, like some sort of currency.
We've seen, and lived, this story a million times—in real life and in cinema. You, too, may have waited for a lover who never showed up after making meticulous plans for an encounter, wrapped up in the sweetest of promises, like the one Luc makes to Djemila when he says, "For the room, I'll refund the whole amount." It's then that she takes the train to see him. At a hotel, she puts on her prettiest nightgown, powdering her face in preemptive bliss. But Luc never shows up. And when Djemila goes to the hotel lobby to ask for a cigarette from the night porter (Michel Charrel), we see that the scenario, the woman who waits, is quite familiar to the man as well. "I've seen women wait for their men all their lives," he tells her.
And yet, despite so much identification, and despite the fact that some of the best films ever made, from Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage to Rohmer's A Summer's Tale, are precisely about masculine cowardliness and feminine despair, why is it that The Salt of Tears makes no room for genuine emotion to emerge? Which is peculiar given that Garrel so recently, with In the Shadow of Women and Lover for a Day, documented the impossibility of monogamy with not only a no-nonsense sensibility but also profound gravitas. Maybe the failure of the film is in Garrel's use of melodramatic music during transitional scenes, a device at odds with the detached style of the rest of the film. Maybe it's in the overtly fable-like structure that reduces the characters to not just archetypes, but cutouts. Maybe it's in the omniscient voiceover narration that punctuates the film with such disaffection and irregularity.
Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple with the same cynicism that permeates his previous work but none of the humor or wit. He thus elevates The Salt of Tears to the status of a work to be enjoyed only intellectually, as if, like Luc, he, too, had learned to foreclose feeling for the sake of some fantasy of self-preservation or pride.
Cast: Logann Antuofermo, Oulaya Amamra, André Wilms, Louise Chevillotte, Souheila Yacoub, Martin Mesnier, Teddy Chawa, Aline Belibi, Michel Charrel, Stefan Crepon, Lucie Epicureo, Alice Rahimi Director: Philippe Garrel Screenwriter: Jean-Claude Carrière, Philippe Garrel, Arlette Langmann Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: Greed Is an Unsubtle Satire of Global Capitalism's Race to the Bottom
The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it's brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.2.5
A morality tale about a piratical fast-fashion clothing entrepreneur, Greed takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie. Each time, though, it's brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness. That uneven mixture of tones, not to mention its easy and somewhat restrained shots at obvious targets, keeps writer-director Michael Winterbottom's film from achieving the Felliniesque excess it strives for.
Steve Coogan plays the discount billionaire villain as a more malevolent variation on the smarmy selfish bastard he's polished to a sheen in Winterbottom's The Trip films. Sir Richard McCreadie, nicknamed "Greedy" by the tabloids, is one of those modern wizards of financial shell games who spin fortunes out of thin air, promise, hubris, and a particularly amoral strain of bastardry. He made his billions as the "king of the high street," peddling cheap, celebrity-touted clothing through H&M and Zara-like chain stores. Now somewhat disreputable, having been hauled before a Parliamentary Select Committee to investigate the bankruptcy of one of his chains, the tangerine-tanned McCreadie is stewing in semi-exile on Mykonos.
While McCreadie plans an extravagantly tacky Gladiator-themed 60th birthday for himself featuring togas and a seemingly somnolent lion, the film skips back in time episodically to show how this grifter made his billions. Although specifically inspired by the life of Philip Green, the billionaire owner of Top Shop (and who was also investigated by Parliament for the bankruptcy of one of his brands), Greed is meant as a broader indictment of global capitalism's race to the bottom. Cutting back from the somewhat bored birthday bacchanal—Winterbottom does a good job illustrating the wallowing "is this all there is?" dullness of the ultra-rich lifestyle—the film shows McCreadie's ascent from Soho clothing-mart hustler to mercantilist wheeler and dealer leveraging a string of tatty bargain emporiums into a fortune.
Linking the flashbacks about McCreadie's up-and-comer past to his bloated and smug present is Nick (David Mitchell), a weaselly hired-gun writer researching an authorized biography and hating himself for it. Thinking he's just slapping together an ego-boosting puff piece, Nick inadvertently comes across the secret to McCreadie's success: the women hunched over sewing machines in Sri Lankan sweatshops earning $4 a day to produce his cheap togs. The Sri Lanka connection also provides the film with its only true hero: Amanda (Dinita Gohil), another of McCreadie's self-hating assistants, but the only one who ultimately does anything about the literal and metaphorical casualties generated by her boss's avarice.
With McCreadie as a big shining target, Winterbottom uses him to symbolize an especially vulgar manifestation of jet-set wheeler-dealers who imagine their wealth has freed them from limitations on taste and morality. That means giving McCreadie massive snow-white dentures, having him yell at the lion he's imported sending him storming out on the beach to yell at the Syrian refugees he thinks are spoiling the backdrop for his party. He's the kind of man who, when his ex-wife (Isla Fisher) calls him out for cheating by using his phone to look like he's reciting classical poetry by heart, shouts proudly and unironically, "BrainyQuote!"
Greed isn't a subtle satire. But, then, what's the point of going small when the target is the entire global clothing supply chain, as well as the consumerism and celebrity worship ("adding a bit of sparkle to a $10 party dress," as McCreadie puts it)? Despite his deft ability to authentically inhabit numerous geographical spaces without condescension (the scenes in Sri Lanka feel particularly organic), Winterbottom often has a harder time summoning the kind of deep, gut-level emotions needed to drive home an angry, issue-oriented comedy of this kind. But even though he isn't able to balance buffoonery and outrage as effectively as Steven Soderbergh did with his Panama Papers satire The Laundromat, Winterbottom at least knew to pick a big enough target that it would be nearly impossible to miss.
Cast: Steve Coogan, Isla Fisher, Shirley Henderson, David Mitchell, Asa Butterfield, Dinita Gohil, Sophie Cookson Director: Michael Winterbottom Screenwriter: Michael Winterbottom Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics Running Time: 104 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: With Saint Frances, the Rise of the of the Abortion Comedy Continues
It has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.2.5
Even for American liberals, abortion has long been a touchy subject. "Legal but rare" is the watchword of cautious Democratic candidates, and popular film has long preferred to romanticize the independent women who make the brave choice not to terminate a pregnancy (see Juno). With Gillian Robespierre's Obvious Child and, now, Alex Thompson's Saint Frances, we may be seeing the emergence of something like the abortion comedy. The very concept of such a thing is probably enough to make a heartland conservative retch, which Thompson and his screenwriter and lead actress, Kelly O'Sullivan, no doubt count on.
Bridget (O'Sullivan) is a white Chicagoland millennial who, like so many of her generation, finds herself still living the life of a twentysomething at the age of 34. Messy and a little irresponsible—qualities that could be largely chalked up to the inert decade of post-college poverty she's endured—she struggles to admit in conversation with her ostensible peers that she works as a server at a greasy diner. In the film's opening scene, a tidy encapsulation of the tragicomedy of being an underachieving hanger-on in bougie social circles, she's brought to the verge of tears when a yuppie dude she's chatting with loses interest in her after her age and employment come up. She immediately pounces on Jace (Max Lipchitz), the next guy who talks to her, after he casually reveals that he, too, works as a waiter.
Fortunately, Jace turns out to be an indefatigably cheerful and supportive 26-year-old who comes across as perhaps a tad too perfect until the precise moment in Saint Frances that the filmmakers need him to come off more like a Wrigleyville bro. At some point during their initial hook-up, Bridget gets her period, and the couple wakes up fairly covered in blood. (Bridget's nigh-constant unexpected vaginal bleeding and the stains it leaves will serve as both metaphor and punchline throughout the film, and it works better than you may think.) Amused but unphased by the incident, Jace will also prove to be a supportive partner when Bridget chooses to terminate her accidental pregnancy later in the film, even though Bridget remains openly uncertain about whether or not they're actually dating.
In the wake of her abortion, Bridget is taken on as a nanny for Maya and Annie (Charin Alvarez and Lily Mojekwu), a mixed-race lesbian couple who need someone to look after their unruly daughter, Frances (Ramona Edith Williams), while Maya cares for their newborn. Frances is a self-possessed kindergartner whose dialogue sometimes drifts into "kids say the darnedest things" terrain, even though it can be funny ("My guitar class is a patriarchy," she proclaims at one point). But O'Sullivan's screenplay doesn't overly sentimentalize childhood—or motherhood for that matter. One important subplot involves Bridget's mother's (Mary Beth Fisher) reminiscing that she sometimes fantasized about bashing the infant Bridget's head against the wall, a revelation that helps Maya through her post-partum depression.
Maya and Annie live in Evanston, the Chicago suburb where Northwestern University is located, and Bridget counts as an alumna of sorts, though in conversation she emphasizes that she was only there for a year. She clearly views the town as the epicenter of her shame; underlining this is that the couple's next-door neighbor turns out to be Cheryl (Rebekah Ward), an insufferable snob who Bridget knew in college, whose "lean in" brand of upper-class feminism doesn't preclude her from treating her erstwhile peer like an all-purpose servant. Frances's smarmy guitar teacher, Isaac (Jim True-Frost), also embodies the moral ickiness of the privileged, as he takes advantage of Bridget's foolhardy crush on him.
