Spitball Army

Steve Carell utters one of the most ridiculous lines in a movie ever in Dan in Real Life: “This corn is like an angel.” Out of context, it’s even more ridiculous, but I laughed out loud at the moment in the film when he lets it rip.

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Scott Hicks, who directed the film Shine (about pianist David Helfgott), has spent the last few years creating a documentary portrait of composer Philip Glass. It has just begun appearing on the film festival circuit. If the promise shown in this trailer for the film is any indication, the movie will be wonderful. Sidewalk Film Festival, are you listening?

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Then, at the curtain call, the singers came out individually and the Met audience clapped their approval, measurable by the loudness of their clapping. The audience here did the same. How odd that was, as if they were trying to communicate their admiration for the performance to the shadows on the screen.

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This afternoon I trekked to the cinema to see There Will Be Blood, and must say that I don’t recall ever seeing a performance so flamboyant and scenery-chewing, yet so absolutely incredibly human, as Daniel Day Lewis in the role of Daniel Plainview. Imagine Orson Welles (as Charles Foster Kane) and James Dean (as Jett Rink) being channeled by John Huston and you will have an idea of what to expect – if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know what I’m getting at.

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Music permeates every moment of this movie. The sounds of objects in the film ricochet off of the musical score like instruments in a contrapuntal symphony: the click of a cigarette lighter, overhead lights being switched on in an infirmary corridor, the busy clacking of the typewriter keys and wrrrrhh of the platen as the paper is ripped from the carriage.

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And that was why Dorothy Monet, 18, artist and fashion designer, was in Lincoln Hospital yesterday with Peter Martono, 25, a Puerto Rican, who slashed her wrists and his.

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Once the city gets into a bohoy’s syhystem, he loses his ahankering for the cohuntry.

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So, being a man of the times, I typed “blessings on your head” into my toolbar, and here is some text from one of the entries that came up:

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I’m just now starting to notice and investigate what new music is on the way for the coming months. It looks OK.

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As expected, the record made a multitude of Best of 2007 lists, which are kinda hard to avoid this time of year. Not that I make an effort to avoid them – I have a perverse fascination with lists, anyway, and to deride them would make me a hypocrite when I post mine in a couple of days.

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