Friends of mine will tell you that I’m “too plot driven.” And while I’m not even really sure what that means, I do have a clear enough idea to know that it’s an awfully faint way to challenge someone else’s taste in movies, especially when the person in question counts among his favorites such atmospheric gems as Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time is it There and Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. Never mind: expecting the story-aspect of a film to work is just about the last transgression for which I’m planning an apology. If I am to be guilty of expecting a self-supporting narrative, by all means let’s pay the nickel fine and have it over with. The sooner some of us can get back to soaking-up a narratively enthralling tunnel of suspense, like this one.
Johannes Krisch is Alex, the hardscrabble ex-con whose job as a Viennese brothel bouncer entangles him with the beautiful and indentured Ukrainian prostitute Tamara, played by Potapenko. When Tamara’s situation at the brothel becomes unsustainable, Alex decides to pay-off her debt by robbing a bank located near the farm of his estranged grandfather Hausner, played by Johannes Thanheiser—thence to lie low while the heat dies down under the pretense of chopping granddad’s copious stash of firewood for the coming winter. Meanwhile Ursula Strauss is Susanne, early middle-aged, long-time churchgoing friend and through-the-woods neighbor of Hausner, struggling to build with her husband a comfortable family-life for themselves, with decidedly qualified success.
When Alex’s ham-handedly opportunistic robbery goes just as terribly wrong as a person might have imagined ahead of time, he finds himself holed up at Hausner’s farm for reasons far more serious than a trifling fifty thousand euros—a poison-laced isolation made all the more unbearable by the recurring pop-in visits of the unsuspecting Susanne, who plays it chatty and informal with the new houseguest, despite Alex’s openly impolite self-excusals to chop more wood.
When at last Alex finally confronts Susanne with the news that he does not welcome the further disruption posed by her vicarious company, matters abruptly take a turn that would surely have knocked all of us ten-inches back in our chairs, even if we hadn’t known the other, up-till-then-larger reason to cringe at Susanne’s arrestingly heterodox response.
What follows is a third act in which no one discloses the only thing that someone else needs to know—a series of misunderstood exchanges raising the anxiety like the counterweight on an elevator to oblivion. Even at the moment of denouement, we realize at a stroke that the critical exchange is being perceived completely differently by each of the parties to it—the two characters participating, and us.
Writer-Director Gotz Speilmann is no stranger to delicate balancing acts of narrative tension, as in his 2004 Film Movement selection Antares, but here with Revanche he outdoes even himself in stretching our capacity to endure our awareness of things of which the characters on the screen are unaware. In ingenious service of this objective he chooses a sporadically de-saturated color palette—thus allowing us to find our players sympathetic without being likable, by rendering them in brushstrokes that are beautiful without being pretty.
The cinematography, too, is a conscious nod to this tricky needle-threading, with a series of camera-cuts so rapid and without explanation at the film’s outset that Susanne’s and Alex’s stories aren’t at first obviously even coherent, let alone related—followed at the critical moment by a seamless transition to the very opposite photographic style, with desperately long takes featuring camera-pans so slow and overloaded with latent anticipation that we find ourselves wondering if the character in question will still be there to make their next bad decision when we arrive.
The end result is a narrative-driven masterpiece that even a pooh-pooh’er of narrative will surely never forget—our sheer exhaustion of a sort not just grateful for the end of all that ringingly taut discomfort that has come before, but laced with the deep and abiding satisfaction that comes from knowing just how masterfully has our route been plotted along this low-current, intimately personal, E-ticket thrill ride of dread.
The Key Grip gives Revanche five bald heads, his highest rating.
Click Here to Read More...
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Movie Review: The King's Speech (2010)
William Shakespeare had a lot of problems. He had to write astonishingly good poetry and prose, or starve. He had to be funny, compelling, romantic, historically credible, sometimes all at once. But of all the challenges confronted by the Bard, surely the highest was that of how to tell a story about royalty in such a way that his everyman-audience could give a damn. Fortunately for the rest of us, the everyman-audience for whom he was writing was galvanized by a commoner’s lustful appetite to see the overambitious brought low. Shakespeare’s currency, in other words, was comeuppance.
What then to make of Tom Hooper’s film about the eventual World-War-Two-era British monarch George the sixth, and our instant connection with that stammering, insecure, quintessentially reluctant royal—a man so under-ambitious that he was all but physically thrust onto the throne by his brother’s abdication? Well, the short answer is—everything.
Collin Firth is Albert—Bertie to his closest family and the friends of whom he has none—at the film’s mid-thirties outset the Duke of York, younger brother of Edward, son of George the fifth. He stammers. He stammers so badly that at the 1936 European Cup, he is unable to continue. In times previous the solution would’ve simply been not to speak. But now Britons, like their cousins across the pond, have been swept-up in a sugar-high addiction to the just-invented mass communication tool that threatens to wreck Albert’s cozy anonymity, radio.
Helena Bonham Carter is Elizabeth, the stoic-but-not-stuffy wife and duchess whose mission to find the expert who can help her husband is clearly driven by the mundane desire not to see him any-more-humiliated. After a series of false starts, the quest brings her to the disarmingly negative-spaced office of one Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush, a quirky Australian retread whose passionate insistence on egalitarian informality immediately sets all involved—including us—to wondering just how this is going to work.
After some obligatory posturing Logue takes the job, at least to the extent that his patient will permit the indignity of administration. Thence do their meetings careen across a galaxy of mutually cautious transactions, with Firth’s Albert somehow regal and indignant without being inaccessible, and Rush’s Logue somehow confident and assertive without being cheeky. Bit by bit, at times almost imperceptibly, Albert makes progress.
All around him his dream of passing into historical obscurity is much less imperceptibly falling apart. Even before his father the King has passed away, the nascent British tabloids have begun feasting on the decidedly un-regal romantic interests of Albert’s older brother Edward, played by Guy Pearce—the man whom, in Shakespeare’s time, this whole business would surely have been about. Worse, or at least just as bad, is Edward’s self-evident lack of conviction regarding the rising threat of totalitarianism on the continent. “Ah, Heir Hitler will sort them all out,” he mutters over his shoulder, in one particularly telling and no doubt tonally authentic moment of unbecoming candor.
