Smart Energy

Straight Up is out now on Blu-Ray.

Review by Brian Charles Clark
3.5 stars

Straight Up is straight up-adventure of the vertical kind. This film glorifies helicopters and the people who pilot and work with them.

Produced by the National Air and Space Museum, Straight Up is wonderfully educational while also maintaining a thrilling, exploitative edge — call it copter porn. The movie was originally made for IMAX screens and, as director David Douglas says in the behind-the-scenes featurette, the helicopter point of view is perfect for really big images.

The standard jobs are here, of course: the medevac teams who whisk people to life-saving medical care via mountain-hopping chopper; drug interdiction; rescues at both sea and in mountains. We see helicopters delivering humanitarian aid and being used for research and relocation of endangered species.

Nothing like a little copter porn to liven up a mix.

But who would have thought that the folks who carry out repairs on the huge high-tension wires that carry electricity from dams in remote locations to the grid in the city are repaired by guys coming in on helicopters? Indeed, the lines aren’t shut down for repair; the electricians work on live wires. To do this, the workers wear special Faraday cages — stainless steel threads in the specially woven fabric used to make their clothes — that allow zillions of volts to pass harmless over their bodies as they work. And they get to work sitting on the wheel strut of a helicopter. When the chopper gets to the stretch of high-power cable that needs repair, the worker scoots off the strut and into a harness hanging directly from the wires.

The behind-the-scenes film is also great. Any number of trade secrets are revealed as the filmmakers show how they got some of their shots and we learn the basics of flying helicopters. Point left, go left; point right, go right: this is good to know

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD at Straight Up: Helicopters in Action – DVD review – Blu-ray / documentary DVD / IMAX DVD.

reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
3.5 star review originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

One of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings.

Paul Gauguin was a strange guy who spent his life in search of paradise, which he tacitly but clearly recognized as an illusion. For over a hundred years he’s been considered one of the most important of the French post-impressionist painters but, in his own time, he was a commercial failure.

The predominant subtext of the short film Gauguin: Maker of Myth, is that, in fact, “Mr. Flop City But I Don’t Care Gauguin” very much wanted to be a commercial success. This, says Myth, despite the fact the that he vehemently eschewed the trappings of bourgeois culture and went so far as to call himself “un sauvage,” a savage. This driven man fled as far as possible as it was in his day (which was very far, indeed) from the sources of capital, fame, and “civilization.” Gauguin fled, mind you, but he did so complaining about his poverty every inch of the way. Like James Joyce, he was of a contemporary milieu that found its satisfaction, even joy, in exile.

This lovely short film, produced by the National Gallery of Art, is a vivid and concise introduction to the artistic career of the pivotal and influential Gauguin. Oddly, though, no director or writer is credited; distressing, that. The film is edited by the talented and keen-eyed John Warnock (the photographer, not the CEO of Adobe who announced Photoshop in 1987–unless I’m deeply confused, of course, and the universe is in fact running in a course deeply in tune with the desires of mortal humans). Read the rest of this entry »

reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
1 star review originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Last Tango in Paris? Don't bother.

An American man (Marlon Brando), his wife having recently committed suicide, meets a lovely Parisian girl (Maria Schneider) in an empty apartment each is considering renting. There, ladies and gentlemen, is the plot of the “classic” Last Tango in Paris laid bare.

The film has survived as one of the world’s greatest based, apparently, on the scandal it caused when it was first released in the fall of 1972. No doubt there are good enough reasons to consider it an important film, but a great one? Film critics and les connoisseurs des artes cinematiques probably find the symbolism thrilling: the crazy lady at the bottom of the stairs, the cracked mirrors, the blood in the bathroom, and on and on.

