Sunday, May 17, 2015

POTENTIAL SLOW FILM DAY

Winslow Homer: The Wittling Boy

If I leave the house today, I kind of feel like seeing a slow art movie.  I hope there is one in town.  Maybe something about a postman in rural Ukraine who wittles.  A lot of the footage wood feature wittling, or preparations for wittling, or procurement of supplies needed for wittling: a stool, a knife, a chunk of wood, a pack of cigarettes or a plug of tobacco, and if there is not a chair on the porch, a chair.

Television is so good, at this point, that I watch a lot more serial television than I do films.  They are easier to ritualize with dinner or bedtime or whatever.  We are currently watching Bloodline on Netflix, a show that seems to have come out along with Daredevil and House of Cards Season 3, but is better than both of those shows, though less hyped.  The screws are tightening and in some ways it is excruciating to watch but as a show about secrets in families, it is spot on. 

My buddy Mark Facebooked me a link that asks who should play Dave Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell in a potential James Lee Burke series.  I think that it should be Kyle Chandler from Bloodline/Friday Night Lights, and Domenick Lombardozzi (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Daredevil).  


It's still so weird to me that Tommy Lee Jones was cast as Robicheaux in a film that left out Cletus Purcell.  Tommy Lee Jones was great, but that is like a World Series with only one team.  How could that idea have flown for even one second?  Hollywood is strange.  Would my pitch fly for a film about a Ukrainian wittler?  

It may not be the Seine, and it may be somewhat of a sewer, but living just up the hill from Brush Creek and the campus of the Kaufmann Center is a Troostwood neighbhorhood bonus.  This is the view from the bridge on Troost, where we saw a heron amongst the geese.  The creek must be running high from the incredible storm last night.
Another bonus: you can't smell Gate's BBQ when walking in Paris.




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