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riellystares
In 1975, Rielly Stares was born in the Canadian town of Kingston, Ontario. She attended Queen's University and since then has been working and writing in Kingston. Some of her artwork was chosen for inclusion in the Queen's University Human Rights Office Mosaic in 2011.
Rielly was a writer for the now on hiatus Cinematica, the official blog of the Screening Room movie theatre in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of a short pamphlet about journal-writing entitled Charting the Course of the Muse: Systematic Journal-Writing for Flying Minds, Writers, Artists, and Innovators which she self-published in 2015.
In 2010 the highly respected Kingston poet and writer Rose De Shaw listed Rielly Stares as a poet who "must be considered" in a long list for the job of Poet Laureate in Kingston.
Other publications include four poems and artwork featured in various anthologies, and nine poems with The City the great poetry magazine from Cincinatti, OH in (2007) http://www.thecitypoetry.com.
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Hail, Caesar! (2016)
HAIL, CAESAR! THE COEN BROTHERS' TRIBUTE TO OLD HOLLYWOOD
This is review I wrote for Hail, Caesar! for CINEMATICA, The Screening Room's movie blog! It was one of my favourite movies of the last six months. It's a beautiful thing! Here is the link to the article on the CINEMATICA website.
Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail, Caesar! has arrived at the Screening Room and is another excellent demonstration of the filmmakers' ability to deftly present sprawling casts of interesting personages in a character-driven tightly-woven script. There is so much to know about this, their latest film. The value of the experience is partially in an awareness of its dense historical and cinematic references. Hail, Caesar! comes off as light-hearted, which it is essentially, but the message of this very film is actually very sophisticated, thoughtful, and deftly presented. It is, incidentally, only one of two Coen Brothers in which nobody dies, the other movie being Inside Llewyn Davis. Costing an estimated $22 million to make and bringing in gross profit of over $29 million as of March 11th, 2016, I'm sure that Universal pictures hoped for a greater immediate financial result, but my guess is that Hail, Caesar! will eventually generate increasing interest and recognition, especially among fans of the Coen brothers. As well as being a movie for people who know and love movies, it is a gorgeous document of a specific period in Hollywood, presenting a stunning amount of visual information about film history in a very short amount of time. The filmmakers have used this production to commendably reproduce a cluster of once popular and now vanished cinematic devices and elements: The film captivatingly spins from one set to another, from one movie to another as we experience life in a major Hollywood studio in the 1950s and get glimpses of many of its productions. As the Coen brothers like to do, they shot the entire movie on 35mm film instead of digital and in some instances they tried to recreate the shooting methods that would have been used in the 1950s as much as they could. According to the film website IMDb, this film references, visually, musically, or choreographically, and/or verbally at least twenty-six movies including Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, South Pacific, Vertigo, Ben Hur, Barry Lyndon, and Monty Python's Life of Brian. I have discovered more references than this in the writing of this article. Also, the inclusion of pieces of Hollywood history are rich and pervasive.
THE "FIXER"
Essentially this film is a day in the life Eddie (Edward) Mannix, a Hollywood "fixer," a somewhat coarse studio executive (played by Josh Brolin) answering to the off camera head of the studio named Nick Skank, a subtle nod to Joe Schenck who was the head of 20th Century Fox in the 1950s. In the film, Eddie Mannix covers up legal and personal embarrassments of celebrities on behalf of a major Hollywood company. In the story this character is drawn as a short-tempered man who is a dedicated employee of the fictional Capitol Pictures and a devoted Catholic.
This protagonist is loosely based on a real ex-bouncer and producer, and vice-president Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer "Eddie" (Edgar Joseph) Mannix, who was also known as a Hollywood "fixer". The real Eddie Mannix was only pious in the keeping-up-appearance way that kept him from getting a divorce when both he and his wife were both seeing other people. In fact, he was a shadowy, brutal fellow with ties to the mafia. The real-life Mannix was instrumental in "fixing" numerous real-life publicity problems for MGM. He kept top-box office star of the 1930s, William Haines' numerous gay affairs out of the press, and tracked down and destroyed a pornographic film that starred an underage Joan Crawford, for example. And similar to how Hail, Caesar! shows the fictional Mannix covering up a pregnancy out of wedlock for the Scarlett Johannson character, the real Eddie Mannix was responsible for setting up a scheme for star Loretta Young to publicly adopt a child who was secretly her own. Mannix also reputedly helped Spencer Tracy get out of a charge for having sex with a minor, and "fixed" Clark Gable out of a drunk driving hit-and-run incident.