With the final outbreak of war, even Edward himself realizes he is too compromised and abdicates—whereupon Albert finds himself George the sixth, quite literally at the very moment that his subjects, far and wide, need to hear him speak clearly, lucidly, and firmly inhabiting his capacity as the head of a now mortally imperiled state. It is not obvious that he can do this. Neither is it obvious how Britain will literally survive it if he does not.
If the power-embracing and ultimately self-destructive Edward and his love-interest Wallice Simpson stand as anachronistic prototypes of the Shakespearean royal, then surely the unfussy genius of Tom Hooper’s film lies in just how perfectly the would-be-alien plight of George VI strums the sensibilities and dramas of the modern bourgeoisie.
All of us doubt ourselves, true enough. All of us from time to time find ourselves asked to do things we are fairly certain that we cannot do. All of us sometimes fail, and when we do, all of us turn to our closest loved ones for our foundation of support. But what connects us so profoundly to this peerless film is the other thing that happens. The thing that happens next. The thing that happens when all of us—from the cubicle worker in Pamona to the King of England—look inside ourselves, urgently, hopefully, not quite sure what we will find, and discover there a small, gently turning crystal of potential, its facets glinting in the light of our resolve.
The Key Grip gives The King’s Speech five bald heads, his highest rating. Click Here to Read More...
What then to make of Tom Hooper’s film about the eventual World-War-Two-era British monarch George the sixth, and our instant connection with that stammering, insecure, quintessentially reluctant royal—a man so under-ambitious that he was all but physically thrust onto the throne by his brother’s abdication? Well, the short answer is—everything.
Collin Firth is Albert—Bertie to his closest family and the friends of whom he has none—at the film’s mid-thirties outset the Duke of York, younger brother of Edward, son of George the fifth. He stammers. He stammers so badly that at the 1936 European Cup, he is unable to continue. In times previous the solution would’ve simply been not to speak. But now Britons, like their cousins across the pond, have been swept-up in a sugar-high addiction to the just-invented mass communication tool that threatens to wreck Albert’s cozy anonymity, radio.
Helena Bonham Carter is Elizabeth, the stoic-but-not-stuffy wife and duchess whose mission to find the expert who can help her husband is clearly driven by the mundane desire not to see him any-more-humiliated. After a series of false starts, the quest brings her to the disarmingly negative-spaced office of one Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush, a quirky Australian retread whose passionate insistence on egalitarian informality immediately sets all involved—including us—to wondering just how this is going to work.
After some obligatory posturing Logue takes the job, at least to the extent that his patient will permit the indignity of administration. Thence do their meetings careen across a galaxy of mutually cautious transactions, with Firth’s Albert somehow regal and indignant without being inaccessible, and Rush’s Logue somehow confident and assertive without being cheeky. Bit by bit, at times almost imperceptibly, Albert makes progress.
All around him his dream of passing into historical obscurity is much less imperceptibly falling apart. Even before his father the King has passed away, the nascent British tabloids have begun feasting on the decidedly un-regal romantic interests of Albert’s older brother Edward, played by Guy Pearce—the man whom, in Shakespeare’s time, this whole business would surely have been about. Worse, or at least just as bad, is Edward’s self-evident lack of conviction regarding the rising threat of totalitarianism on the continent. “Ah, Heir Hitler will sort them all out,” he mutters over his shoulder, in one particularly telling and no doubt tonally authentic moment of unbecoming candor.
With the final outbreak of war, even Edward himself realizes he is too compromised and abdicates—whereupon Albert finds himself George the sixth, quite literally at the very moment that his subjects, far and wide, need to hear him speak clearly, lucidly, and firmly inhabiting his capacity as the head of a now mortally imperiled state. It is not obvious that he can do this. Neither is it obvious how Britain will literally survive it if he does not.
If the power-embracing and ultimately self-destructive Edward and his love-interest Wallice Simpson stand as anachronistic prototypes of the Shakespearean royal, then surely the unfussy genius of Tom Hooper’s film lies in just how perfectly the would-be-alien plight of George VI strums the sensibilities and dramas of the modern bourgeoisie.
All of us doubt ourselves, true enough. All of us from time to time find ourselves asked to do things we are fairly certain that we cannot do. All of us sometimes fail, and when we do, all of us turn to our closest loved ones for our foundation of support. But what connects us so profoundly to this peerless film is the other thing that happens. The thing that happens next. The thing that happens when all of us—from the cubicle worker in Pamona to the King of England—look inside ourselves, urgently, hopefully, not quite sure what we will find, and discover there a small, gently turning crystal of potential, its facets glinting in the light of our resolve.
The Key Grip gives The King’s Speech five bald heads, his highest rating. Click Here to Read More...
Movie Review: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
Not long ago I asked a friend of mine to pore over a printout of my entire, roughly 2000-title movie collection, in search of omissions that risked leaving the collection incomplete. And you know, I could’ve said that the very definition of a friend is someone who would agree to do such a thing—but really the very definition of a friend is someone who would even pretend, to agree to do such a thing. This friend returned to me in less than two weeks with a list of perhaps a hundred missing titles, the top-left corner of which was reserved for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. “It’s the only film I’ve ever watched,” he explained, that the moment it was finished I pressed PLAY and watched it all over again without a break.” And now so it is for me, too.
Sam Rockwell is Chuck Barris—yes, that Chuck Barris—the sixties-era game show producer and eventual host who claims with evident sincerity in his “unauthorized autobiography” that he was also a contract killer for the CIA. His early TV-producing aspirations unfulfilled, Barris is approached by the dark and mysterious Jim Byrd, played by Clooney, who persuades him that the very implausibility of a game-show host doing CIA wet-work is what makes Barris so perfect—the quintessential “guy-we’d-least-suspect.”
Chuck reluctantly agrees, ultimately teaming-up with equally eccentric colleagues Patricia, played by Julia Roberts, and Keillor, played by Rutger Hauer—the former of whom quotes Chaucer as foreplay and only beds her colleagues if they’ve first hidden the microfilm in the… um… appropriate recess, and the latter of whom solicits his fellow assassins to photograph him at the moment of dispatch, and whose default dinner-order is a green salad with no dressing.
Rockwell plays the supposedly gun-totin’ game-show host at his word, artfully gracing his fatalistic acceptance with a semi-permanently affixed disbelief that makes the entire movie, since only by not quite accepting that this is all happening to him, can his character sell us that perhaps it really it is. Meanwhile the life for which Barris is known takes off equally unexpectedly—with the Dating Game and other voyeuristic schmaltz-vehicles proving smash TV-hits.