Bridget's relationship with Frances and her parents changes her, but the film isn't making the point that she learns the majesty of child-rearing and the awesome responsibility of parenthood. It's that Bridget finds strength in intersectional and intergenerational solidarity, emerging from the isolating cell she's built herself out of quiet self-shame. If that approach sounds academic, it's true that at times Saint Frances is staged too much like dramatic enactment of feminist principles—a public confrontation with an anti-public-breast-feeding woman ends up feeling like an after-school special about conflict mediation—but it has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.
Cast: Kelly O'Sullivan, Charin Alvarez, Lily Mojekwu, Max Lipchitz, Jim True-Frost, Ramona Edith Williams, Mary Beth Fisher, Francis Guinan, Rebecca Spence, Rebekah Ward Director: Alex Thompson Screenwriter: Kelly O'Sullivan Distributor: Oscilloscope Laboratories Running Time: 106 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Disappearance at Clifton Hill Is a Well-Sustained Trick of a Thriller
What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin's ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.2.5
Throughout Disappearance at Clifton Hill, director Albert Shin nurtures an atmosphere of lingering evil, of innocence defiled, that shames the ludicrous theatrics of Andy Muschietti's similarly themed It movies. Set in Niagara Falls, Ontario, the film opens with its finest sequence, in which a young girl, Abby (Mikayla Radan), runs into a frightened boy in the woods. One of the boy's eyes has been gauged out, and he wears a bloodied white bandage over it. (Perversely, the square shape of the bandage and the red of the coagulated blood make it seem as if he's wearing a broken pair of 3D glasses.) The boy gestures to Abby to keep quiet, and soon we see pursuers at the top of the hill above the children.
Much of this scene is staged without a score, and this silence—a refreshing reprieve from the tropes of more obviously hyperkinetic thrillers—informs Shin's lush compositions with dread and anguish. Just a moment prior, Abby was fishing with her parents (Tim Beresford and Janet Porter) and sister, Laure (Addison Tymec), so we feel the shattering of her sense of normalcy. The boy is soon scooped up, beaten, and thrown in the trunk of a car, never to be seen again.
Years later, the thirtyish Abby (now played by Tuppence Middleton) has yet to settle into herself, as she's a loner who haunts the nearly abandoned motel that her deceased mom used to run. By contrast, Laure (Hannah Gross) has married a sensible man (Noah Reid) and has a sensible job as a security manager at the local casino, which looms above the town surrounding Niagara Falls like an all-seeing tower. The casino, run by the all-controlling Lake family, is in the process of acquiring the sisters' motel. Looking through old pictures, Abby finds a shot that was taken the day she ran into the kidnapped boy, and she becomes obsessed with solving the case, descending into the underworld of her small, foreboding community.
Shin and co-screenwriter James Schultz's plot, and there's quite a bit of it, is the stuff of old-fashioned pulp. But what distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Shin's ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details. A local conspiracy theorist, Walter (David Cronenberg), is introduced bobbing up and down in the water behind Abby as she investigates the site of the kidnapping, emerging in a wet suit from a dive to look for potential valuables. It's a hell of entrance to accord a legendary filmmaker moonlighting in your production, and it affirms the film's unease, the sense it imparts of everyone watching everyone else.
When Abby's sleuthing leads her to a pair of married magicians, the Moulins (Marie-Josée Croze and Paulino Nunes), they memorably turn the tables on her smugness, using sleights of hand to intimidate her and illustrate the elusiveness of certainty. And one of Shin's greatest flourishes is also his subtlest: As Abby surveys the hill where the boy was taken in the film's opening scene, a bike coasts across the road on top, echoing the movement of the kidnappers' car decades prior, suggesting the ongoing reverberations of atrocities.
Shin does under-serve one tradition of the mystery thriller: the unreliable protagonist. Abby is understood to be a habitual liar, a fabulist who's either a con woman or a person wrestling with issues of encroaching insanity. Given the luridness of the boy's disappearance, and the way it conveniently meshes with Abby's unresolved issues, the notion of the mystery as a terrible, self-entrapping fabrication is credible and potentially revealing and terrifying—suggesting the wrenching plight of the doomed investigator at the heart of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. But for Shin, Abby's fragile mental state is ultimately a red herring, relegating Abby to an audience-orienting compass rather than a true figure of tragedy. Which is to say that Disappearance at Clifton Hill isn't quite a major thriller, but rather a well-sustained trick.
Cast: Tuppence Middleton, Hannah Gross, Marie-Josée Croze, Paulino Nunes, Elizabeth Saunders, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Eric Johnson, David Cronenberg, Andy McQueen, Noah Reid, Dan Lett, Tim Beresford, Mikayla Radan Director: Albert Shin Screenwriter: James Schultz, Albert Shin Distributor: IFC Midnight Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: With Onward, Pixar Forsakes Imagination for Familiarity
While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking.2
Pixar specializes in tales of people, animals, and artificial intelligence coping with loss: of a spouse (Up), of human contact (the Toy Story films), of love (WALL-E). But like a lot of Hollywood dream-workers, Pixar's storytellers also believe in believing. And faith in something, anything, is essential to the studio's latest feature, Onward, as the heroes of this comic fantasy are two teenage elves who go searching for the magical gem—and the self-assurance—needed to briefly resurrect their departed and sorely missed father.
Ian and Barley Lightfoot's (Tom Holland and Chris Pratt) 24-hour quest is lively and sometimes funny but seldom surprising. Writer-director Dan Scanlon and co-scripters Jason Headley and Keith Bunin have assembled a story from spare parts of various adventure and sword-and-sorcery flicks, and topped it with a sentimental coda about the value of a male role model. Mychael Danna and Jeff Danna's drippy score pleads for tears, but viewers who sniffle are more likely to have been moved by personal associations than the film's emotional heft.
Blue-haired, pointy-eared Ian and Barley live with their widowed mom, Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), in a neighborhood that's a cross between Tolkien's Shire and a near-contemporary California suburb. A prologue explains that "long ago the world was filled with magic," but enchantment succumbed to a diabolical adversary: science. The invention of the light bulb is presented as this toontown's fall from grace. What's left is a Zootopia-like cosmos where such mythic creatures as centaurs, mermaids, cyclopses, and, of course, elves live together in stultifying ordinariness. Most stultified of all is Ian, who meekly accepts the torments of high school. He's nearly the opposite of brash older brother Barley, a true believer in magic who crusades to preserve the old ways and is devoted to a mystical role-playing game he insists is based on the world as it used to be. (A few of the film's supporting characters appear by courtesy of Wizards of the Coast, the game company that owns Dungeons & Dragons.)
It's Ian's 16th birthday, so Laurel retrieves a gift left by the boys' father, who died before the younger one was born. The package contains a magical staff and instructions on how to revive a dead soul, if only for 24 hours. It turns out that Ian has an aptitude for incantations but lacks knowledge and, crucially, confidence. He casts a spell that succeeds but only halfway, as it summons just Dad's lower half. A mysterious crystal could finish the job, so the brothers hit the road in Barley's beat-up but vaguely magical van with a gear shift that reads "onward." Barley is certain that his role-playing game can direct them to their shadowy destination.
Like most quest sagas, Onward is an episodic one, but it doesn't make most of its pitstops especially memorable. The supporting characters are few and most are easily forgotten, save for a once-terrifying but now-domesticated manticore, Corey (Octavia Spencer), and Mom's cop boyfriend, Colt Bronco (Mel Rodriguez), who may be a centaur but strikes his potential stepsons as embarrassingly bourgeois. Both join a frantic Laurel on her sons' trail.
Onward doesn't have a distinctive visual style, but it does showcase Pixar's trademark mastery of depth, light, and shadow. As in Scanlon's Monsters University, the fanciful and the everyday are well harmonized. That's still a neat trick, but it's no more novel than Ian and Barley's experiences. Animated features often borrow from other films, in part to keep the grown-ups in the crowd interested, but the way Onward recalls at various points The Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Ghostbusters feels perfunctory and uninspired. And it all leads to a moral that's at least as hoary as that of The Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan. While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking. That you can accomplish whatever you believe you can is a routine movie message, but it can feel magical when presented with more imagination than Onward ever musters.
Cast: Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer, Ali Wong, Lena Waithe, Mel Rodriguez, Tracey Ullman, Wilmer Valderrama, Kyle Bornheimer, John Ratzenberger Director: Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, Keith Bunin Screenwriter: Dan Scanlon Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Running Time: 103 min Rating: PG Year: 2020
Interview: Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson on Working Together on Ordinary Love
It's to the immense credit of these two great actors that Ordinary Love is so inspiring.
It's to the immense credit of Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson that Ordinary Love is so inspiring. As Joan and Tom, the couple at the center of Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn's drama about a couple tested by the wife's breast cancer diagnosis, their naturalism and comfort never waver while the characters stare down the disease.
Despite having never collaborated prior to their brief rehearsals for the film, these two celebrated actors settle authentically into the quiet dignity of longstanding companionate affection. Both performances hum with grace notes as the actors imbue even the most quotidian moments with compassion and wisdom. Ordinary Love speaks to how Joan and Tom maintain the strength of their relationship in spite of cancer, not because of it.
