Glittering lights

My friend Sara in Stockholm is trying to hook me up with a male friend of hers here in Malmö.

"Is he on Facebook?" I asked her, wanting to see a picture because I'm totally not shallow at all.

"No, he doesn't like Facebook.  He's strictly old school."

Wow, I'll have to meet him in person and not actually see what he looks like beforehand.  Does anyone DO this anymore?  Facebook is always my first reference point for people I'd like to find out more about - what can I find out?  Who is this person friends with?  And then that got me thinking - Facebook, Twitter, various comments on blogs etc - they all create an online trail where you can sometimes piece together what people are thinking/doing/feeling.  But what about those people I knew who lived lives I remember but have no online identity?  Are identities of people before the internet existed as a  popular tool seem less relevant because they are not online?

Let's take two friends of mine who are unfortunately no longer with us, but I still think about them all the time as both were huge influences on me.

Jon Heretz was one of my professors in college in Oswego, New York.  He sincerely believed in both my potential to be a great director, and the incredible possibility that theatre can be a real life-affirming art. He was always trying to give me a hand with my work and when I moved to London gave me some people to contact so I can make some connections. Aside from being a very talented lighting designer, he was one of the most witty people I'd ever met, so quick with puns and jokes and sayings that I always thought, man, I hope one day I can be as funny as this guy. If I'm able to 'work a room' these days I always think of Jon, who if he was still around probably still do it better than me. I have no doubt he'd be proud of me and my accomplishments.  He committed suicide a few years ago by drowning himself in Lake Ontario.

Todd McCarthy turned up one day at the theatre I was working at as an usher and I was instantly smitten - not by his looks so much but more his huge amount of energy.  A freckle-covered redhead from Australia, he was goofy and sunny.  He was very into musicals and theatre in general so we hit it off immediately.  His stay in London was tinged with some sadness though, for him and for me.  London was the last stop in a world tour he did before his HIV got the best of him - and this was in the days before combination therapies helped a lot of people.  After being in and out of hospices in London, he eventually went back to Oz.  Four weeks before I was due to go to Australia to see him, I got a call from his live-in nurse telling me he'd passed away.  I went to Sydney anyway and met with his family, who were as fantastic as Todd was.  In what appeared to be the plucky McCarthy way, they mourned their loss by celebrating his life.  While Todd was still alive, his father and brother built a wishing well in the garden and all of the neighbourhood came and threw coins in once it was finished.  Todd's brother took me to where he was buried - and Todd had picked a burial spot that faced the sea so he could always be close to the water he loved.  His family decorated his grave with sand and beach paraphenalia.

I imagine that if both of them were alive today, Jon would only be on Facebook in a cursory manner - joining but never checking or updating it.  He always thought of himself as a gentleman born in the wrong era so modern things were probably not for him.  Todd, I bet, would be all over everything, with thousands of Twitter updates that I could follow from afar.  But I want to take them and their memories out of my mind and document them somewhere so if anyone ever wants to know more about them, here they are.  They deserve not to be forgotten just because they weren't around to get on board the internet.  

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Nice on, Jon

THE DAILY SHOW is a long running TV show that was a little frat-boy and frivolous until Jon Stewart took over 10 years ago. Now it's one of the only shows on US TV that take a cynical but serious look at US politics and media and all that is rotting within.  

Lou Dobbs, a TV and radio personality and something of a nutjob, left his show on CNN claiming that America is now being ruled by tyranny and an oppressive government where Americans no longer have a voice.  Dobbs protested the rot started a long time ago but Stewart countered that it's funny how suddenly it seems to be threatening the fabric of the country, coinciding with Obama's election.  Stewart ended the interview with this excellent conclusion which summarizes my feeling succinctly about the insanity of the extreme right wing in the US:

I don't think we're a delicate country.  I don't think we're a fragile country.  I think that we are an incredibly tenacious... the whole fabric of this country was borne of people who came from a place they didn't want to be to a place they wanted to be to do whatever they wanted to do to make that, and that ethos still lives in this country.  The idea that trying Khalid Sheik in New York mohammed will destroy us, or trying to bring universal health care to people will destroy us, or trying to solve the problem of global warming will destroy us is trumped up fear that is being used as a wedge to flatter people to vote for them, and it is absolutely not a part of our national character.  And the people who continually tell me that they love this country, and I don't, also say how little this country can accomplish to overcome the problems that all countries face. 

What do you think?

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Trailer Trash Thursdays: FEMME FATALE

Every Friday I head over to my friends' Anders and Dan for our now traditional movie night.  Those two have exquisite taste in both incredible B&W melodrama, extreme horror and musicals.  Just my kind of guys. Last week it was Dan's turn to pick a film and he came up with FEMME FATALE - the Brian dePalma Paris-set crossing/double crossing/cross dressing lesbian big slice of lunacy. The film doesn't bear too much logical thought but it's engrossing all the way through.