Everything in Chuck’s young-to-middle life seems to be clicking, save for his ostensibly cavalier but practically troubled partnership with Drew Barrymore’s Penny, the unsinkably affectionate hippy chick whose intermittent companionship ties Barris down in the very ways they’d agreed to avoid, not least for her ignorance of precisely how Chuck is paying the bills. When a mole inside the assassin corps threatens everyone’s survival, Barris must shelve his multilayered emotional conflicts, along with his life-taught instinct to selfishness, just to have the fighting chance everyone is counting on, for him to save the day.
Of all the astonishing aspects of this film, and there are far too many to chronicle here, perhaps the most arresting is the fact that each of the movie’s complex scene-segues is accomplished entirely in-camera, with no CG, blue-screening, or other form of visual effect. Barris abandons his spot at the back of an NBC tour and shows up from the opposite wing dressed as a page and giving a tour of his own, and the whole thing is nothing more than a manic quick-change and a race behind the set. Barris draws from Penny’s banal kitchen-chatter his inspiration to pitch The Dating Game, and the blink-of-an-eye scene switch is handled by placing Rockwell on a turntable. Of all the brilliant craftsmanship that Clooney brings to the direction of this amazing picture, it is the scene-shift-in-camera idea that proves the most inspired, delivered so inconspicuously and in so many different guises throughout the film, that it’s unlikely most of the audience even notices.
Of course gee-whiz camera trickery is no substitute for a compelling overall narrative, and Clooney’s interpretation—and Rockwell’s performance—of Charlie Kauffman’s typically elaborate screenplay are both perfectly-paced and as consummately professional as any of the grand old hands of filmmaking. And all from an actor playing his first-ever lead, and a director making his first film. The bastards!
The Key Grip gives Confessions of a Dangerous mind five bald heads, his highest rating, and places it in position number ten on the list of his hundred favorite movies of all time. Click Here to Read More...
Sam Rockwell is Chuck Barris—yes, that Chuck Barris—the sixties-era game show producer and eventual host who claims with evident sincerity in his “unauthorized autobiography” that he was also a contract killer for the CIA. His early TV-producing aspirations unfulfilled, Barris is approached by the dark and mysterious Jim Byrd, played by Clooney, who persuades him that the very implausibility of a game-show host doing CIA wet-work is what makes Barris so perfect—the quintessential “guy-we’d-least-suspect.”
Chuck reluctantly agrees, ultimately teaming-up with equally eccentric colleagues Patricia, played by Julia Roberts, and Keillor, played by Rutger Hauer—the former of whom quotes Chaucer as foreplay and only beds her colleagues if they’ve first hidden the microfilm in the… um… appropriate recess, and the latter of whom solicits his fellow assassins to photograph him at the moment of dispatch, and whose default dinner-order is a green salad with no dressing.
Rockwell plays the supposedly gun-totin’ game-show host at his word, artfully gracing his fatalistic acceptance with a semi-permanently affixed disbelief that makes the entire movie, since only by not quite accepting that this is all happening to him, can his character sell us that perhaps it really it is. Meanwhile the life for which Barris is known takes off equally unexpectedly—with the Dating Game and other voyeuristic schmaltz-vehicles proving smash TV-hits.
Everything in Chuck’s young-to-middle life seems to be clicking, save for his ostensibly cavalier but practically troubled partnership with Drew Barrymore’s Penny, the unsinkably affectionate hippy chick whose intermittent companionship ties Barris down in the very ways they’d agreed to avoid, not least for her ignorance of precisely how Chuck is paying the bills. When a mole inside the assassin corps threatens everyone’s survival, Barris must shelve his multilayered emotional conflicts, along with his life-taught instinct to selfishness, just to have the fighting chance everyone is counting on, for him to save the day.
Of all the astonishing aspects of this film, and there are far too many to chronicle here, perhaps the most arresting is the fact that each of the movie’s complex scene-segues is accomplished entirely in-camera, with no CG, blue-screening, or other form of visual effect. Barris abandons his spot at the back of an NBC tour and shows up from the opposite wing dressed as a page and giving a tour of his own, and the whole thing is nothing more than a manic quick-change and a race behind the set. Barris draws from Penny’s banal kitchen-chatter his inspiration to pitch The Dating Game, and the blink-of-an-eye scene switch is handled by placing Rockwell on a turntable. Of all the brilliant craftsmanship that Clooney brings to the direction of this amazing picture, it is the scene-shift-in-camera idea that proves the most inspired, delivered so inconspicuously and in so many different guises throughout the film, that it’s unlikely most of the audience even notices.
Of course gee-whiz camera trickery is no substitute for a compelling overall narrative, and Clooney’s interpretation—and Rockwell’s performance—of Charlie Kauffman’s typically elaborate screenplay are both perfectly-paced and as consummately professional as any of the grand old hands of filmmaking. And all from an actor playing his first-ever lead, and a director making his first film. The bastards!
The Key Grip gives Confessions of a Dangerous mind five bald heads, his highest rating, and places it in position number ten on the list of his hundred favorite movies of all time. Click Here to Read More...
Movie Review: Hopscotch (1980)
With the benefit of hindsight it would seem that, in order to make a good spy-caper movie, the first thing one needs is society’s inclination to invest an evening thinking about spies. I don’t know about you, but the most recent movie I’ve seen about international idea-traffickers was Billy Ray’s Breach—a 2007 film whose absence of a backdrop of cold-war-style paranoia left me feeling fidgety and un-engaged. So yes, context played a role in priming the potential of a Carter-era jab at hapless government secret-keepers. Then again, potential isn’t worth a hill of shredded documents if the resulting picture fails to deliver on its promised resonances, and Hopscotch hits nearly every note.)
Walter Matthau is Miles Kendig, the anachronistic CIA field agent tasked with preventing western secrets from leaving the west through Munich. When at the outset of the film he catches red-handed his opposite number Yaskov, played by Herbert Lom, Kendig decides of his own initiative that recovering the microfilm is enough, and lets Yaskov go. His enraged department head Meyerson, played by Ned Beatty, summons Kendig to Langley and reassigns him to a desk. Instead Kendig—after a creative switcheroo to cover his tracks—disappears to Salzburg and the company of old friend and intermittent canoodle-partner Isobel, played by Glenda Jackson. There he hatches a plan to write a tell-all memoir and circulate it simultaneously to all the major intelligence bureaus of the world, one chapter at a time.