On the more edgy side of things, Mannix is also rumoured to have been involved with the mysterious deaths of Jean Harlow's second husband, his own first wife Bernice Mannix toward whom he was physically abusive, and his second wife's lover, George Reeves, whom Mannix is rumoured to have killed for Reeves having broken up with her. This aspect of Eddie Mannix is explored in the 2006 film Hollywoodland starring Ben Affleck as George Reeves the real actor who played Superman in the old television series The Adventures of Superman in the '50s. In Hollywoodland Bob Hoskins plays Mannix.
END OF THE GOLDEN AGE
According to an interview with Joel and Ethan about the film, however, the real character of Eddie Mannix was not a key consideration to the story. It was more important to them to use this film to showcase an emblematic period in Hollywood history that is known as the end of the "Golden Age of Hollywood." The end of the "Golden Age" precipitated from a historical U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1948. The verdict was an antitrust ruling against Paramount Pictures prohibiting studios from forcing theatres to buy films in blocks. "Block Bidding" meant that, in order to get the more profitable films, theatres had to buy many other films that they otherwise may not want. This landmark verdict severely limited the profit-making ability of the film industry. Block bidding had been happening since the depression in the 1930s when the industry was struggling to stay afloat; and subsequently - especially since the beginning of WWII - it had made the studios very wealthy, hence the flowering in film that was called "The Golden Age of Hollywood."
The consequence of the end of the "studio system" was that the major studio were suddenly much more interested in investing a lot of money in fewer films with mass appeal rather than creating many second-rate films that they were no longer able to force the theatres to buy. This resulted in huge movies with enormous casts, and highly populated dance sequences. Moreover, movies were suddenly being crammed with all kinds of entertainment, tried-and-true familiarity. The stakes were becoming higher still since the post-WWII emergence of home television, which was expected to become a threat to the movie industry.
Hail, Caesar! captures the spirit of this time period with great dedication, recreating wildly complex aquatic synchronized swimming displays, intricately choreographed dance sequences, huge biblical epic marches, and reality-defying cowboy gunplay and acrobatics. It was also more important than ever after the end of the "studio system" for the industry to protect the reputations of their valuable celebrity assets so that they could continue to bring audiences to the box office, hence the importance of minimizing bad publicity with the use of "fixers".
BEAUTIFUL REMINISCENCES
One outstanding example Hail, Caesar!'s excellently-realized reminiscences of this time period is of this is a singing and tap-dancing sailor sequence led by Channing Tatum's character, Burt Gurney. The cute sailor costumes are identical to those in the 1949 Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra shore-leave film On the Town. Gene Kelly was the lead choreographer in many of his films and insisted on being shot from head to toe when he was dancing, and this type of camera shot is employed by the Coen brothers in the excellent, complicated, and increasingly homerotic dancing sequence to a song called "No Dames" about how life on the sea is devoid of women. "We may see a moy-maid, But moy-maids got no yams! No yaaaaaaaams!"
Another commendable and beautiful reminiscence involves Scarlett Johannson's character, DeAnna Moran, who is a swimming movie star. Moran is based on the legendary Esther Williams, who was an Olympian swimmer picked up by MGM when the Olympics were cancelled in 1940 because of WWII. MGM made Williams into a huge star at the studio through famous and dizzyingly beautiful "water ballet" pool sequences that were created by the brilliant choreographer Busby Berkeley. The Coen brothers shot Scarlett Johansson's pool sequence in Hail, Caesar! in the Esther Williams pool that still exists at Sony Pictures with the same complex geometric synchronized motion, high-platform diving, and underwater dancing that Busby Berkeley was famous for directing.
Hail, Caesar! also hilariously recreates an admirable gunfighting drama centering on the character of the fictional cowboy star Hobie Doyle. This segment shows an old-Hollywood western, complete with dubious stunts involving horses and gunplay as well as rope tricks, which reportedly involved much one-on-one onsite training with rodeo coaches.