All of it amounts, frankly, to a lot of hot, stale air. Marlon Brando, once the amazing actor who starred in On the Waterfront, is frumpy, cruel and boring–it is extremely odd that his performance in Last Tango is considered one of his best. Or maybe it’s not so odd; maybe it is a great performance, one that mirrors the sadism of the general population. Schneider, meanwhile, is clearly miserable and, as we now know, her misery was not an act. Read the rest of this entry »

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino
3 stars on a scale of 5

review by Brian Charles Clark

When that abusive bastard of a stalking-mooching ex-husband won’t leave you alone, are you justified in murdering him? That’s precisely the question that is never even once raised in this novel by the bestselling Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino.

Yasuko Hanaoka divorced the bastard (Togashi) then changed jobs and moved to another apartment in order to shake him off. But he tracks her down anyway and, one night at her apartment, he crosses the line, threatening her and her daughter, Misato. The result? A corpse on the apartment floor.

Yasuko’s next-door neighbor, the high school teacher and mathematician Ishigami, hears the scuffle and steps in to help. He choreographs the perfect crime. Why? Because he’s in love with Yasuko, because he’s “devoted,” as the title suggests.

All this we learn in the first couple of chapters. What ensues is an entertaining and escalating mystery featuring prize-winning Higashino’s recurring character, physicist Dr. Manabu Yukawa, known affectionately as Professor Galileo. Read the rest of this entry »

Review by Brian Charles Clark
3 stars on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Look out. Look up. A still from Resonnances

Look, you guys, quit giving rides to serial killers, okay? I know you think, what with the intertubal Facebooks and the Tweety birds surveilling from limb to limb and all that wooly blanket of webbery, that you’re perfectly safe. All watched over by machines of loving grace, as it were. But what you didn’t count on is what you need to count on.

In the case of the “micro-budget” (I ain’t buying it) RESONNANCES, the thing you didn’t count on was the alien craft crash landing in the vicinity some 400 years ago.

And this is rural France, don’t forget, so things are… different. Vive la difference, sure–except things aren’t. We’re ricocheting between Hollywood horror and indie spoof here. This is familiar, fun turf – with subtitles.

read the rest of Brian’s review on Curedl Up with a Good DVD.

Todd P. Goes to Austin, a film by Jason Buim

Todd P. Goes to Austin
directed by Jason Buim; 79 minutes; Color, DVD, NTSC
Featuring Todd Patrick, Mika Miko, The DeathSet, Matt and Kim, Dan Deacon
Released on Microcinema September 28, 2010

Review by Brian Charles Clark, who gives the documentary a rousing 4 stars

Brooklyn-based concert promoter Todd P. hates the star-making machinery of the big labels and the big festivals. He wants the raw, unmediated truth of music that hasn’t been marketed into a niche and over-produced by hit men. What to do? DIY, that’s what.

In particular, one thing to do is to descend upon Austin (the only surviving city in the atomic crater of Texas) in a shitty green van crammed with people and sound gear. Austin is the site of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival where everything hip, new and cool is, if we believe the industry hype, showcased and signed to lucrative record contracts. It’s statements like that that make Todd P. blow beer out his nose in a fountain of froth that fumes at fraudulence. Read the rest of this entry »

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done by Werner Herzog gets 2 stars from Brian

review by Brian Charles Clark

Werner Herzog has been making films – lots and lots of films – steadily sense the mid-1960s. Most of them are mind-bendingly great. This is especially true of his “documentaries,” a word that, in the context of a Herzog production, must go in quotes for the simple reason that Herzog never simply documents: he extrapolates, fantasizes, and pushes through the permeable membrane of reality into something more, different, or beyond. Or, as Herzog said during a recent interview, his documentaries mold the plastic of reality in order to reveal “truth.”

But then have been misfires in the rogue filmmaker’s long career. The magnificent documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, for instance, was later remade as a fiction feature, Rescue Dawn. Bad, bad, bad – but not as bad as My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?.

My Son, My Son is getting lots of press because it’s a collaboration between long-time mutual admirers David Lynch and Herzog. The story is certainly Lynchian, but the execution – well, a high-speed blender couldn’t have made it any worse.