What follows is one of the great and clever chase narratives in all of cinema—with our hero chagrining his erstwhile colleagues, east and west, as-much-with his globetrotting elusiveness as his whistle-blowing candor. All with his young protégé Cutter—played by Sam Waterston—and reluctant old friend Yaskov in hapless pursuit. At each stop along an intercontinental triptick, Kendig flourishes the completion of his next chapter with progressively brazen revelations of his own whereabouts, only to have worked-out his escape with progressively shrewder and more hilarious stylistic flair.
It is for this reason that Hopscotch turns out also to be an unwitting celebration of nostalgia for a world driven by paper documents, and all the intrepid lateral mobility that has disappeared right along with them. Kendig hands a fake passport to an Austrian border guard, and at least one member of his 2011 audience bemoans living in a time in which the same stunt would end the movie in its first reel. Kendig masks his non-compliance with his boss by switching two sets of paper personnel records, and at least one member of his 2011 audience wishes that the H/R department of his local community college was run the same way!
In the end, though, the simple genius of writer Brian Garfield’s story is that our swelling sympathy for Kendig can itself hide in such plain sight, with moments of his near-capture bringing genuine, squirm-in-the-seat urgency because of, rather than despite all the comedic set-pieces and playfully romantic repartee that has come before. In this investment we are aided inestimably—just as Kendig is—by Jackson’s remarkably un-self-conscious Isobel, written just lightly enough that we infer a long and star-crossed backstory between the two, without knowing exactly what has kept them apart or even, once we think about it, whether perhaps Isobel might have come to know and so deeply care about our hero while working for the other side.
There are, it must be said, a series of narrative and continuity problems in Hopscotch, at least one of which pulls-out from the movie every friend and colleague with whom I’ve watched it. But surely it must speak volumes for the undiluted joy of this picture that I’ve departed far enough from character not to let this bother me. Films, it would seem, were more easily fudged in 1980 as well—a lesson the aspiring movie aficionado would be advised to keep in mind, the better to embrace a quirky, underrated cinematic gem like this one.
The Key Grip gives Hopscotch four bald heads out of five. Click Here to Read More...
Walter Matthau is Miles Kendig, the anachronistic CIA field agent tasked with preventing western secrets from leaving the west through Munich. When at the outset of the film he catches red-handed his opposite number Yaskov, played by Herbert Lom, Kendig decides of his own initiative that recovering the microfilm is enough, and lets Yaskov go. His enraged department head Meyerson, played by Ned Beatty, summons Kendig to Langley and reassigns him to a desk. Instead Kendig—after a creative switcheroo to cover his tracks—disappears to Salzburg and the company of old friend and intermittent canoodle-partner Isobel, played by Glenda Jackson. There he hatches a plan to write a tell-all memoir and circulate it simultaneously to all the major intelligence bureaus of the world, one chapter at a time.
What follows is one of the great and clever chase narratives in all of cinema—with our hero chagrining his erstwhile colleagues, east and west, as-much-with his globetrotting elusiveness as his whistle-blowing candor. All with his young protégé Cutter—played by Sam Waterston—and reluctant old friend Yaskov in hapless pursuit. At each stop along an intercontinental triptick, Kendig flourishes the completion of his next chapter with progressively brazen revelations of his own whereabouts, only to have worked-out his escape with progressively shrewder and more hilarious stylistic flair.
It is for this reason that Hopscotch turns out also to be an unwitting celebration of nostalgia for a world driven by paper documents, and all the intrepid lateral mobility that has disappeared right along with them. Kendig hands a fake passport to an Austrian border guard, and at least one member of his 2011 audience bemoans living in a time in which the same stunt would end the movie in its first reel. Kendig masks his non-compliance with his boss by switching two sets of paper personnel records, and at least one member of his 2011 audience wishes that the H/R department of his local community college was run the same way!
In the end, though, the simple genius of writer Brian Garfield’s story is that our swelling sympathy for Kendig can itself hide in such plain sight, with moments of his near-capture bringing genuine, squirm-in-the-seat urgency because of, rather than despite all the comedic set-pieces and playfully romantic repartee that has come before. In this investment we are aided inestimably—just as Kendig is—by Jackson’s remarkably un-self-conscious Isobel, written just lightly enough that we infer a long and star-crossed backstory between the two, without knowing exactly what has kept them apart or even, once we think about it, whether perhaps Isobel might have come to know and so deeply care about our hero while working for the other side.
There are, it must be said, a series of narrative and continuity problems in Hopscotch, at least one of which pulls-out from the movie every friend and colleague with whom I’ve watched it. But surely it must speak volumes for the undiluted joy of this picture that I’ve departed far enough from character not to let this bother me. Films, it would seem, were more easily fudged in 1980 as well—a lesson the aspiring movie aficionado would be advised to keep in mind, the better to embrace a quirky, underrated cinematic gem like this one.
The Key Grip gives Hopscotch four bald heads out of five. Click Here to Read More...
Movie Review: True Grit (2010)
I confess at the outset to having never disliked a Coen Brothers film. From their 1987 debut Blood Simple through such triumphs as O Brother Where Art Thou, and culminating with last year’s exquisite masterpiece A Serious Man, the Coen brothers have always seemed to have all the answers, even for questions the rest of us might not have thought to ask. This being said, True Grit struck me as something of an underperformer—at least when measured against such lofty standards.
Haley Steinfeld is Matti Ross, the sage and precocious teenaged daughter of a man killed by his hired hand Tom Chaney during a cattle-drive. Despairing of the likelihood of independent justice, Ross seeks out the one-eyed, alcoholic, amusingly matter-of-fact Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges. Ross intends Cogburn to track Chaney into Indian territory with her in tow—despite the fact that Ross herself is only fourteen years old. But before they can depart they are joined in the search by Matt Damon’s Ranger LaBoeuf, tasked with apprehending and extraditing Chaney to Texas for a completely different crime.
A series of fragile partnerships form and disintegrate among the three, in due course airing a wide array of mutual antagonisms. Above all is the deportment of Josh Brolin’s Tom Chaney, whom Cogburn stands to benefit from killing for Ross, and whom LaBoeuf stands to benefit from bringing back alive to stand trial in Texas.