The fictional picture for which Hail, Caesar! is named is the one starring the George Clooney character, Baird Whitlock, specifically entitled Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ, a reference to the early film Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). The Coen brothers concoct a huge Roman epic similar of the Ben Hur of 1959. In an an interview about the film, the Coens say that they watched the battle scenes of the biblical epics that came out in old Hollywood and reverse-engineered the look and feel of them, using the same camera angles and set construction in order to recreate the atmosphere. They said that the unique look of the old epic desert films was sometimes due to the limitations of the older equipment, and that without these limitations - that is working with the new equipment of today - there would be no reason to make the same film choices, which is an interesting discussion in itself.
Painted Land: In Search of the Group of Seven (2015)
In Search of the Group of Seven
I wrote this article about the new documentary entitled Painted Land: In Search of the Group of Seven for Cinematica, the official blog of the Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario and was published on November 11, 2015. Follow this link to the Cinematica site. If you wish to watch this documentary it is available for free through the TVO website through this link.
On November 14th & November 15th at 1pm and 4pm, The Screening Room is showing a new 2015 film entitled Painted Land: In Search of the Group of Seven. Excitingly, producers Nancy Lang and Peter Raymont (a Queen's alumni!) will be on hand on Saturday to give a talks to accompany the screenings.
By 1913 six coworkers at the design company Grip Inc. in Toronto, who were also painters, Tom Thomson, J. E. H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston and Franklin Carmichael, were accustomed to sharing their paintings with each other at the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. That year, because they were on the lookout for new artists whose work excited them, they invited A.Y. Jackson from Montreal, and Lawren Harris from Vancouver to join them. This was the group of eight artists that was later to become the Group of Seven. To give a cosmopolitan perspective to things, Picasso had yet to exhibit his first cubist painting - Picasso's latest known works at the time were from the rose period; the impressionists had shaken the European art world to its core from the 1870s to the 1890s; a new century had begun and with it had come the death of the long-reigning and era-defining Queen Victoria. Everything seemed very new. Electricity was fairly new, photography was fairly new. A new feeling in art was stirring in Europe and the United States, and it was stirring in Canada too.
Adding to the romance of this story, in 1917, four years later, Tom Thomson, a founding member of this group of eight, who had begun to transition from a designer to a full-time painter by then, died in Algonquin Park on a summer painting expedition. In the years before he died he was producing his now most famous works and working out of a little utility shack in Rosedale in Toronto on the grounds of a larger artists' studio. Although the coronor did not say so, it has been suspected since his death that the 39 year old Tom Thomson was murdered by a friend. Speculated motives range from that Thomson impregnated someone, to that Thomson slept with his friend's wife, or that the murderer owed Thomson a debt he could not repay.
Tom Thomson is acknowledged as an extremely sensitive and beautiful artist. He was influenced by European impressionists but also, strangely enough given that his primary subject was Canadian landscape, by art deco. Some of his work puts him on the leading edge of abstract art in Canada. He was also very attractive man and clearly loved by his fellow painters, who were galvanized by his loss. Tom Thomson's death struck a note in the hearts of his friends that deepened an already accumulating feeling that this group of men had something to say with their art about nature and the Canadian landscape that was unique to the world and that life was too short to waste time. In 1920, the remaining seven members of the group, three years after the death of the beloved Tom Thomson, exhibited for the first time, having the self-awareness and self-importance to present themselves as "The Group of Seven." There were a couple of additions and subtractions to the group, but it remained remarkably cohesive until the end.
One of the things that makes the Canadian landscape interesting is that, at the wrong time and place, the landscape can be deadly. Also, the wilderness is so vast in comparison with the settled areas. The painters in the Group of Seven variously translate these feelings by conveying their intense respect for the landscape and nature in different kinds of majestic, special, often magical, deep, sometimes harrowing, and iconic images. Placing the Group of Seven into the context of world art history is a process that is still ongoing. It was only in 2012 there was a show in South London at the Dulwich Picture Gallery called Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, which was the most important exhibit of its kind to that date. Also significant, just a few weeks ago in Los Angeles the Hammer Gallery opened a show of a single member of the Group of Seven. Lawren Harris' work entitled The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, which is the first major show of Harris' work or any Group of Seven work so far in the United States. This exhibit was organized between the Hammer Gallery and the AGO and is the brainchild of American actor, writer, and art collector, Steve Martin, who was also the curator. It will go on until January 2016. In interviews about this landmark show, Martin explains that Canadian law is prohibitive of masterworks being sold or even moved across international borders. In order to do either a committee be consulted who must agree to let a painting go. It is difficult, therefore, for a person who does not live in Canada to buy our best art, and quite a bit of work to exhibit it. Therefore great Canadian art has not been circulating in the auctions in world art centres like New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris. Partly because of this, Martin speculates, important Canadian artists such as Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven including Lawren Harris have been largely isolated from the discussion that the rest of the world has been having about the art of the 20th Century.
