Day: December 26, 2006

Whereabout 12-26 to 1-7

This “officially” a vacation week for me, the last of 2006, but I am of course staying close by email and the cellphone and working on a presentation for the first week of the New Year.

12.26: Cotuit, doctor’s appointment re: back

12.27: Boston, mother-in-law to Logan for flight back to San Francisco

12.28: local roadtrip, R&R

12.29-1.1: Cape Cod, New Year’s Eve

1.2: Massachusetts to RTP

1.3.-1.5 RTP for meetings, move into new office

1.6-1.7: weekend in Cotuit

No major international trips planned in January. Just business-as-usual back and forths from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Holiday Cotuit Film Festival – Fires on the Plain/The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Two down, forty-eight to go in Eliot’s Xmas gift — The Essential Art House — 50 Years of Janus Films.

He started me off with Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 Fires on the Plain, (Nobi) a grueling Japanese war film about the horrors endured by a Japanese soldier trying to survive the final days on Leyte in the Phillipines. I have never seen a war picture as unflinching and brutal.

“It is the Philipines, 1945. The Japanese Imperial Army has been reduced to a ragtag mob hiding in the jungles. Among them is Pvt. Tamura. The situation goes from bad to worse and in the face of the brutal conditions facing the men, some go insane and resort to murder and cannibalism. In the midst of this, Pvt. Tamura tries to survive without giving up his principles.”

That was followed by a Technicolor antithesis — The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp — the 1943 story by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger of Clive Candy, the quintessential stiff-upper lipped British Army officer. The film follows the arc of his career from the Boer War to the Home Guard in WW II. The writing and wit was superb. Even though the film could be regarded as semi-propaganda coming as it did in the midst of the war, it paints a picture of service and devotion to country that is stereotypical today, but interesyting in the sense that this is the film that defined the cliche.
More films today, but with some moderation so I don’t completely go the way of the couch potato. I am still having serious back issues and have to restrict my sitting time, especially when I sprawl and let my posture go to hell. Off to the neurologist this afternoon for some more tests and consultations.

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