The bond that appears effortless on screen, however, was quite effortful, as I learned when talking to the two actors following the film's limited release. The organic chemistry was evident between Manville and Neeson, who both spoke softly yet passionately about their approach to forging the connection at the heart of Ordinary Love. The two performers came to the film with storied careers and full lives, both of which contributed to how they approached bringing Tom and Joan's tender marriage to life.
Lesley, you've said that Liam was the big draw for you to board this project. I'm curious, to start, what's your favorite of his performances and why?
Lesley Manville: Oh my gosh! I've got to say the right thing here. I wish I'd have seen you [to Neeson] on stage. I never have. Schindler's List, I think, really is up there. Had the [Ordinary Love] script been awful, then I wouldn't have wanted to do it despite Liam. But the script was great, and they said Liam was going to do it, so I said it sounded like a good one, really.
Liam, do you have a favorite performance of hers?
Liam Neeson: I've seen Lesley in a couple of the Mike Leigh films. She struck me, and I mean this as a compliment, as like, "Oh, that's someone who just walked in off the street and is playing this." She was so natural and so great as an actress. And I did see her on stage, I thought she was wonderful.
Right away, we can sense such a shared history of the couple. Surely some of it came from the script itself, but how did you collaborate to ensure you were on the same page about where Tom and Joan have been?
Manville: Sometimes it's hard to manufacture that or try to cook it up. I guess the casting of the two of us was pretty good and a fluke to some degree. We could have not got on. The warmth we have for each other is a bonus. We couldn't predict that until we'd met. We're quite similar as actors, really, we see what's on the page and try to make it as truthful as possible. But day one, we were shooting scenes of them on the sofa, watching telly, not doing much, 30-plus-year relationship…you just have to plow in and do it. We've both lived a fair amount—
Neeson: We didn't really "plan" anything. There's a saying, "If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage." That foundation stone of the script was beautiful.
Was there a rehearsal period, or did you just jump right in?
Manville: We had a couple of afternoons in New York, didn't we?
Neeson: Yeah, we did.
Manville: Liam lives here, and I was doing a play. Lisa and Glenn, our directors, came over and we spent a few afternoons mostly eating quite nice lunches.
Neeson: Yeah, those were nice lunches. But we certainly didn't "rehearse" rehearse it, did we?
Were they more like chemistry sessions?
Neeson: Yeah, just smelling each other, really!
Liam, you've said that part of what drew you to the film was the ability to play someone like yourself, a nice Northern Irish man. Is it easier or harder to play something that's less like a character and more like yourself?
Neeson: I think if you're playing a character that's not you, i.e. thinking of doing accents, there's a process of work you have. Be it an American accent or a German accent, there's a process. Then I try to do that and ignore it. So, whatever comes out of my mouth comes out. If a few Irish words come out, if it's supposed to be German, I don't care. You can fix it a little bit in an ADR department, but I hate doing a scene with a dialect coach there.
I have to tell you a funny story. I did this film Widows with Viola Davis a couple years ago. And myself and Colin Farrell have to be from Chicago. I met with this lovely lady, the dialect coach. My first scene was in a shower, right, and into the bathroom comes Viola with a little drink [mimes a shot glass] for her and I, it's a whole process we do before I do a heist job. It's a little ritual we do, and she has a dog, a tiny wee thing. When we finish the scene, I'm supposed to go "rawr-rawr" to the dog. I did this a couple of times, and the dialect coach literally ran in and says, "Liam, you're doing the dog sound wrong, accent wise! It should be 'woof-woof,' use the back of your throat." I thought, "She's pulling my leg! The dog's that size [puts hand barely above the ground]." But she meant it.
Manville: Oh dear, she needs to take a check, doesn't she?
Neeson: But being the professional I was, I went "woof-woof."
When you're playing characters who are "ordinary" or "normal," as the final and working titles for the film have suggested, do you start with yourself and fit into the character? Or is the character the starting point and you invest little pieces of yourself into it?
Manville: Certainly, for me, there's a lot about Joan that's not a million miles away from me, although there are obvious differences. I just thought, there's this woman, they've had this tragedy in their lives, they've lost their daughter, getting on with things, their lives have reduced down to this co-dependent small existence—it's all about the ordinary stuff. And then you've just got to layer onto that the fact that this horrible diagnosis happens. But, in a way, I felt that took care of itself because I—touch of wood [knocks on the wood frame of her chair]—have not been through breast cancer. I've had a sister who did, but the women in the [hospital] scenes, the technicians and the surgeons were all real, and they were very helpful. They were wonderful women, and they helped me hugely just walking me through it. I just thought, "There's Joan, and you've just got to be Joan as these other things are happening to her." Of course, all bits of your own experiences and life stuff comes out. But it's almost not conscious. I've had a lot of life—a lot of ups, a lot of downs, as has everybody. That's nothing exceptional. Nothing more different than the average person. Our job is we lock those feelings away somewhere inside of us, and they're there to call upon if we need to.
Neeson: Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. James Cagney used to have an expression when an ingénue would ask him how to do a scene. He famously said, "You walk in the room, plant your feet and speak the truth." That was always his answer. It's true.
There's a moment during chemo where Joan makes a remark that she thought the experience would change her more but feels relatively the same. Lesley, I'm curious, do you believe her at that moment?
Manville: Yeah, because you're always you, no matter what's happening. I guess that kind of statement is probably quite particular to people who go through a big health thing like that. You expect it's going to really alter you, shift you, but actually it's still you underneath. Because it's just you with this epic thing happening to you. Nevertheless, it's you.
Is it tough as an actor to depict that kind of stasis while also bringing some variation?
Manville: I think there's enough in the scenes. A good point in the film is when they [Tom and Joan] are having a row about nothing—which color pill. But it's bound to happen. They're a great couple, yet something gives way because that's human. I felt that was quite well charted throughout the script.
We don't really get a similar moment of verbal reflection from Tom. Do you think the same sentiment of feeling unchanged might apply to him?
Neeson: There's one scene where he visits their daughter's grave and talks about how scared he is. And I think he is. But he's "man" enough to put up a kind of front that everything's going to be okay, and I think he really believes that too. But he's terrified that he might lose his life partner. It might happen. Without getting too heavy about it, I know Lesley has experienced loss in her family. I've had four members of my family die. It was wrenching for the family—very, very wrenching. It's a horrible disease. Lesley was saying to me last night, in America alone, one in eight women are going to suffer some form of breast cancer, which is an astronomical number. We are all one degree of separation from someone who has it.
Manville: But the survival rate is very impressive now.
It's nice that the film is about more than just the struggle of the disease but how life continues in spite of it. We even start the film more or less where we ended it in the calendar year.
Neeson: Just that minutiae of life. Going to a grocery store. You still have to eat! Save up your coupons, that minutiae, I love that it comes across the script.
You've both worked with some incredible directors in your time. Is there anything in particular that you took from them for Ordinary Love, or do you just clear out your memory in order to execute what Lisa and Glenn want?
Neeson: I think Lesley said in an earlier interview—forgive me for jumping in, darling—that you absorb it through osmosis if you work with really good people. And bad people too. You just allow it to come out. You're not, "What was it Martin Scorsese said? I must remember that. Or Steven Spielberg"—I don't do that.
Manville: Also, they get a lot from you too. A lot of people think directors are like dictators. If they employ two actors like us, they're expecting a collaboration of some sort. Hopefully they get something from us too.
In this more recent stage of your career, you've each had roles that have exploded and become beloved by the Internet—Liam with Taken, Lesley with Phantom Thread. How do you all react to something like that making such a big splash where people turn your work into a meme?
Manville: I didn't know what a meme was until quite recently. Somebody told me I was a meme.
Neeson: What is it? I honestly don't know. I've heard the word, but I don't know what it means.
Manville: They just take a bit of a performance…
Yes, snippets of a performance and use it as a response to something else. Recontextualized.
Neeson: Oh, I see. Like "release the kraken."
Or "I have a very particular set of skills" from Taken. I see that, and I see bits of Cyril a lot online.
Manville: Apparently, I'm a bit of a gay icon. So that's new. Never thought I'd reach my age and be that. But I'll take it!
Is that just a nice thing to keep in the back of your head? Does it enter into the process at all?
Manville: No! Listen, I think there's a myth that actors, however successful they are, wander around in some sort of successful bubble. You're just not! You're having your life like everyone else. I understand that our jobs are quite exceptional, and other people view our jobs with some kind of halo over them. But personally speaking, when I'm working, I'm working. The rest of my life is incredibly regular.
Review: The Call of the Wild Provides a Resonant Take on a Classic
The film's avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism.3
The latest cinematic adaptation of Jack London's The Call of the Wild is a surprisingly thrilling and emotionally moving adventure film. Its surprises come not only from director Chris Sanders and screenwriter Michael Green's dramatic overhaul of the classic 1903 novel for family audiences, but also from the way their revisions make London's story richer and more resonant, rather than diluted and saccharine.