I did some further online browsing and saw that the film made so little money when it was released. Anders' theory was that it wasn't American enough for the US... too complicated and European.  The review in VARIETY said the same, that it was more like a 5-act movie rather than a 3-act one.

I think the US trailer was the problem.  It doesn't capture the sultry and dark tone of the film at all - it looks like a long-forgotten Keanu Reeves-starring action movie, and manages to say nothing but tell the entire story all at once.  Look at this:

Now compare this to the French trailer.  Quite different, isn't it?

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Reboot, rehash, rewind.

The fact that the film '2012' made $225m last week on worldwide release - aka a quarter of a billion dollars, proves two things: 1) people love to see shit getting blown up and destroyed and 2) critics are redundant when it comes to films like this.  I wouldn't call '2012' original, as the director Roland Emmerich pretty much remakes all of his movies over and over and laughs all the way to the bank.  It seems to me that there are such a dearth of original film ideas in general, especially coming out of the US - with movies constantly getting remade with more volume and more FX, and not only that, the same genres being rehashed over and over (weddings gone wrong, American suburbia in the 50s/60s gone wrong, and Jennifer Aniston starring in 'I can't find a boyfriend-oh-wait-I-got-one-in-the-last-reel" over and over.

In your opinion, what are the worst remakes, rehashes, and reboots that you've seen?  Here are some of mine:

PLANET OF THE APES.  Directed by Tim Burton, but almost unwatchable.  The original was frightening because it seemed so plausible, but Tim Burton's last few films are more worried about the physical production rather than plot.  Mark Wahlberg wasn't butch enough in this part anyway.

ONE MISSED CALL.  Chilling little Japanese horror about killer voicemails (yes, really) was remade and had all the scares taken out of it.

THE ITALIAN JOB - A very hot cast pulling off a very big heist - in... umm..... LA.

HALLOWEEN - I recently rewatched the original and forgot how fucking chilling it is.  The Rob Zombie remake spent half the film on a back story and the other half making people act stupid.  I barely got through it.

FOOTLOOSE - OK, this hasn't even come out yet, but come on, no update can top the cheesy original.

It's not all bad, the recent STAR TREK was really good, and then there's the Argentine version of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES... see who you recognize: 

He is a SOCIALiST & thats it!!!!1!!!1

BY THE PEOPLE: THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA is a recent HBO documentary that I watched on Swedish TV last night, which chronicles what was going on behind the scenes at his campaign.  There were a few peaks at how the McCain campaign was unfolding (and failing) but how the Obama campaign managed to pull off winning the election was fascinating to watch - trying to remain honest and cool while his staff had endless WTF moments, kind of feeling their way through as they went along.  I'm really glad that someone thought to follow this campaign because it was a really honest view of how this campaign built up from absolutely nothing.

I think Obama's done a brilliant job considering the mess he's inherited.  What that documentary reminds me of and never ceases to amaze me is the amount of outright vitriol and lies from the US's right wing, who are currently struggling to get their voices heard in all three branches of the Federal government.  There was footage of how McCain's campaign traded subtly at Obama's race, his inexperience, the fact he was born Muslim.  It backfired on McCain and Palin so badly - see this clip of how McCain had to try to clean up his mess:

My country of birth is full of crazies like these people - usually God-fearing, poorly educated, and easily led. The Republicans, in collaboration with some of the media, have continued to stoke the flames of "freedom" and "democracy" with such passion, throwing untruths, outright lies and suspicions like fuel to the flames. First the manufactured scandals of Obama's birthplace, his "socialist" takeover of the banks (something approved by the Bush administration and which was the idea of the Treasury and Federal Reserve), the propaganda campaign against Obama's ideas behind the much-needed healthcare bill - that's been especially criminal. Some Senators and Representatives should be ashamed of themselves for a constant attack campaign, mixing faux-patriotism and freedom with the idea that this black man is infringing American values, but unfortunately a lot of elected officials in the federal government aren't the sharpest people on the block.

When Obama won, I felt it was finally a triumph for intellectuals and people living in the real world over insane Americans who interprets 'freedom' as being a gun-toting, moralistic, gay-bashing, overwhelmingly moral kind of person.  In 2004 I watched the election coverage until 3am UK time (10pm NYC) where it looked like John Kerry was going to win.  Going to bed contented, you can just imagine the look on my face the following morning when Bush creeped in yet again.  All I can say is I am glad Obama is rarely rising to the occasion by fighting back, he's just letting a lot of things slide, simply countering outrageous lies when he has the opportunity.  And he's so cool and controlled, and young enough to be in touch with how progressive people want their country to go forward.  Freedom of speech is great if the speech being brought up is actually causing debate and injecting new ideas, not receding into a morass of half-truths and Bible values, which a lot of people DON'T follow their lives by.

Unlike these people.  (see the comments after the article)

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