In Canada, however the fervour for The Group of Seven is ardent and legendary. Even Canadians who don't know anything about art have at least heard the term "The Group of Seven." I think at it's basis this is a credit to the intensity of these artists who felt charged during their lifetimes to stake their claim on a grand legacy. In continuation of lives fueled from this intensity, the grandeur is further evidenced by the fact that that six of the seven men have been ceremoniously buried together in the McMichael Cemetary in Kleinberg, Ontario along with their wives, on a hill near the McMichael Gallery within sight of a shack that Tom Thomson used as a studio. One of the members, Frank Johnston, and his wife was disinterred in order to be re-buried there. The husband and wife founders of the McMichael gallery, Robert and Signe McMichael, are also buried there. Each of the graves is fittingly marked by a huge slab of granite cut from the Canadian shield.
I'm really excited to see how this film will add to an already present awareness of these important artists in Canada, and to the accessibility of the story or The Group of Seven and other significant Canadian artists and their work internationally.
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016)
Werner Herzog Sings The Body Electric: His documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
This article"Werner Herzog Sings The Body Electric: His new documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World" was published September , 2016 at CINEMATICA, the blog associated with The Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario. Here is a link to the original article.
"I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul."
- Walt Whitman
Werner Herzog is the internationally lauded and immensely prolific filmmaker who directed the documentaries Grizzly Man (2005) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (a 2010 3D celebration of the Chauvet cave containing ancient on its walls in France); and a raft of raw, intense, heavy fictional films, including Queen of the Desert (a 2015 film starring Nicole Kidman about the adventurer/write Gertrude Bell), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1977). Of the over fifty films he's made (and counting) many are considered among the finest films every made. Herzog is also a steady and hard-working director in the world of opera and theatre, a writer and poet, and an actor. He has started his own film school and is a generous and tireless pedagogue who uses any and all opportunities to teach others what he knows and what he believes is important. Of all the things he does, Herzog says that the prose and poetry he has written probably has deeper and lasting cultural relevance than anything, including any of his films and he speaks frequently about the importance of fostering the poetic spirit for any kind of artistic endeavour, including and especially filmmaking.
A discussion of his work must also include this director's "true grit" and his restless preference for most extreme settings, most extreme physical feats (usually of endurance) whilst filmmaking, and most extreme subject matter. The appreciation of Herzog's poetic spirit and his spectacularly adventurous and extremes-seeking nature, I think, is part of what binds Herzog's fans to him, of which there are many. Francois Truffaut, himself acknowledged as one of the greatest, called him "the most important film director alive." With his characteristic stark acknowledgement of reality and bravado Werner Herzog also joins the expression of enthusiasm of his own talents. When attending a forum at the Producers Guild of America in conjunction with the release of Lo and Behold, Herzog said: "I believe that not only was I the best choice for this: I was the only choice." He cited his curiosity and the fact that he is a vast reader and says this makes him a critical and conceptual thinker adequate for the task of considering the internet at its impact on humanity. I think Herzog's relative unfamiliarity with the internet and his unusual upbringing in a remote German village without any running water, electricity, or telephones make him a unique candidate to lead an investigation into the most significant and far-reaching technological development of our time. He's after all in the position of witnessing our rapid unfolding of technological advancement because he realizes what it is like to live with the very basic level of technology that most of humanity experienced for most of history. To a person who made his first phone call at the age of 19 as Herzog did, the last 80 years of developments in technology must seem all part of the same wonder - or more exactly rephrased - they must seem all part of the wonder that they truly are. Indeed, the lofty and prophetic title of this film Lo and Behold is meant to underscore the wondrousness of the subject matter and to acknowledge the actual and important dawning of a vastly unique era for humanity. It's also referring to "LO" the first internet message ever sent in UCLA in 1969, which was going to be "LOG" before an unexpected failure of the equipment.