It's worth recalling that London's vision of man and nature in The Call of the Wild is anything but romantic; indeed, at times it's literally dog eat dog. In his story, the imposing yet spoiled Buck, a St. Bernard and Scotch Collie mix, is kidnapped from his wealthy master's California manor and sold to dealers in Yukon Territory, where the Gold Rush has created high demand for sledding dogs. Buck's initiation into the culture of the Northlands involves severe beatings at the hands of his masters, brutal rivalries with fellow sledding dogs, harsh exposure to unforgiving elements, and an unrelenting work regimen that allows for little rest, renewal, or indolence. What London depicts is nothing less than a Darwinian world where survival forbids weakness of body and spirit, and where survivors can ill-afford pity or remorse.
Not much of that vision remains in Sanders and Green's adaptation. Buck is still kidnapped from his home and sold to dog traders, but his subjugation is reduced from repeated, will-breaking abuse to a single hit. In this Call of the Wild, dogs never maul one another to death, a regular occurrence in London's novel. And minus one or two exceptions, the human world of the story has now become uplifting and communal rather than bitter and cutthroat. In the first half of the film, Buck's sledding masters are an adorable husband-and-wife team (Omar Sy and Cara Gee) in place of a rough pair of mail deliverers, and in the second half, John Thornton (Harrison Ford), Buck's last and most beloved master, isn't revealed to be hardened treasure-seeker, but a grieving man who finds redemption in the great outdoors.
The film's avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism and by its deepening of the man-dog bond that forms the heart of London's story. This Call of the Wild relies heavily on a CGI Buck (and other virtual beasts) to create complex choreographed movement in labyrinthine tracking shots that would be impossible to execute with real animals. One might expect the artifice of even the most convincing CGI to undermine Buck's palpable presence, as well as the script's frequent praises to the glory of nature, yet the film's special-effects team has imbued the animal with a multi-layered personality, as displayed in joyously detailed, if more than slightly anthropomorphic, expressions and gestures. And the integration of Buck and other CGI creations into believable, immersive environments is buttressed by the cinematography of Janusz Kamiński, who lenses everything from a quiet meadow to an epic avalanche with lush vibrancy.
In the film's first half, human concerns take a backseat to Buck's education as he adapts to the dangerous world of the Northlands, but in the second half the emergence of Ford as Buck's best friend adds to the film a poignant human dimension. Thornton rescues Buck from a trio of inept, brutish, and greedy city slickers (Dan Stevens, Karen Gillan, and Colin Woodell), and Buck in turn saves Thornton from misery and drunkenness as he pines away for his late son and ruined marriage while living alone on the outskirts of civilization.
This is a welcome change from London's depiction of Thornton, who possesses on the page a kind heart but not much else in the way of compelling characteristics; the summit of his relationship with Buck occurs when he stakes and wins a fortune betting on Buck's ability to drag a half ton of cargo. In this film version, Thornton and Buck's relationship grows as they travel the remotest reaches of wilderness where Thornton regains his sense of wonder and Buck draws closer to the feral origins of his wolf-like brethren and ancestors. Ford lends gruff vulnerability and gravity to Thornton in scenes that might have tipped over into idyllic cheese given just a few false moves, and his narration throughout the film forms a sort of avuncular bass line to the proceedings lest they become too cloying or cute.
A paradox exists in The Call of the Wild, which is indebted to advanced technological fakery but touts the supremacy of nature and natural instincts. Yet there's a sincerity and lack of pretense to the film that transcends this paradox and evokes the sublime.
Cast: Harrison Ford, Dan Stevens, Omar Sy, Karen Gillan, Bradley Whitford, Colin Woodell, Cara Gee, Scott MacDonald, Terry Notary Director: Chris Sanders Screenwriter: Michael Green Distributor: 20th Century Studios Running Time: 100 min Rating: PG Year: 2020 Buy: Book
Review: Daniel Roher's Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band
Robertson's sadness was more fulsomely evoked by Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz.2.5
Toward the end of the 1960s, with the Vietnam War raging and the civil rights movement and the counterculture in bloom, art was about taking political and aesthetic sides. As such, one can understand how Bob Dylan's electric guitar could be met with violent boos, as it signified a crossing of the bridge over into the complacent mainstream, to which folk music was supposed to represent a marked resistance. In this context, one can also appreciate the daring of the Band, whose music offered beautiful and melancholic examinations of heritage that refuted easy generational demonizing, while blending blues, rock, and folk together to create a slipstream of American memory—Americana in other words. Like Dylan, the Band, who backed him on his electric tour, believed that art shouldn't be reduced to editorial battle hymns. Complicating matters of identity even further, the prime architects of Americana are mostly Canadian. Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson were all from Ontario, while Levon Helm hailed from Arkansas.
Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band is concerned mostly with celebrating the Band's early rise and influence on American culture, as well as their sense of connecting the past and present together through empathetic lyrics. Holding court over the film is Robertson, the dapper and charismatic songwriter and guitarist who looks and sounds every inch like the classic-rock elder statesman. Airing sentiments from his memoir, Testimony, Robertson mentions his mixed heritage as a citizen of the Six Nations of Grand River reservation who also had Jewish gangster relatives, and who moved to Canada at a formative age. Richardson learned his first chords on the reservation, and began writing songs professionally at 15, after he met Ronnie Hawkins and Helm. Hawkins's group would over several permutations become the Band, whose musical identity crystallizes during their collaboration with Dylan.
Director Daniel Roher's glancing treatment of Hawkins, a vivid presence who also performed on Martin Scorsese's Band concert film The Last Waltz, signifies that Once Were Brothers is going to steer clear of controversy. Was Hawkins bitter to have his band usurped by the teenage prodigy Robertson? Even if he wasn't, such feelings merit exploration, though here they're left hanging. The documentary's title is all too apropos, as this is Robertson's experience of the Band, rather than a collective exploration of their rise and fall. To be fair, Danko, Manuel, and Helm are all deceased, the former two dying far too young, though Hudson perhaps pointedly refused to participate in this project—another event that Roher fails to examine. And the big conflict at the center of this story—Robertson's intense, eventually contentious relationship with Helm—is broached only in an obligatory fashion.
Although the fact that Robertson and Hudson are the only Band members left standing adds credence to the former's view of things, as he maintains that much of the group succumbed to drugs and booze, leaving him to write most of the music and to shepherd their joint career as long as he could. (Robertson's wife, Dominique, offers disturbing accounts of the car crashes that routinely occurred out of drunk and drugged driving.) Helm, however, insisted that the Band's collective influence on musical arrangements merited a bigger slice of royalties all around. Robertson and various other talking heads remind us of these grievances, though Roher quickly pushes on to the next plot point. Robertson is a magnificent musician and subject, but his devotion to his side of the story renders him suspicious—a cultivator of brand.
For these omissions and elisions, Once Were Brothers is a slim, if ultimately enjoyable, rock testimony. The highlight is the archival footage of the Band practicing and recording, including a privileged moment with Dylan after one of the controversial electric concerts, as well as interludes at the pink house in Woodstock where they recorded their defining Music from Big Pink, an album that included their classic "The Weight," which Dennis Hopper would turn into a master boomer anthem in Easy Rider. Moments of the Band at play affirm Robertson's idea of their early days as a kind of lost utopia, and his present-day nostalgia is cagey yet undeniably moving. Yet Robertson's sadness, his sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction, was more fulsomely evoked by Scorsese in The Last Waltz, as he looked at the Band and saw an entire group, a dying unit, rather than Robbie Robertson and the other guys.
Director: Daniel Roher Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 100 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Come and See Is an Unforgettable Fever Dream of War's Surreality
It suggests that a war's horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind.4
War movies largely condition us to look at warfare from a top-down perspective. Rarely do they keep us totally locked out of the commander's map room, the bunker where the top brass exposit backstory, outline goals, or lay out geography for the viewer. Both characters and audience tend to know what's at stake at all times. Not so in Elem Klimov's 1985 film Come and See, in which relentless bombings and frenetic camerawork shatter the Belarusian countryside into an incoherent, fabulistic geography, and the invading Germans appear to coalesce out of the fog on the horizon like menacing apparitions.
We experience the German invasion of Belarus through Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko), a teenager who joins the local partisan militia after discovering a rifle buried in the sand. The early scene in which he departs from his mother and sisters presents a disconcerting, even alienating complex of emotions: the histrionic panic of his mother (Tatyana Shestakova), who alternately embraces and rails against him; the hardened indifference of the soldiers who've come to retrieve him; and the jejune oblviousness of Floyria himself, who mugs at his younger siblings to mock his mother's concerns. Eager to participate alongside the unit of considerably more weathered men, Flyora feels emasculated when he's forced to remain behind in the partisans' forest encampment with Glasha (Olga Mironova), a local girl implicitly attached to the militia unit because she's sleeping with its commander, Kosach (Liubomiras Laucevicius).