The western genre is at its root a linear one: good guys are good; bad guys are bad; people ride their horses in straight lines and shoot straight when they get there. For this reason I’ve always found myself most impressed by westerns that are unafraid to take big chances—and this is where True Grit lets its audience down: Make a list of the six things that you suppose might happen to our unhappy trio out there on the wrong side of that river, and you’ll pretty-much end up right. Contrast this with, say, Unforgiven, in which the would-be hero is an unremediated mass murderer, his ersatz ring-leader is a lying braggart, and the chief rival is driven from town while the hero is off-camera with the flu.
Everywhere chances for such complexity exist in True Grit, they pass unexploited. Some might argue that the Coen brothers were constrained by the remake-status of the project, but this only removes the question to the wider theater of why they chose this particular movie to remake in the first place, and anyway doesn’t excuse many of the specific choices they made. Even the cinematography felt surprisingly clamped-down and unimaginative, with two of the scenes in the supposedly boundless Indian Country pretty obviously taking place in the same back corner of some sagey woodland, shot from opposite directions.
None of which is to say that this film shouldn’t be seen, since skipping it would deprive the film-lover of one of the great leading performances in recent memory in Hailey Steinfeld’s Matty Ross. Confronted with a script in which her character’s knee-jerk reliance on bookish repartee could easily have devolved into caricature, Steinfeld instead brings a warmth and multidimensionality to the role, contrasting the rigid dialogue with emotive gestures and child-like expression. The effect is to snap us back each time to Ross’ youthful status, galling us with our own parental instinct to see her delivered to safety, with or without the vengeance for which she’s traveled so dangerously far from home.
I began this review by confessing my admiration for the Coen brothers, and so at the end it seems fitting to acknowledge the trap that such admiration brings, in elevated expectations. The problem here isn’t that True Grit is not a good movie, as much as it is a good movie, crafted by virtuoso hands. And in a world cohabited by films like Inception and The Departed and The Day the Earth Stood Still, a good movie that could’ve been better is surely a good problem to have.
The Key Grip gives True Grit three bald heads out of five. Click Here to Read More...
Haley Steinfeld is Matti Ross, the sage and precocious teenaged daughter of a man killed by his hired hand Tom Chaney during a cattle-drive. Despairing of the likelihood of independent justice, Ross seeks out the one-eyed, alcoholic, amusingly matter-of-fact Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges. Ross intends Cogburn to track Chaney into Indian territory with her in tow—despite the fact that Ross herself is only fourteen years old. But before they can depart they are joined in the search by Matt Damon’s Ranger LaBoeuf, tasked with apprehending and extraditing Chaney to Texas for a completely different crime.
A series of fragile partnerships form and disintegrate among the three, in due course airing a wide array of mutual antagonisms. Above all is the deportment of Josh Brolin’s Tom Chaney, whom Cogburn stands to benefit from killing for Ross, and whom LaBoeuf stands to benefit from bringing back alive to stand trial in Texas.
The western genre is at its root a linear one: good guys are good; bad guys are bad; people ride their horses in straight lines and shoot straight when they get there. For this reason I’ve always found myself most impressed by westerns that are unafraid to take big chances—and this is where True Grit lets its audience down: Make a list of the six things that you suppose might happen to our unhappy trio out there on the wrong side of that river, and you’ll pretty-much end up right. Contrast this with, say, Unforgiven, in which the would-be hero is an unremediated mass murderer, his ersatz ring-leader is a lying braggart, and the chief rival is driven from town while the hero is off-camera with the flu.
Everywhere chances for such complexity exist in True Grit, they pass unexploited. Some might argue that the Coen brothers were constrained by the remake-status of the project, but this only removes the question to the wider theater of why they chose this particular movie to remake in the first place, and anyway doesn’t excuse many of the specific choices they made. Even the cinematography felt surprisingly clamped-down and unimaginative, with two of the scenes in the supposedly boundless Indian Country pretty obviously taking place in the same back corner of some sagey woodland, shot from opposite directions.
None of which is to say that this film shouldn’t be seen, since skipping it would deprive the film-lover of one of the great leading performances in recent memory in Hailey Steinfeld’s Matty Ross. Confronted with a script in which her character’s knee-jerk reliance on bookish repartee could easily have devolved into caricature, Steinfeld instead brings a warmth and multidimensionality to the role, contrasting the rigid dialogue with emotive gestures and child-like expression. The effect is to snap us back each time to Ross’ youthful status, galling us with our own parental instinct to see her delivered to safety, with or without the vengeance for which she’s traveled so dangerously far from home.
I began this review by confessing my admiration for the Coen brothers, and so at the end it seems fitting to acknowledge the trap that such admiration brings, in elevated expectations. The problem here isn’t that True Grit is not a good movie, as much as it is a good movie, crafted by virtuoso hands. And in a world cohabited by films like Inception and The Departed and The Day the Earth Stood Still, a good movie that could’ve been better is surely a good problem to have.
The Key Grip gives True Grit three bald heads out of five. Click Here to Read More...
Sunday, January 9, 2011
What's the Matter, Can't You Take a Joke?
I don't enjoy writing about politics. During the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election I did rather a lot of it -- and a few people might have said that some of what I was producing wasn't all that bad -- but on very, very few of those occasions would I have described the activity as a labor of love. (Live-blogging the actual map on election night stands out as the exception that proves the rule, here, precisely because the topic about which I was writing was an exception that proves the rule: The good guys, on that night, were winning.)
Mostly the act of writing commentary about our present era from a perspective on the political left has felt less like a gleeful celebration of the promise of representative government being enjoined by an informed electorate -- and more like drawing the short-straw of trying to write a compelling narrative about a mismatched bowl game in which it is already understood that the entire coaching staff on the losing side will immediately be fired when the game is over. Except for the existence of high, occasionally life-and-death real-world stakes for the rest of us. Yes, that's more like it: A mis-matched football game, in which those of us seated in the stands have all wagered our lives' savings on the team everyone was predicting was going to lose before kickoff. We know how it's going to end, and it's going to end badly for almost everyone.
Indeed it is so not fun to write about politics from the left in this country that, on more than one occasion, it has actually given me chest-pains. I write about politics anyway because, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the idea of not writing about politics is often even more unbearable. January 9, 2011 is one of those times.
