A solar eclipse, a payphone call
I have moved on to taking the cloud cover very personally, especially since last night when I had access to binoculars but not the telescope the sky was clear in all the right places; my hands are not as steady as a tripod. I am also annoyed that I have regained sufficient stamina for walks of several miles, but if I spend ten minutes behind the wheel of a car, I am useless for the rest of the day. Have some links-ish.
1. It feels disingenuous to say that my antisemitism tolerance really has dropped in the last few years, but I decided last night to watch the first episode of Callan (1967–72) because my mother and I have been talking about it—she's not confident she saw much if any of it, but she has always been the most media-oriented person in this family and she really likes Edward Woodward—and it was handily on YouTube in all its 405-line telerecorded crunchiness and it turned out that the plot revolves around the identification and capture of a Nazi war criminal in hiding. This was not in itself a dealbreaker, cf. my missing no chance to champion Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966). But the particulars of Callan's assignment require him to work with the Israelis who want the one-time Obersturmbannführer for an Eichmann-style trial; we meet two of the team. One is a traumatized survivor, introduced praying and still terrified of the man who coldly broke his ribs after he was taken from the camps for forced labor at the Mittelwerk. The other is a kibbutz-bred young agent, vengeance-bent and humorless; his inflexible pursuit of a man whose worst crimes were committed before he was born is regarded by Callan with jaundice at best. "Twenty-three years ago . . ." Leaned on by an impatient Avram to follow his orders, he throws the Jew a mocking Hitler salute. I watched another scene or two and just sort of tapped out on the episode. There was other plot going on, but![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie had just been talking about how not to teach the Holocaust and it felt uncomfortably close to a primer: the old generation of pathetic victims, the new generation of self-righteous perpetrators, how very Old Testament to cling to a grudge a quarter-century on. I didn't even get to find out if the title—"The Good Ones Are All Dead"—was some sort of riff on Viktor Frankl. I may try waiting a little and then skipping to the next unburninated episode on the theory that they can't all be topically about ex-Nazis. Tragically, now that I've seen him out from behind a beard, I seem to think that Russell Hunter had a really interesting face.
2. Speaking of interesting faces, because I have been futzing around with a telescope, I wondered what Burn Gorman had been up to lately. The answer seems to be playing the creep in a male-gaze thriller. Which I may yet try to track down because it looks like a contemporary variation on a kind of disbelieved woman's picture that I have mostly seen in noir or proto-giallo, but now this feels even more like the classic Hollywood character actor problem where two or three times—if lucky—you get to see them in a role as versatile and adorable as they deserve and otherwise it's all third psychopath from the left.
3. Speaking of classic Hollywood, I don't want to see Andrew Dominik's Blonde (2022). I am especially disappointed because I loved the same director's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): I could describe it best and most accurately by comparing it to the historical fantasias of Angela Carter. I didn't expect him to fuck up catastrophically trying to get inside another American myth.
I am seriously honored to be a column favorite at Reading the Weird.
1. It feels disingenuous to say that my antisemitism tolerance really has dropped in the last few years, but I decided last night to watch the first episode of Callan (1967–72) because my mother and I have been talking about it—she's not confident she saw much if any of it, but she has always been the most media-oriented person in this family and she really likes Edward Woodward—and it was handily on YouTube in all its 405-line telerecorded crunchiness and it turned out that the plot revolves around the identification and capture of a Nazi war criminal in hiding. This was not in itself a dealbreaker, cf. my missing no chance to champion Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966). But the particulars of Callan's assignment require him to work with the Israelis who want the one-time Obersturmbannführer for an Eichmann-style trial; we meet two of the team. One is a traumatized survivor, introduced praying and still terrified of the man who coldly broke his ribs after he was taken from the camps for forced labor at the Mittelwerk. The other is a kibbutz-bred young agent, vengeance-bent and humorless; his inflexible pursuit of a man whose worst crimes were committed before he was born is regarded by Callan with jaundice at best. "Twenty-three years ago . . ." Leaned on by an impatient Avram to follow his orders, he throws the Jew a mocking Hitler salute. I watched another scene or two and just sort of tapped out on the episode. There was other plot going on, but
selkie had just been talking about how not to teach the Holocaust and it felt uncomfortably close to a primer: the old generation of pathetic victims, the new generation of self-righteous perpetrators, how very Old Testament to cling to a grudge a quarter-century on. I didn't even get to find out if the title—"The Good Ones Are All Dead"—was some sort of riff on Viktor Frankl. I may try waiting a little and then skipping to the next unburninated episode on the theory that they can't all be topically about ex-Nazis. Tragically, now that I've seen him out from behind a beard, I seem to think that Russell Hunter had a really interesting face.2. Speaking of interesting faces, because I have been futzing around with a telescope, I wondered what Burn Gorman had been up to lately. The answer seems to be playing the creep in a male-gaze thriller. Which I may yet try to track down because it looks like a contemporary variation on a kind of disbelieved woman's picture that I have mostly seen in noir or proto-giallo, but now this feels even more like the classic Hollywood character actor problem where two or three times—if lucky—you get to see them in a role as versatile and adorable as they deserve and otherwise it's all third psychopath from the left.
3. Speaking of classic Hollywood, I don't want to see Andrew Dominik's Blonde (2022). I am especially disappointed because I loved the same director's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): I could describe it best and most accurately by comparing it to the historical fantasias of Angela Carter. I didn't expect him to fuck up catastrophically trying to get inside another American myth.
I am seriously honored to be a column favorite at Reading the Weird.
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Exactly! I'm not morally opposed if he wants to play creeps, but he's so good when he doesn't that I want him to have more scope for it. Also I keep feeling that most directors don't notice he's beautiful.
(Speaking of which-- Pacific Rim was the first time I actually saw him in something where I recognized him, but I've realized retrospectively that he'd been in a bunch of movies I'd seen before that, including Penelope, where he has a small role as a journalist and an American accent???)
Same, actually: I don't remember him in it at all, but I would technically have seen him first in Layer Cake (2004). Oh, my God, that American accent.