Glasha first takes on nymph-like qualities in Flyora's adolescent imagination, appearing in hazy close-ups that emphasize her blue eyes and the verdant wooded backdrop. This deceptive idyllic disintegrates, however, when the Germans bomb and storm the empty camp, kicking up clouds of dirt and smoke that never seem to fully leave the screen for the rest of Come and See's duration. The two teenagers flee, pushing through the muck of the now-fatal landscape, only to discover more horrors waiting for them back in Flyora's village.
The horrors lurking in the mists of a muggy Eastern European spring may not be what Carl von Clausewitz had in mind when he coined the phrase "the fog of war," but Klimov's masterpiece suggests a redefinition of the term, the evocative phrase signifying the incomprehensible terror of war rather than its tactical incalculables. Come and See's frames are often choked with this fog—watching the film, one almost expects to see condensation on the screen's surface—and Klimov fills the soundtrack with a kind of audio fog: the droning of bombers and surveillance planes, the whine of prolonged eardrum-ringing, an ambient and sparse score by Oleg Yanchenko. It's a cinematic simulacrum of the overwhelming, discombobulating sensory experience of war that would have an influence on virtually every war movie made after it.
And yet, in a crucial sense, there's hardly a more clear-sighted or realistic fiction film about World War II. Klimov refuses to sanitize or sentimentalize the conflict that in his native language is known as the Great Patriotic War. While fleeing back into the woods with Flyora, Glasha momentarily glimpses a heap of bodies, Flyora's family and neighbors, piled on the edge of the village where tendrils of smoke still waft from their chimneys. Despite the fleeting nature of her glance, the image sticks with the viewer, its horror reverberating throughout the film because Klimov doesn't give it redemptive or revelatory power. There's no transcendent truth, no noble human dignity to be dug up from the mass graves of the Holocaust.
Florya and Glasha eventually separate, Flyora joining the surviving men to scour the countryside for food, only to find himself the survivor of a series of atrocities perpetrated by the Germans. A full third of the Nazis' innocent victims were killed in mass executions on the Eastern Front—both by specially assigned SS troops and the regular Wehrmacht (though the myth of a "clean Wehrmacht" lives on to this day). As the end titles of Come and See inform the audience, 628 Belarusian villages were extinguished in the Nazis' genocidal quest for Lebensraum, so-called "living space" for the German Volk. As wide-eyed witness to a portion of this monstrous deed, Flyora's face often fills the film's narrow 4:3 frame—scorched, bloodied, and sooty, trembling with horror at the inhumanity he's seen.
Like his forbears of Soviet montage, Klimov uses a cast stocked with nonprofessionals like Kravchenko, and he doesn't shirk from having them address the camera directly with their gaze. In Klimov's hands, as in Eisenstein's, such shots feel like a call to action, a demand to recognize the humanity at stake in the struggle against fascism. Klimov counterbalances his film's apocalyptic hopelessness with a righteous rage on behalf of the Holocaust's real victims. The film, whose original title was Kill Hitler, takes as its heart-shattering climax a hallucinatory montage of documentary footage that imagines a world without the Nazi leader.
Come and See bears comparison to Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, which likewise narrates a young boy's conscription into the irregular Russian resistance to German invasion. But whereas Tarkovsky embellishes his vision of a war-torn fairy-tale forest in the direction of moody expressionism, Klimov goes surreal. Attempting to make off with a stolen cow across an open field—in order to feed starving survivors hidden in the woods—Flyoria is blindsided by a German machine-gun attack. Pink tracers dart across the fog-saturated frame, a dreamlike image at once unreal and deadly. Taking cover behind his felled cow, Flyoria awakes in the empty field, now absolutely still, with the mangled animal corpse as his pillow.
As an art form, surrealism was fascinated by the capacity for violence and disorder lurking in the psyche. Without betraying the real—by, in fact, remaining more faithful to it than most fictional remembrances of WWI have been—Come and See suggests that the war's horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind. For Klimov, the dreamscapes of war realized surrealism's oneiric brutality.
Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas, Jüri Lumiste, Viktors Lorencs, Evgeniy Tilicheev Director: Elem Klimov Screenwriter: Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov Distributor: Janus Films Running Time: 142 min Rating: NR Year: 1985
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System Specs
Website ordered to remove Xbox 720 leaked document
A website carrying the leaked document allegedly pertaining to the specs and features of the next Xbox has been ordered to remove it by Microsoft.
System Specs headlines
StarCraft II system specs revealed by Blizzard
Blizzard's confirmed StarCraft II's system specs to Big Download. Can you run it?
Aliens Vs Predator gets system specs
Rebellion's confirmed system requirements for the PC edition of Aliens Vs Predator. Doesn't look too mental, which is nice.
Bad Company 2 and BF1943 get system specs
Unflustered by the fact Bad Company 2's beta's been pushed into 2010, DICE just released system specs for both the shooter sequel and Battlefield 1943. And here they are: Minimum Frostbite PC Specifications for BFBC2 & BF1943 Processor: Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz Main memory: 2GB Graphics card: GeForce 7800 GT / ATI X1900 Graphics […]
Mass Effect 2 PC gets system specs, basic DRM confirmed
BioWare just confirmed system specs for ME2, as well as detailing what sounds to be a very basic DRM check on the disc version. The good stuff: Digital Rights Management (DRM) – The boxed/retail PC version of Mass Effect 2 will use only a basic disk check and it will not require online authentication. This […]
Need for Speed: Shift gets system specs
Need for Speed: Shift will probably run on your PC, from the look of the system specs EA put out overnight. Required – Internet Connection OS – Windows XP (Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista (Service Pack 1) / Windows 7 Processor – Intel Core™2 Duo 1.6 GHz or faster Memory – XP: 1 GB […]
Wolfenstein system specs released
Raven's Wolfenstein update just got system requirements, courtesy of an id poster on the game's boards. And here they are. We're still waiting for a solid date, but you should be playing this next month at the latest. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP or Windows Vista(R) (Windows 95/98/ME/2000 are unsupported) Microsoft DirectX(R) 9.0c (included & […]
Batman: Arkham Asylum PC specs released
The PC specs for Batman: Arkham Asylum have been released via the Eidos forums. It's not for slouches, from the look of it. Minimum: CPU: Intel single core 3 Ghz or AMD equivalent Memory: XP = 1 GB, Vista = 2GB GPU: Shader Model 3 NVidia 6600 or ATI 1300 or higher Recommended: CPU: Pentium […]
Valve shows company PC system specs
This is amazingly handy. Valve's posted system specs of the PCs it uses in the office, so if you're looking to upgrade Valve-style, now you know how. It's all about quad-cores and bastard-hard GPUs, obviously. And 12Gb of RAM. Worry about your bank balance through the link.
Sims 3 specs released for both desk and lap
EA's put out the minimum specs for Sims 3 for XP and Vista, desktop and laptop. Nothing like thoroughness. Looks as though it's not going to bother you, to be honest. If it does, you might want to think about upgrading. Get them from Gaming Today.
Blizzard releases Wrath of the Lich King system specs
And they're not so heavy, which is nice. Here you are: PC System Requirements OS: Windows XP (Service Pack 3), Windows Vista (Service Pack 1) Processor: Minimum: Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500+ Recommended: Dual-core processor, such as the Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 Memory: Minimum: 512 MB […]
GTA IV PC gets recommended specs
The official Games for Windows site's posted recommended specs for the PC version of GTA IV, and looking at them, you may well have a computer able to handle it. OS: Windows XP SP2 Processor: Dual core processor (Intel Pentium D or better) RAM: 2GB Hard Drive: 18GB free hard disk space Video Card: 512MB […]
Mirror's Edge system specs should be doable
GamerCyte's posted minimum PC specs for Mirror's Edge, and there's nothing in there to make your brain bleed. Quite restrained, in fact. OS: Windows XP or Vista CPU: Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz / Athlon 64 2800+ RAM: 1GB GFX card: GeForce 6 Series with 256MB VRAM or higher, or ATI X1650 (or HD2400) Game's […]
Crysis: Warhead system specs published
The US EA Store's published Crysis: Warhead's system specs as part of the game's pre-order campaign. It really does look fine. After the link. Release dates for both the US and Europe were announced this afternoon, in case you missed them.
WAR system specs released
Mythic's released minimum system specs for Warhammer Online, to be found after the break. As you can see, there's nothing especially mental going on there, news that will no doubt be welcome to the untold legions of fantasy fans waiting for the MMO to ship. Have a look. Thanks, IGN.
Red Alert 3 system specs rumoured
Strategy Informer's running what looks to be a solid set of system specs for upcoming RTS Red Alert 3, saying the detail's come from EA. Here's what you're going to need: OS – Windows XP / Vista (32-Bit) Processor – XP: 2.0 GHz (Intel Pentium 4; AMD Athlon 2000+; Multiple Cores) / Vista: 2.2 GHz […]
Spore gets minimum system specs
According to this Shacknew piece, the minimum hardware specs to run Spore are: FOR WINDOWS XP 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 512 MB RAM A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 At least 6 GB of hard drive space FOR WINDOWS VISTA 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 768 MB […]
Blizzard rumourifies StarCraft II system specs
Blizzard's offered a profoundly dull and completely predictable "if it's not from us it isn't true" quote to last night's supposed StarCraft II system spec release. "Blizzard has not released final, official system requirements for StarCraft II," a company rep told IGN. "The numbers you're seeing are a result of independent speculation from a Spanish […]
Starcraft II system specs revealed (maybe)
A reader of this Starcraft fansite's posted what looks to be a set of system specs for Starcraft II. Apparently they came from a Spanish mag who recently visited Blizzard. And here they are: Minumum Requirements GFX: GeForce 7/8 Series or Radeon 1000/2000 with 256 MB RAM CPU: Pentium 4 RAM: 1 GB Internet: ADSL […]
System Specs latest