At the time of the release of Lo and Behold Werner Herzog called himself a beginner with regard to the technology about which he was reflecting. "I understand the basics conceptually but I'm still a novice," he said about his facility with the internet at the Producer's Guild of America. During an interview with Ben Makuch of VICE Herzog entertainingly and with self-awareness revealed his at-the-time patchy knowledge about the internet. He recounts to Makuch that after having participated in a podcast someone suggested that he google it once it was posted, to which Herzog asked how he would "hack" into Google to do such a thing and how for minutes afterward the room was seized hopelessly with irrepressible and wordless fits of laughter. No one who has ever used Google would refer to the act in that manner. It's clear that embarking on this project Herzog was secure in what is actually his historically and perennially preferred filmmaking perspective: that of being a stranger in a strange land. I hope now that this film has been made, Werner Herzog can take time to explore the internet and discover how he really feels about it when it's up close and a daily facet of his life. Although I'm sure he believes his "fresh eyes" approach served his purposes, I'm curious about what he would actually think about his subject if he had the same level of usership on it as someone like me, and how he would specifically feel about Facebook and Twitter and Youtube etc. if he were to actually know them and experience them on a daily basis. He made it clear in his VICE interview that he is aware that there are Twitter and Facebook accounts under his name, but that they are made by "imposters" and not authorized by him.
Throughout the film, Herzog's conversation perspectives of the internet are only representative of a technical or scientific view of the internet (curiously heavy on nightmare science-fiction scenerios) or with those highly-antagonistic to the internet. The personal opinion that Herzog in the end seems to convey is that the internet may be a miracle, but that it may be just as well avoided altogether. I can detect from watching interviews about this film that at times Herzog seemed pleased in some ways to be so far away from the enchantment and - for himself and his work - still largely living in a pre-internet environment of his own preservation.
This project began when the production company Netscout offered him a commission to do five short films about the internet. Herzog says it became clear within days that the scope of the project would be much larger. He says that Netscout easily assented to all expansion and to his delight, continued to give him freedom to pursue it in any way he pleased. His modus operandi was to set up a series of meetings with experts and interesting characters. He admits that in general he shoots relatively little footage compared with other filmmakers for any project he embarks upon. In the end this time he shot about 28 hours of footage mostly in Los Angeles and Chicago and Pittsburgh to make the finished product of 1 hour 38 minutes. About his methods for capturing good footage quickly, he explained in his talk at The Producer's Guild of America (whose audience was populated with many young filmmakers) that in all the films in which he uses "talking heads" footage, he that he doesn't do interviews, but he "conducts conversations." He does not have a catalogue of questions and likes to arrive completely unprepared. He gets a quick sense of the person he's dealing with and forms a natural rapport. Herzog emphasizes that in order to be able to have a rapport with others they must be worldly and to read widely: "You learn about the world and reading that gives you access to the rapport and thoughtfulness. If you want to learn how to do it - have real conversations with real people, expose yourself to the world where it is raw stark-naked and intense. That will make it easy for you to have a decent conversation on camera."
The students in his charge at his film school, Rogue Film School (est. 2009) are probably well-used to such admonishments. According to Wikipedia "The program is a 4-day seminar with Herzog, which occurs annually (the last of which was held in March, 2016 in Munich). Courses include "the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance." For the students, Herzog has said, "I prefer people who have worked as bouncers in a sex club, or have been wardens in the lunatic asylum. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia." In an appearance on a UK television debate program called Intelligence Squared Herzog states: "The poet, the filmmaker, the musician... must not avert his eyes. We should not be sitting in the library and study it as an academic subject. I think the poet has to live a real, solid, pure, raw life out there in life itself." He goes onto say that the poet must even observe and try to understand all aspects of culture - even the most base and vulgar.
In this film, Herzog brings us interviews with scientists, computer experts, technologists, robotics engineers, and game-designing microbiologists, and he also features the stories of ordinary people with extraordinary relationships to the internet like internet and video game addicts and others who live without the internet for other reasons.