Pictureland

The vegetation of the Pacific Northwest, the fauna I guess, is dizzying not only in its teeming variety but its mad fecundity.  Perhaps there's just as much variety in the my Midwest.  But to leave Chicago in late March and drop into Oregon or Washington makes the contrast seem even more stark.  This is as true in the midst of a fairly big city like Portland as it is when you go traipsing into the countryside of the Northwest.  Or driving.  Or strolling, I suppose.  Or otherwise conveyed.   I sat in my friends' kitchen in Portland and watched the moss adhering to one of their backyard trees practically glow subsequent to an afternoon rain.  So it seems to go with the moss and lichen in this part of the world.  I stopped along a particularly verdant stretch the  Umqua River valley   in Oregon several years ago to clamber down to a creekside and it seemed as though my rental car itself would start to grow some some of the s...

A day and a half bulging with the variety and extremes of Pacific Northwest climate, landscape and culture.  Brunch in a hip Portland eatery Thursday morning.  Snowshoing that afternoon up on Mt. Hood.  Stillness and silence as we walked across the deep snow covering a small forest lake.  After something of a snow-chain-applying debacle, a drive into near blizzard conditions at about 4000 feet to visit Timberline Lodge, where the exterior shots of The Shining were taken.  The snow looked to be 15 to 20 feet deep from the upper levels of the lodge as we had a quick drink.  Then, the prudent desire to get to well below 4,0000 feet before night fell.  As my friends and I tried to scrape the car windows clear of snow and ice - we did this with the caps from a couple of water bottles, lacking a snow scraper; obviously very prepared for these conditions - there could have been some homicidal father just yards away dragging his bloody axe and his psychoti...

They're kooky, not so creepy - the Stoker Family.   Oh, adolescence.  It can be such a dark, difficult time.  Particularly if you’re the unfortunate India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska).  Not only does she bear a surname which provides rhyming fodder for the menacing jocks who lurk outside her high school.  But not long into Stoker , the young woman finds out that her beloved father has died in his SUV in a mysterious accident.  Fast upon that shock, the father’s heretofore unseen brother, the mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up after the funeral and quickly ingratiates himself with India’s not-terribly-mournful mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), very much to the chagrin of the melancholy child. Lest this begin to sound like a contemporary, female Hamlet - dad barely dead and mom getting cozy with the creepy uncle almost before the body's cold -  first-time screenwriter Wentworth Miller has cited Hitchcock and not Shakespeare ...

Love, Michael Haneke style.  The title of the Austrian director's tenth feature film is as perverse as it is profoundly appropriate.  In Amour we see abundant example of love at it's most compassionate, at its most brave, at its most...loving.  But we also see amour played out in one of the most grinding, heartbreaking ways imaginable.  That really is love, some might say.  That's life.  It is, at least, the only sort of love story that Michael Haneke would seem able or willing to tell. There's little surprise in Amour where all of this is going.  No more than where any of our lives are ultimately bound.  After a silent interval of crisp, white opening credits against a black background - no surprise there, either, from Mr. Haneke - the silence is broken by the crashing open of a Parisian apartment's entry doors.  Before we see what is waiting in the sealed bedroom of the apartment, the covering of noses by a few of the attending pol...

Young Megan Charpentier, after her first look at the script for Andres Muschietti's   Mama. Mama mia!  Is there no end to the suffering that will result from bank deregulation?  How many lives have been affected for the worse?  How many national economies thrown into chaos?  How many men  driven to shoot financial firm partners, do the same to their estranged wives, drag their confused children on strange odysseys that culminate in gangly shape-shifting 19th-century ghosts wringing their sorry necks before playing mother to those increasingly feral children for five years, the poor waifs subsisting on a diet mainly of cherries?  How many?!!   Well, as for that last scenario, I feel safe in proclaiming the answer to be an unambiguous one, and that courtesy of the operatically silly Mama from writer and director Andres Muschietti. Most of the above takes place before the opening titles arrive in Mama.  Then it's five years hence from the...