subset: commoncrawl


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From now until Friday, May 10th, I'm showcasing my hidden talent in support of mental health!
CAMH One Brave Night is a chance to share a piece of myself with the world for a great cause. I am excited (and a bit nervous!) to express my passion and creativity, so we can inspire hope for the one in five Canadians who experience mental illness every year.
Please donate today and help me reach my fundraising goal.
Together we will break down stigma, fund innovative research, and provide access to new and promising treatments for people living with mental illness.
Welcome to My Personal Page
From now until Friday, May 10th, I'm showcasing my hidden talent in support of mental health!
I've raised $1,000!
Personal Gift
Has made a donation to this event
Personal Progress:
of Goal
$10,280 Raised
Fundraising Honor Roll
Margorie Vyse
Melanie Poitras
P Diddy
Peter Stanojevic
If you think this page contains objectionable content, please inform the system administrator.


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Six dead, others missing
UP to six people were confirmed dead and others still missing after a deadly tsunami hit coastal villages on Santa Cruz island, Temotu Province yesterday.
The tsunami was triggered by a powerful 8.0 magnitude earthquake that struck near 33 kilometres west-southwest of Santa Cruz Island, just after 12pm.
Authorities say two people were killed at Nela village, one in Luova village, a child in Bimbir village, one at Venga village, one dead and three still missing at Malo village.
Acting Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Environment Chanel Iroi confirmed the casualties, but added the death could rise.
He said lack of communication to other parts of the province have made it impossible to get actual assessments.
But he said an assessment team will be dispatch to the province soon.
Mr Iroi said the five villages were badly damaged by the tsunami with shelters no longer standing and people escaped to higher ground for safety.
"The Lata airport has also been swept over by waves and reports have indicated that there's lots of debris including logs on the runway," Mr Iroi said.
Reports said about 30 minutes after a Solomon Airlines aircraft left the airfield, the tsunami struck.
Mr Iroi said police officers at Lata and others have been called upon to clear the debris from the airport so the assessment team can land safely on ground by plane.
He said they were unable to get confirm reports from Temotu's outer islands in the Reefs, Vanikoro, Utupua, and Tikopia.
Mr Iroi added Makira and Malaita provinces have reportedly experienced unusual rise of sea level but there were no reports of damages or casualties.
Police Commissioner John Lansley yesterday said his officers in Lata are helping our in assessing damages and evacuation in the nearby villages.
Mr Lansley said he will accompany the assessment team to Lata this morning.
Mr Iroi said that the assessment team is expected to be made up of a number of people from various specialist areas, including two doctors.
"Until the assessment team completes their findings on ground, there is no other information as yet but will give an update report as soon as they arrive there," Mr Iroi said.


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Bellingham Physical Therapy is a private practice orthopedic clinic, providing comprehensive out-patient physical therapy services. We are locally owned and operated, proudly serving the Bellingham community since 1981.
Our mission is to provide exceptional, creative physical therapy in the treatment of the whole person by offering innovative solutions, combining the art and science of physical therapy to alleviate limitations of the musculoskeletal system.
We pride ourselves on being a hands-on clinic, with highly skilled and specialized manual therapists. Our hands are the primary tool to assess and treat disorders in the fascia, muscles, ligaments, tendons, joint segments and the nervous system. We routinely treat Orthopedic Therapy, Rehabilitation Therapy and Work Related Injuries with immediate, long-term, positive results and provide relief for a multitude of conditions and diseases including Sports Injuries, Neurological Conditions, Chronic Pain Management and more...
I so appreciate the whole package that is Bellingham Physical Therapy. The physical therapists are sympathetic, highly skilled and very effective. The front desk staff is friendly and informative. The location and hours are convenient and the office is bright and inviting. I have gone from debilitating headaches that would last three days down to about one headache a month. I never would have thought this was possible. I am so very grateful and would recommend Bellingham Physical Therapy to anyone.
-Laura L.


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Price: $48.00
Size: 33.8 ounce
Other Sizes: 0.5 ounce 12 pkt 9 ounce
Witness a deep conditioning miracle with this 100% vegan treatment ideal for feeding nutrient-starved strands that is packed with gluten-free plant proteins and enriched with Pro Vitamin B5 for mega-moisturizing. Wellness tip: Use immediately following your favorite Malibu C® Wellness Treatment once a week for a sweet tease of our famous in-salon Malibu MakeOver. Your hair will thank you.
Directions: Following shampooing, apply Miracle Repair and allow to remain on hair for 3-5 minutes, then rinse. For severely damaged hair, apply Miracle Repair, cover hair with a Professional Processing Cap and expose to heat for 5-10 minutes, then rinse.
Notes: May be used weekly or as often as desired. Not recommended immediately prior to a chemical service. When processed following a chemical service, heat is not recommended.
Water/Aqua/Eau, Linum Usitatissimum Seed Extract, Cetearyl Alcohol, Hydrolyzed Rice Protein, Butylene Glycol, Glycerin, Dimethicone, Panthenol, Cetrimonium Chloride, Polyquaternium-4, Quaternium-91, Stearamidopropyl Morpholine Lactate, Tocopheryl Acetate, Allantoin, Fragrance/Parfum, Behentrimonium Chloride, Myristyl Myristate, Limonene, Citric Acid, Guar Hydroxypropyltrimonium Chloride, Potassium Sorbate, Phenoxyethanol, Aminopropanol, Triethanol Amine, Benzyl Benzoate.
• • •
All content on this site is for information only and is not intended to substitute for the advice available from your own medical professional. The information contained herein should not be used as a medical diagnosis and should not be used as prescription for any medication. It is very important to read the information on every product package. If you have or suspect a medical problem, you should promptly contact your health care provider. Claims made above have not been reviewed by FDA.
Malibu Wellness' vitamin technology is a patented technology protected by patent #5,804,172.