The story is actually quite simple and based on a true one, in true Herzogian fashion. One day in June, 1979, Mark Yavorsky, a graduate student in drama, marched across the street and killed his mother with an antique saber. Yavorsky was working on a play, an adaptation of Euripides’ ancient Greek drama, Orestes. In Orestes, the eponymous lead character, on advice from the gods, kills his mother to avenge the death of his father, Agamemnon. There’s really no mystery about the crime, expect maybe why the thirty-something Yavorsky committed it. In any case, he was convicted and spent many years in a mental institution. Read the rest of this entry »

Charlotte Higgins knows an awful lot about really old stuff. When she says “classics,” she’s not talking about rock ‘n’ roll shredders from the 1970s. She’s talking Greek and Latin language writers from before Jesus first spit up on a pile of hay.

It’s All Greek to Me is one of those compendium books that, in a series of snippets and vignettes, tries to give the casual reader (commuting on the train or hanging out in a café trying not to be distracted by everything go on around her) a sense of where she came from.

But that sense will only be even moderately inclusive if our imaginary casual reader is very, very white. There’s no sense in Higgins’ book of there being any foundational culture other than the Greeks. Indeed, there’s no indication here that having the Greeks as the foundation of all that is good, true and beautiful might not be such a good or beautiful thing. There’s no sense here of the horrible xenophobia that is central to the ancient Greek cultures, nor of the racist sense of superiority that infuses much of ancient Greek literature. Even though they lived in a Mediterranean culture themselves, the Greeks figured that pretty much everyone living in the “warm climates” was lazy, uncultivated — and dark-skinned. Read the rest of this entry »

A Brilliant Darkness

“The dead are the pensioners of remembrance,” João Magueijo writes toward the end of A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age. With his book, Maguijo has built a home for his pensioner, the probably dead but definitely disappeared physicist Ettore Majorana. It may be sometimes a cathouse (and you thought physicists were all serious and cerebral and stuff), sometimes a house of mirrors, but Majorana does indeed dwell on every page.

Ettore Majorana, we learn, was the wunderkind of the early atomic age. In his native Italy, the Sicilian worked with Enrico Fermi — or worked circles around Fermi and his circle of geniuses, according to Magueijo. Himself a physicist of some repute, Magueijo isn’t a great writer (his sentences sometimes get tangled in their dangling participles), but he’s clearly a passionate one who cares enough about his subjects to have done vast amounts of homework.

The underlying metaphor in A Brilliant Darkness is that the mysteriously disappeared Majorana is the elusive neutrino which passes through ordinary matter unperturbed and is notoriously hard to detect. (In the time it took you to read the foregoing sentence some 100 trillion neutrinos passed through your body.)

It’s not just a conceit: Majorana was hot on the trail of the neutrino, whose existence had been theorized, when he disappeared on March 26, 1938. Majorana’s work was important to Fermi’s project during World War II: developing the atomic bomb. Magueijo wonders, if Majorana had disappeared, whether the younger man might have tempered the venerable Fermi’s decision to join the Manhattan project.

We’ll never know, of course, and Magueijo, a physicist who deals in probabilities but never in certainties, revels in the epistemological uncertainty. In any case, we get a mystery story wrapped up in a biography that unfolds the history of particle physics in a most enjoyable way.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

A World Without Ice by Henry Pollack

Henry Pollack is a venerable scientist with a thousand stories to share. He’s been doing ice science for over 40 years. He’s also been explaining what he does, and the implications of what he and his colleagues have learned, for nearly as long. All of that experience makes A World Without Ice a great introduction to climate science.

Pollack doesn’t bother to tackle the climate change deniers head on. At this stage of the game, there’s really no point. Although surveys inform us that Americans remain stubbornly pig-headed about the subject, the rest of us are innovating and positioning ourselves to capitalize on the inevitably growing demand for greener, cleaner technology. For example, roughly thirty percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the buildings we live and work in. Reducing emissions from buildings (either by building new ones right or by retrofitting existing ones) not only lowers our overall carbon footprint but lowers utility bills, as well. So the deniers can fume all they want; they’ll modify their tune soon enough when their wallets are empty. Read the rest of this entry »