In case you've been living underwater since yesterday afternoon, one Gabrielle Giffords, along with twenty other people, was shot outside the entrance to a Tuscon-area supermarket. Ms. Giffords is the representative from the eighth congressional district of Arizona, and she was shot while meeting with constituents. Of the twenty other people shot, six were killed -- including a Federal judge and a nine year-old girl. Ms. Giffords herself was struck in the head and suffered a bullet wound that traveled all the way through her brain and exited the other side. Reports on her condition at this hour are still mixed: It appears likely that she will survive, though it is far less likely that she will ever truly recover. The alleged gunman is already in custody, after bystanders are reported to have tackled the individual as he attempted to re-load. The suspect's name is Jared Lee Loughner and he is twenty-two years old. After executing a search warrant into his home and automobile, law enforcement officials discovered an extensive collection of writings about the threat to freedom and democracy that is posed by excessive government control -- in language that could pass for the script of Glenn Beck's next radio broadcast.
Giffords has represented a Tuscon-area district that voted for McCain in 2008 and, after casting a vote in favor of the health insurance reform bill that past last year, won narrow reelection over a Tea-Party sponsored candidate in the 2010 midterms -- a juxtaposition that had not escaped the attention of highly placed and typically vitriolic opinion leaders on the black-hearted right. And here we come to the point of today's comment. It happens that Sarah Palin's political action committee, the SarahPalin PAC, recently published a map of the United States which targeted twenty congressmen and -women who fit the same political description as Ms. Giffords: Democrats who represented districts that had voted for McCain, and who subsequently voted in favor of health insurance reform. ...But when I say targeted, you see, I mean that the map in question actually placed gun sights over the areas of the country that these people represent. Let me just repeat that: Sarah Palin, folks, the woman who wants to be your next President, published a map that included gun sights drawn over the locations represented by nineteen other Democratic congresspeople, and Gabrielle Giffords.
As chilling as this is (and let no one attempt to suggest otherwise), it also serves as an excellent example of something else that too few people are talking about these days, it seems to me: the wave-of-the-hand dismissals that are being brought to such chains of causality by the right wing's rank and file. Having invested themselves in a world view that operates on an embrace of simplicity for the sake of itself, to an extent that a candidate for President can lose an election on the grounds of suggesting that he'd meet with people and have conversations before deciding, the Joe Everyman constituent on the political right does not now want to have that seductively vapid world view compromised by the obvious dot-connections between Sarah Palin's gun sights, and Gabrielle Giffords' gunshot wounds.
Forced to address the connection at all, they smirk their smug, bully-smirks, and ask you why you didn't realize that the Palin ad was intended to be taken as a joke. Far from serving as conclusive proof of the fulminating, pro-violence, anti-constructive agenda of the right, the linkage between Sarah's obviously (?) tongue-in-cheek map, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, is instead proof somehow of your thin skin.
It wasn't that long ago that I was asked semi-publicly by a husband-and-wife duo how it was that I'd become so unreasonable when it comes to politics. This, you understand, from a couple with whom I'd once enjoyed a close friendship but who, in adulthood, have like so many other people surrendered all semblance of basic reason to the right wing hate machine's siren-song cocktail of xenophobic religious bigotry, fear-mongering about excessive government interference, and laughable disinformation dressed up as open-minded impartiality. Two weeks before the wife of this couple asked me how it is that I could have changed into someone so unreasonable in the years since we'd known each other, the husband in this couple had referred to Glenn Beck -- the man who said on his nationwide broadcast, "You know, I'm seriously thinking about killing Barack Obama" -- as a journalist.
Of course, if we've learned anything over the past two years it is that the country gains nothing through the engagement of such people. Inviting their preferred politicians to participate in the writing of important legislation, and incorporating their suggestions, only threatens the facile diorama if it is reported that way by their mass-market spokespeople of hate, and so it doesn't even get mentioned. Instead it's "Obamacare," and the people who voted for it in pro-McCain districts get to wear gun sights -- if not on their persons, then on the places where they live.
Few people with whom I've discussed this want to admit it, but if the countless Republican ideas that were incorporated into the eventual health-insurance reform bill were to have no beneficial impact on the rhetorical tone of the extreme right -- if the bill ultimately passed could, as a result, end up being a virtual carbon-copy of the one proposed in 1994 by The Heritage Foundation, in response to the proposals being advanced at that time by the Clinton Administration -- then really, folks, the notion that constructively engaging a pair of foam-at-the-mouth religious nut-jobs about the A-to-B connection between Palin's poster and the Giffords shooting is a fool's errand. It's contrary to the best instincts of those of us on the left, but it's also true: Informed debate with these people is now pointless.
What then remains? What remains is a renewed commitment to Democratic ideals (sparing the pointless compromise for some other epoch in which both sides are once again prepared to negotiate in good-faith), coupled with a far more proactive commitment to messaging both the accomplishments those ideals have produced, and the ghastliness of the alternative, to the supposedly undecided but actually there-for-the-taking independent vote. It's the subject for another column at this point, obviously, but personally I am of the opinion that independents were largely ignored during the first two years of the Obama Administration, in two important senses: The ridiculousness of the right's characterizations of the President's agenda were never proactively countered with equally effective messaging about the truth (an old story with Democrats in high places, alas), and the compromises being offered to that agenda were targeted at mollifying the hardened right, instead of being offered so as to sound reasonable to the people in the low-information middle. In the case of health insurance reform, this produced a bill that carries less appeal to them, with no upside for people like Gabrielle Giffords.
As painful as it may be, as against-type as it may be, Democrats are going to have to cede the idea of speaking to Republicans as if there were any room left in this country for earnest, good-faith dialogue about the issues of the day, because there isn't. Painting gun-sights on the home towns of elected officials is the conclusive evidence of this -- the in-this-case-literal smoking gun. But more to the point, a decision to let go of the time-honored tradition of one-way good faith on the part of Democrats will free those officials, and the messaging resources that have been wasted in the effort, to point out far more effectively and far more comprehensively to the low-information voters in the middle that the threat represented by handing-back power to the gun-wielding religious nuts on the other side is larger now than it has ever been in our country's history. In other words, the next time one of those swaggering bully fascists from the Drudge Report smirks at us and asks us, "What's the matter, can't you take a joke," the answer we give in response -- thinking first of Ms. Giffords and the long and arduous rehab that probably awaits her -- should be a resounding, "No."