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Business Intelligence Solutions SQL Server Course
Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server, Cameroon
2KO Cameroon offers online SQL BI courses in Cameroon. We also offer full time Designing Business Intelligence courses in Yaounde for groups of four or more delegates. 2KO Cameroon's SQL Designing Business Intelligence course is offered to our international and local students. 2KO delivers cutting-edge IT products in the consulting and business services space, as well as offering top-rated training for various IT vendors. Our internationally recognised courses can be offered either as hands-on full time classes, or as online learning, to ensure students have access to the best Business Intelligence certification in Cameroon. 2KO Cameroon's SQL course in Yaounde is designed specifically for participants to gain the knowledge and skills for making the appropriate job role decisions around designing business intelligence solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2012.
Register for an Online Microsoft Technical Course Here
This course is designed for BI
Architects, who focus on the overall design of the BI
infrastructure, including how it relates to other data systems in
use. Primary responsibilities may include but are not limited to:
BI Solution architecture and design
Provisioning of software and hardware
Data warehouse and data mart design
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube design
Integration with SharePoint or line of business applications
This 2KO Africa training course on designing business intelligence solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 prepares participants for the Microsoft Exam 70-467.
This course will provide all the skills and knowledge for the following areas:
Performance planning
Scalability planning
Planning for managing upgrades
Maintaining server health
Designing a security strategy
SQL partitioning strategy design
Backup strategy design
Designing a logging and auditing strategy
Reporting Services dataset design
Managing Excel Services/Reporting for SharePoint
Data acquisition strategy design
Planning and managing reporting services configuration
BI reporting solution architecture design
Data warehouse design
Designing a schema
Designing cube architecture
Designing fact tables
BI Semantic Model design
Designing and creating MDX calculations
Designing SSIS package execution
Planning to deploy SSIS solutions
Designing package configurations for SSIS packages
2KO Africa creates the highest quality course curriculum possible, ensuring you receive the training and knowledge required to succeed.
Microsoft 70-467 Designing Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Module 1
Course Introduction
Course Modules
Introduction to Data Warehousing
On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) vs. OLAP
Data Warehousing
Data Warehouse Architecture
Creating a Data Warehouse
Presenting On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) Data
OLTP vs. OLAP Demonstration
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 2
Designing a Data Warehouse
Data Modeling
Data Warehouse Schemas
Time Dimensions
Data Modeling Considerations
Implementing a Data Model
Logical Model
Physical Model
Working with Dimensions and Fact Tables
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 3
Extraction, Transformation, and Load (ETL) with SSIS
Introduction to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
Upgrading SSIS Packages
SSIS Tools
Introduction to Data Flow Tasks
Data Sources
Control Flow
Control Flow Containers
Package Execution with Checkpoints
Working with SSIS Packages
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 4
Deploying and Securing Packages
Deploying Options
Deploying Packages
Deploying Projects
Securing Packages
Deploying and Securing Packages
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 5
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
Introduction to Reporting Services
SSRS Reports Creation and Delivery
SSRS Reports
Visual Components
Creating Reports Within Reporting Services
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 6
SSRS Reports
Deploying Reports
Report Security
Report Execution
Report Caching
Report Snapshot
Data Alerts
Deploying Reports and Report Security
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 7
Multidimensional Cubes
Introduction to Cubes
Components of a Multidimensional Cubes
Measure Format and Aggregation Functions
Measure Groups
Dimension Storage
Dimensions Hierarchies
Grouping and Sorting
Key Performance Indicators
SSAS Security
Cell Permissions
Dimension Permissions
Creating and Configuring a Cube
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 8
Tabular Data Models
Introduction to Tabular Data Models
Working with PowerPivot
Linked and Non-Linked Tables
PowerPivot Features
Server Based Tabular Data Models
Creating a Tabular Data Model
Tabular Models with SSDT
Workspace Database
Tabular Data Model
Tabular Data Model Security
Creating a Tabular Data Model Using PowerPivot
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 9
Introduction to Multidimensional Expressions (MDX)
Why Use MDX?
MDX Syntax
Where is MDX Used?
Introduction to Data Analysis eXpressions (DAX)
Working with DAX
DAX Functions
DAX Queries
Calculated Columns
DAX Measures
Multiple Relationships
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Module 10
Data Mining
Introduction to Data Mining
Data Mining Algorithms
Data Mining Components
Validating and Presenting Data Mining Models
Creating a Data Mining Model
Exam Scenarios
Module Review
Course Review


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Advisory Councils
The Office of Governance and Leadership Development has established an advisory council for each region. The council comprises superintendents, assistant superintendents, principals, directors and supervisors who volunteer their time to share their expertise and knowledge in developing meaningful session topics and agendas for the Leaders Learning from Leaders Professional Learning Community Network. The advisory councils have been instrumental in identifying leaders' needs and challenges, offering suggestions and promising practices for consideration. Additionally, members share the information discussed at meetings with colleagues in their districts, schools and/or with various organizations to ensure a collaborative effort that effectively meets the needs of school and district leaders.
Roles and Responsibilities of the Advisory Committee Members:
- Serve as the vehicle for the identification of regional leadership needs and opportunities.
- Identify school leaders who can provide evidence of "Effective Practices" which address current critical areas of school improvement and leadership development.
- Provide a high quality of professional development in a manner that fosters the creation of Professional Learning Communities (PLC's) between and among participating schools/districts.
- Provide feedback, recommendations for improvement and updates on current research and studies.
- Provide input on the Governor's Reform Agenda as it relates to the effective implementation of district and school leadership and governance issues.
Leadership Advisory Council Members


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Skip to Content
Jump to Main Navigation
Skip to Search
You Are Here: RWTHextern
To Portal Page
The Citizens' Forum, RWTHextern, informs citizens in the three country point about RWTH Aachen's activities. Its goal is to provide the most thorough look at the university possible.
more...zu: About Us
In the 2019 summer semester, a multitude of events once again offer exciting and entertaining glimpses into the science and research activities at RWTH Aachen to all those interested in the city and region.
more...zu: Program
RWTHextern Citizens' Forum successfully builds a bridge between the university and citizens in the region with its comprehensive semester program. Everyone is welcome to attend the events.
more...zu: Event Series
There are no events at this time.
RWTHextern Citizens' Forum successfully collaborates with numerous university and city department and offices. Here you can find out what is behind our events.
more...zu: Our Partners
RWTHextern Citizens' Forum and its members. Get to know our board.
more...zu: Board Members


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Accurate Paid Appraisals
Our experienced professionals will conduct a thorough assessment to satisfy your insurance, legal, refinancing, estate planning or other needs. With an accurate appraisal from Ritchie Bros., you can make sound, informed business decisions. And if you decide to sell, we can help with that too.
Want to know the value and condition of your equipment fleet?
The Appraisal Process
Field inspection
One of our trained and experienced appraisal inspectors will visit your site to conduct a thorough physical inspection of your equipment. We will take photographs and also record and verify:
- An exact description of each item, including year, make and model
- The serial number or vehicle identification number
- The hour meter or odometer reading
- Additional features, attachments and upgrades that enhance the value of the unit
- The condition of each unit
- The undercarriage or tire condition
- Any owner's identification number
Analysis and assessment
Information that is collected during the physical inspection is input directly into our proprietary field asset management system. This information can then be compared to global auction results and other market data. Working independently, several regional field representatives and senior valuation analysts each assign a current global market value to every item.
We don't give you one person's opinion: we incorporate the valuations prepared by your team of qualified valuation analysts and regional representatives. Many of our field staff have specialized knowledge about particular markets or industries; if the appraisal includes specialized equipment, we will also have one of these people evaluate the assets. This method ensures that the final value reflects the true global market value of the equipment.
Inspection report
Following the completion of the appraisal, you will receive a detailed, coil-bound inspection report: yours to keep. You'll not only know exactly what you own – you'll know what it's worth in the global market. Contact our paid appraisal division for rates and an accurate appraisal today.
And if you decide to sell, we can put you in touch with your local Ritchie Bros. representative for a confidential, no obligation discussion of your selling options and the range of flexible contract options we offer.


text: Our premium liners are constructed of Standard and Heavy Gauge vinyl, ourliners will last longer and maintain their beautiful appearance foryears. Strong, double-welded seams will withstand winter? worst.Our liners are so rugged; they are backed by a 15-Year Warranty on Standard gauge liners and a 25-Year Warranty on theHeavy gauge. All of the flat-bottom liners listed below will fit either a 48?or 52?sidewall. Available in 5 vibrant colors/styles.


