Just to be a normal man, just to go out shaking hands

[sovay]

I don't understand Facebook's algorithms. Independent of any pages shared by my friends, it keeps presenting me with this photo of violinist Gil Shaham, upcoming guest of the BSO, and I cannot tell if it thinks that I am the sort of person who listens to classical music (true) or the sort of person who thinks this particular musician is great-looking (also true) and in either case I have no money for the symphony and extant commitments on one of the days he's playing anyway, but I still want to know which data they were farming to produce this result. Seriously, it's been every time I go to check in on the news. I'm not complaining, but I am impressed.



(I did not make it to the Brattle's screening of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), so the question of whether I find David Niven as beautiful in that movie as Andrew Moor does will have to wait for another time.)

Comments

[boxofdelights]

Facebook knows you a little too well.

[nineweaving]

I did not make it to the Brattle's screening of A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

I did. Excellent short speech by Thelma Schoonmaker (filmed earlier today in New York): she said she would have gone up that stairway for Michael Powell, as he would have for her. She said that the war freed Powell and Pressburger to do as they wished: all they were asked, she said, was to make something good for morale; and in this case, something good for Anglo-American relations, which reaction to the war had soured. ("Over-paid, over-sexed, and Over Here.") The black-and-white of heaven, she said, was actually monochrome: clever Jack Cardiff filmed it in technicolor, then printed it without dye. If you see a good print, she said, it's pearly.

Well, this wasn't a print, but 4K.

The restoration did look gorgeous, though——especially the beach. All beautifully acted, wittily written, and Archerly askew. No one else would have thought of those lovely mischievous bits: the goat boy; Conductor 71; the great theatre of heaven dwindling into a galaxy, tinting as it shrank; and the vicar rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream with GIs; and the camera obscura, with our doctor as benevolent spy. The Archers always were drawn to the act of gazing. And of course, the--what do you call a freeze-frame that ghosts can walk around in?--the stopped tsble-tennis match, the stopped neurosurgery is form of spying. It turns humans into art, at once vulnerable, comic, and unsettling. An artform for the dead to smile at.

I think their brief from the government, to bring England and America “into a mountain of affection th'one with th'other" did make the trial scenes rather too preachy. But when the lights went up, I found the young couple behind me blown away. "Seventy years old!" she said. I told them to go out and watch them all.

Nine

[thisbluespirit]

LOL, well, it could be worse! ;-D

[cmcmck]

Shaham is a genius and as you say, a nice looking guy, so I can certainly think of worse things to pop up on your pages! :o)

[sartorias]

I watched it while exercising, after your mention the other day. Niven is gloriously splendid early on, quoting poetry madly as he chooses his moment to die. There are some other lovely moments too, his voice and demeanor so light I think it's easy to misjudge him and say he's one note.

It's an odd film, with a naked goat boy whose body language screamed discomfort, and a very regimented heaven.

[ashlyme]

I can't speak for Niven's beauty, but Gil Shaham is pretty. Also I covet his jacket. That's all the Mattie-cliche-boxes ticked!

[ashlyme]

*I also covet his jacket. I worry that Facebook could tell.*

So far I've not been graced by the velvet algorithm. Jacket timeshare?

[kore]

That is a snazzy jacket and lovely smile.

[rosefox]

I bet it's because he looks like you.

[rinue]

Nice! I keep getting ads for the audobon society - well-photographed and beautifully plumed birds, notes about habitat. I'm impressed because I am exactly the right person to target, given that I don't belong to that society but could possibly be persuaded to join if somebody bugged me about it enough times. Which they seem to be trying to do. It needs to be a lot of times, though.