Dave O'Gorman
"The Key Grip"
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Mostly the act of writing commentary about our present era from a perspective on the political left has felt less like a gleeful celebration of the promise of representative government being enjoined by an informed electorate -- and more like drawing the short-straw of trying to write a compelling narrative about a mismatched bowl game in which it is already understood that the entire coaching staff on the losing side will immediately be fired when the game is over. Except for the existence of high, occasionally life-and-death real-world stakes for the rest of us. Yes, that's more like it: A mis-matched football game, in which those of us seated in the stands have all wagered our lives' savings on the team everyone was predicting was going to lose before kickoff. We know how it's going to end, and it's going to end badly for almost everyone.
Indeed it is so not fun to write about politics from the left in this country that, on more than one occasion, it has actually given me chest-pains. I write about politics anyway because, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the idea of not writing about politics is often even more unbearable. January 9, 2011 is one of those times.
In case you've been living underwater since yesterday afternoon, one Gabrielle Giffords, along with twenty other people, was shot outside the entrance to a Tuscon-area supermarket. Ms. Giffords is the representative from the eighth congressional district of Arizona, and she was shot while meeting with constituents. Of the twenty other people shot, six were killed -- including a Federal judge and a nine year-old girl. Ms. Giffords herself was struck in the head and suffered a bullet wound that traveled all the way through her brain and exited the other side. Reports on her condition at this hour are still mixed: It appears likely that she will survive, though it is far less likely that she will ever truly recover. The alleged gunman is already in custody, after bystanders are reported to have tackled the individual as he attempted to re-load. The suspect's name is Jared Lee Loughner and he is twenty-two years old. After executing a search warrant into his home and automobile, law enforcement officials discovered an extensive collection of writings about the threat to freedom and democracy that is posed by excessive government control -- in language that could pass for the script of Glenn Beck's next radio broadcast.
Giffords has represented a Tuscon-area district that voted for McCain in 2008 and, after casting a vote in favor of the health insurance reform bill that past last year, won narrow reelection over a Tea-Party sponsored candidate in the 2010 midterms -- a juxtaposition that had not escaped the attention of highly placed and typically vitriolic opinion leaders on the black-hearted right. And here we come to the point of today's comment. It happens that Sarah Palin's political action committee, the SarahPalin PAC, recently published a map of the United States which targeted twenty congressmen and -women who fit the same political description as Ms. Giffords: Democrats who represented districts that had voted for McCain, and who subsequently voted in favor of health insurance reform. ...But when I say targeted, you see, I mean that the map in question actually placed gun sights over the areas of the country that these people represent. Let me just repeat that: Sarah Palin, folks, the woman who wants to be your next President, published a map that included gun sights drawn over the locations represented by nineteen other Democratic congresspeople, and Gabrielle Giffords.
As chilling as this is (and let no one attempt to suggest otherwise), it also serves as an excellent example of something else that too few people are talking about these days, it seems to me: the wave-of-the-hand dismissals that are being brought to such chains of causality by the right wing's rank and file. Having invested themselves in a world view that operates on an embrace of simplicity for the sake of itself, to an extent that a candidate for President can lose an election on the grounds of suggesting that he'd meet with people and have conversations before deciding, the Joe Everyman constituent on the political right does not now want to have that seductively vapid world view compromised by the obvious dot-connections between Sarah Palin's gun sights, and Gabrielle Giffords' gunshot wounds.
Forced to address the connection at all, they smirk their smug, bully-smirks, and ask you why you didn't realize that the Palin ad was intended to be taken as a joke. Far from serving as conclusive proof of the fulminating, pro-violence, anti-constructive agenda of the right, the linkage between Sarah's obviously (?) tongue-in-cheek map, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, is instead proof somehow of your thin skin.
It wasn't that long ago that I was asked semi-publicly by a husband-and-wife duo how it was that I'd become so unreasonable when it comes to politics. This, you understand, from a couple with whom I'd once enjoyed a close friendship but who, in adulthood, have like so many other people surrendered all semblance of basic reason to the right wing hate machine's siren-song cocktail of xenophobic religious bigotry, fear-mongering about excessive government interference, and laughable disinformation dressed up as open-minded impartiality. Two weeks before the wife of this couple asked me how it is that I could have changed into someone so unreasonable in the years since we'd known each other, the husband in this couple had referred to Glenn Beck -- the man who said on his nationwide broadcast, "You know, I'm seriously thinking about killing Barack Obama" -- as a journalist.
Of course, if we've learned anything over the past two years it is that the country gains nothing through the engagement of such people. Inviting their preferred politicians to participate in the writing of important legislation, and incorporating their suggestions, only threatens the facile diorama if it is reported that way by their mass-market spokespeople of hate, and so it doesn't even get mentioned. Instead it's "Obamacare," and the people who voted for it in pro-McCain districts get to wear gun sights -- if not on their persons, then on the places where they live.
Few people with whom I've discussed this want to admit it, but if the countless Republican ideas that were incorporated into the eventual health-insurance reform bill were to have no beneficial impact on the rhetorical tone of the extreme right -- if the bill ultimately passed could, as a result, end up being a virtual carbon-copy of the one proposed in 1994 by The Heritage Foundation, in response to the proposals being advanced at that time by the Clinton Administration -- then really, folks, the notion that constructively engaging a pair of foam-at-the-mouth religious nut-jobs about the A-to-B connection between Palin's poster and the Giffords shooting is a fool's errand. It's contrary to the best instincts of those of us on the left, but it's also true: Informed debate with these people is now pointless.
What then remains? What remains is a renewed commitment to Democratic ideals (sparing the pointless compromise for some other epoch in which both sides are once again prepared to negotiate in good-faith), coupled with a far more proactive commitment to messaging both the accomplishments those ideals have produced, and the ghastliness of the alternative, to the supposedly undecided but actually there-for-the-taking independent vote. It's the subject for another column at this point, obviously, but personally I am of the opinion that independents were largely ignored during the first two years of the Obama Administration, in two important senses: The ridiculousness of the right's characterizations of the President's agenda were never proactively countered with equally effective messaging about the truth (an old story with Democrats in high places, alas), and the compromises being offered to that agenda were targeted at mollifying the hardened right, instead of being offered so as to sound reasonable to the people in the low-information middle. In the case of health insurance reform, this produced a bill that carries less appeal to them, with no upside for people like Gabrielle Giffords.