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Istanbul: Food and the frugal Turks
Ogier Ghislen de Busbecq was appointed ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire in 1554. He is remembered to this day for his Turkish Letters, a series of four essays written to describe his life and times as ambassador. They remain fresh and fascinating, not only for their insights into the international politics of the time, but also as reportage of the empire at its height. According to Philip Mansel, the historian who has written a book on Istanbul and has contributed an introduction to this edition, permanent embassies were only established in Constantinople in the 1530s and "they functioned as research institutes and artists' studios as well as embassies. Among sixteenth-century ambassadors few were keener to learn about the Ottoman Empire than Ogier Ghislen de Busbecq." In these extracts the ambassador discusses fish in the Black Sea and food:
The sea everywhere is full of fish, either making their way down, as is their habit, from the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea through the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora to the Aegean and Mediterranean, or else on their journey up thence to the Black Sea. They travel in such large and densely packed shoals that they can sometimes even be captured by hand. Mackerel, tunny, mullet, bream, and sword-fish are caught in great abundance. The fishermen are usually Greeks rather than Turks. The latter, however, do not despise fish when they are placed before them, provided they are of the kind which they regard as clean; they would sooner take a deadly poison than eat the other kinds.
Ogier de Busbecq was much taken with sherbet or "Arab sorbet" as he says it was called and gives a description of how it was made. This extract however describes everyday fare:
The Turks are so frugal and think so little of the pleasures of eating that if they have bread and salt and some garlic or an onion, and a kind of sour milk… which they call yoghoort, they ask for nothing more. They dilute this milk with very cold water and crumble bread into it and take it when they are very hot and thirsty. We often experienced great benefit from this drink in the extreme heat; it is not only palatable and digestible, but also possesses an extraordinary power of quenching the thirst. At all the caravanserais, which… are Turkish inns, there was an abundance of sour milk on sale as well as other kinds of relish. For the Turks, when they are travelling, do not require hot food or meat. Their relishes are sour milk, cheese, prunes, pears, peaches, quinces, figs, raisins, and cornel-cherries, all of which are boiled in clean water and set out on large earthenware trays. Each man buys what takes his fancy, and eats the fruit as a relish with his bread, and when he has finished swallows the remaining juice by way of drink. Thus their food and drink costs them very little
Turkish Letters. Ogier de Busbecq. 2005.
[p. 23 & pp. 34-35 / First published by Eland in 2001, this edition, 2005]
January 2009
Tim Judah


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L4400 Series LXI Switch and Control Instruments
The Keysight L4400 Series of switches, digital input/output and analog output instruments offer the best tradeoff in size, functionality and test. They are standalone instruments that perform the same function as their companion 34980A-Series plug-in modules. They come with a fully operational programming interface including a web-page for easy control.
For applications that require the performance of the Keysight 34980A Multifunction Switch/Measure Unit at a lower channel count.
Need help deciding which modules are right? Use our step by step guide
Learn more Switch/Measure 10-Tips Videos
Compare All L4400 LXI Switch & Control Instruments (7)
Find a Model
L4421A 40-Channel Armature Multiplexer (1)
L4421A 40-Channel Armature Multiplexer
- 2-wire latching armature relays
- 300V, 1A switch; 2A carry current
- Thermocouple reference
- Scan up to 100 ch/sec
L4433A Dual/Quad 4x8 Reed Matrix [Discontinued] (1)
L4433A Dual/Quad 4x8 Reed Matrix [Discontinued]
- 2-wire or 128 1-wire cross points
- Dual 4x8, 8x8, or 4x16 2-wire configurations
- +/- 150V peak, o.5A switch, 1.5A carry current
L4437A 32-channel Form A/Form C General Purpose Switch [Discontinued] (1)
L4437A 32-channel Form A/Form C General Purpose Switch [Discontinued]
- 28 form C channels, up to 1A, 50W
- 4 form A channels, up to 5A, 150W
- Armature latching relays with relay counter
L4445A Microwave Switch/Attenuator Driver (1)
L4445A Microwave Switch/Attenuator Driver
- Control microwave switches and attenuators
- Expandable with 34945EXT
- Distribution boards for easy wiring
- External power option
L4450A 64-bit Digital I/O with Memory and Counter (1)
L4450A 64-bit Digital I/O with Memory and Counter
- 64 bi-directional digital I/O bits
- Variable thresholds from 0V to 5V
- 128K pattern memory
- Two 10 MHz counter/totalizer channels
L4451A 4-Channel D/A Converter with Waveform Memory [Discontinued] (1)
L4451A 4-Channel D/A Converter with Waveform Memory [Discontinued]
- Four isolated analog outputs
- Output up to +/-16V DC or +/- 20 mA DC
- 16-bit resolution
- On-board memory for custom waveforms
L4452A Multifunction with 32-bit DIO, 2-ch D/A and Totalizer [Discontinued] (1)
L4452A Multifunction with 32-bit DIO, 2-ch D/A and Totalizer [Discontinued]
- 32-bits digital IO TTL up to 42V
- 100 KHz gated totalizer
- Two +/- 12 V analog outputs with 1 mV resolution


text:
|That's What I Love About Sunday
|Redneck Yacht Club
|More Trucks Than Cars
|The Father, My Son, And The Holy Ghost
Aug 2019 • 1 song
Apr 2017 • 1 song
Jun 2016 • 12 songs
Singer/songwriter Craig Morgan was an army brat before he opted for a career in music. Born and raised in Nashville, Morgan was already a country music fan with dreams of playing guitar and making it big. But before his musical dreams could become reality, Morgan spent time serving in the U.S. Army, where he had a very respectable career and achieved high honors during peace and wartime. It was also during this time that Morgan whetted his guitar-playing styles to perform for troops whenever he could. Such passion led to a deal with Atlantic after he left the service, and his ... Read more


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140 members
1078 members2948 Comments 30 Likes
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Posted on March 25, 2012 at 2:03pm 1 Comment 0 Likes
I am launching my new program on my website today! If you love eco-friendly gifts then you'll love these new Eco-Gift Surprise Sampler bags that I am offering. They are filled with seven products that are useful and affordable. Here are the shops that are participating in the Spring surprise sample bag. For the price of shipping and handling only for U.S. residents. International shoppers will pay…Continue
Hey, I joined your blog. Thanks for giving me a heads up about having a followers list, I should have that and my facebook, twitter and website up on my blog soon. Still trying to make sense of it all!
Hi there and welcome from The Girlz Korner in upstate New York where you'll find light, witty and rather entertaining articles on every topic imaginable from beauty, health, fashion, parenting, sex and everything else in between. So if you get a chance to kick back and exhale, if only for a brief moment, we'd love to have you. Hope you enjoy your stay :) http://www.thegirlzkorner.com
Hi and welcome from Long Island Chick where you'll find posts on everything life has to offer ranging from my insights, crafts, parenting, the crazy things kids do, vacationing, tech, blogging, recipes and more! MBC is a fabulous place to connect with like minded moms and grow your blog. Hope to see you soon at http://longislandchick.com :-)
Hi Marsha! Welcome to the club and feel free to check out my blog: Swanky Baby - swankybaby.net. I'm looking forward to checking yours out too!
Welcome to MBC! We are glad to have you here. We look forward connecting more with you here. I'm a Super Mama who has a family friendly blog. I also have a weekday blog hop called Exposure 99%.Come find out for yourself! This weekday blog hop helps you get more dedicated readers and blog followers. Hope you link up weekly. If you have any questions about how to link up do not hesitate to let me know.
Visit me @ One moment in time, I'll sure return the love :-)
Kindly stop by at Giveaway Junkies on facebook and become a member which you will benefit..
Hope to see you there :-))


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EA Sports today launched a contest to choose one NCAA school's home venue the "Toughest Place to Play" in college basketball. Fans of the EA SPORTS videogame NCAA Basketball 09 can visit EAsports.com now to vote for their school from among 50 schools entered in the contest. Ten finalists will be selected from fan voting before a winner will be crowned and that school featured in next year's videogame. In addition, a full playable demo of NCAA Basketball 09 is available for download beginning November 6 at the PLAYSTATION Store and Xbox Live Marketplace.
NCAA Basketball 09 will be in stores beginning Nov. 19 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PlayStation2.
The NCAA Basketball 09 demo, featuring the University of Tennessee, University of Kentucky, the 1979 Michigan State Spartans and the 1982 University of North Carolina Tar Heels, showcases a new, strategic basketball gameplay experience that challenges gamers to replicate their school's style of play and set the game tempo to win. NCAA Basketball 09 features the EA SPORTS ESPN Classic Tournament of Legends and Division I coaches in-game for the first time. Each coach will provide real time instruction and feedback to help gamers control the tempo by executing their team's offense and defense to perfection.
Voting in the "Toughest Place to Play" contest closes December 1. School's voted in as finalists will receive a visit from EA SPORTS this basketball season to judge their arena based upon a number of factors. A panel of basketball experts will then determine the final top 10 rankings and crown a winner. The rankings will appear in next year's EA SPORTS NCAA Basketball videogame.
To learn more about NCAA Basketball 09 visit www.easports.com/ncaabasketball09.


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I've been planning on making some banded mail for a long time, and I've found some aluminium to make it out of.
I'm looking to use 2 sheets of 1000mm by 250mm by 1.2mm aluminium, and a 12 in 6 pattern of chain to connect the two. I'm going to try and roughly follow this design.
My main concerns are weight and durability. I don't really know what I'm getting into so I'm turning to Stack Exchange for wisdom. Something else I'm concerned about is the armour not looking terribly realistic, as it'll be very shiny.
What do I need to bear in mind when I make banded mail?
For reference I've been larping on and off for 5 years now often wearing chain on banded (one layer of chain, one layer of banded on top) and I'm only now planning on making my own.