As painful as it may be, as against-type as it may be, Democrats are going to have to cede the idea of speaking to Republicans as if there were any room left in this country for earnest, good-faith dialogue about the issues of the day, because there isn't. Painting gun-sights on the home towns of elected officials is the conclusive evidence of this -- the in-this-case-literal smoking gun. But more to the point, a decision to let go of the time-honored tradition of one-way good faith on the part of Democrats will free those officials, and the messaging resources that have been wasted in the effort, to point out far more effectively and far more comprehensively to the low-information voters in the middle that the threat represented by handing-back power to the gun-wielding religious nuts on the other side is larger now than it has ever been in our country's history. In other words, the next time one of those swaggering bully fascists from the Drudge Report smirks at us and asks us, "What's the matter, can't you take a joke," the answer we give in response -- thinking first of Ms. Giffords and the long and arduous rehab that probably awaits her -- should be a resounding, "No."
Dave O'Gorman
"The Key Grip"
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Movie Review: Fat Girl (A Ma Soeur) (2001)
Since Catherine Breillat’s 1975 writer-director debut, A Real Young Girl, the recurring theme she’s been conspicuously single-minded about is the stripping of our hegemonic social morays, the better to confront us with them—especially when it comes to questions of feminine sexuality. So many of her films revolve around the emergent physical identities of adolescent girls on beachside holiday with their families that one cannot help but presume a certain measure of the autobiographical in her work—though, for Breillat’s sake as much as for our own lasting peace-of-mind as her audience, I certainly hope that storytelling craft has trumped historical accuracy in the resulting pictures. There is sexual assault in Breillat’s films, there is manipulation, there is incest. There is an occasional murder. In many of them our young female lead arrives at a disposition that we might charitably describe as unconventionally empowered.
All of her films are thus challenging to watch, but it is with Fat Girl that Breillat’s unflinching and slow-panning creative voice at last finds its tricky harmony with the difficult subject matter, resulting in a finished product that manages to be fully enthralling without feeling prurient, methodical without feeling labored, and, most importantly, tied-up with the red-ribbon of unexpected denouement that manages to be stunningly arresting without feeling stridently dissonant or gratuitous.
Reboux is Anais Pingot, a stout if not exactly morbidly obese twelve year-old, trapped in the resentful wake of her glamorous parents and even-more-glamorous fifteen year-old sister Elena, played by Roxanne Mesquida. As ever in Breillat’s films, the family hires a seaside villa in the south of France for the summer, whereupon Elena becomes infatuated with Fernando, a college-aged Spaniard played by Liburo DiRenzio.
In short order Anais finds herself stranded at the far side of the girls’ shared bedroom, thence to bear involuntary witness to every imaginable outlet for Elena-and-Fernando’s disequality of previous experience. The middle act of the film thus unfolds as an unnervingly passive-aggressive contretemps, with Elena’s displaced self-hatred by day followed abruptly by her saccharine and abruptly over-sentimental pleas for her little sister’s complicity at bedtime. We understand at a stroke that Elena is invoking a time-practiced spell on her sister to get what she wants, here: plucking Anais’ heartstrings like the access-code on an ATM. The scene in which Elena attempts to quiet Anais’ tears by force-feeding her, directly across the kitchen table from their impassive mother and father, is but the tamest specimen from this exquisitely and pitch-perfectly uncomfortable second act.
None of which is what gets people talking about this incredible movie and keeps them that way, of course: Rather it is that thunder-striking final vignette that crystallizes the manic, pissed-off genius of the director’s creative vision—an episode about which any more said would spoil the whole experience of the film. It is and forever will be, we understand at once, the event in Anais’ life that gathers all those voyeuristic wayposts into something far more obviously a journey—elevating the already memorable experience of the thing into the club of that rarest of ugly ducklings, the not-just technically, but emotionally superlative motion picture.
The Key Grip gives Fat Girl five bald heads, his highest rating.
Dave O'Gorman
(The Key Grip)
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
All of her films are thus challenging to watch, but it is with Fat Girl that Breillat’s unflinching and slow-panning creative voice at last finds its tricky harmony with the difficult subject matter, resulting in a finished product that manages to be fully enthralling without feeling prurient, methodical without feeling labored, and, most importantly, tied-up with the red-ribbon of unexpected denouement that manages to be stunningly arresting without feeling stridently dissonant or gratuitous.
Reboux is Anais Pingot, a stout if not exactly morbidly obese twelve year-old, trapped in the resentful wake of her glamorous parents and even-more-glamorous fifteen year-old sister Elena, played by Roxanne Mesquida. As ever in Breillat’s films, the family hires a seaside villa in the south of France for the summer, whereupon Elena becomes infatuated with Fernando, a college-aged Spaniard played by Liburo DiRenzio.
In short order Anais finds herself stranded at the far side of the girls’ shared bedroom, thence to bear involuntary witness to every imaginable outlet for Elena-and-Fernando’s disequality of previous experience. The middle act of the film thus unfolds as an unnervingly passive-aggressive contretemps, with Elena’s displaced self-hatred by day followed abruptly by her saccharine and abruptly over-sentimental pleas for her little sister’s complicity at bedtime. We understand at a stroke that Elena is invoking a time-practiced spell on her sister to get what she wants, here: plucking Anais’ heartstrings like the access-code on an ATM. The scene in which Elena attempts to quiet Anais’ tears by force-feeding her, directly across the kitchen table from their impassive mother and father, is but the tamest specimen from this exquisitely and pitch-perfectly uncomfortable second act.
None of which is what gets people talking about this incredible movie and keeps them that way, of course: Rather it is that thunder-striking final vignette that crystallizes the manic, pissed-off genius of the director’s creative vision—an episode about which any more said would spoil the whole experience of the film. It is and forever will be, we understand at once, the event in Anais’ life that gathers all those voyeuristic wayposts into something far more obviously a journey—elevating the already memorable experience of the thing into the club of that rarest of ugly ducklings, the not-just technically, but emotionally superlative motion picture.
The Key Grip gives Fat Girl five bald heads, his highest rating.
Dave O'Gorman
(The Key Grip)
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
