1917

Movies, Photographers

A masterpiece of cinematography.

In his enthralling thriller of 1948 Rope, Alfred Hitchcock used the ‘One Take’ artifice to add spice to a story of two psychopaths who murder a friend for fun. A perfect John Dall leads a cast with Jimmy Stewart and Farley Granger in what purports to be a movie shot in one take. In practice a roll of movie film ran some 12-15 minutes back then and Hitch cleverly changes reels by zooming in on the back of one of the participants, freezes the frame, and inserts a new roll in the camera. It’s pretty seamless and coaxes the actors into stage quality performances as there can be no retakes.

British cinematographer Roger Deakins had no such constraints in the making of the 2019 classic 1917 whose two hour length is also shot in one take. And the result is positively hypnotic. Deakins is no stranger to readers of this journal and for an extensive survey of his work you should go here. After a multi-year Oscar drought – what are those Academy members thinking of? – Roger has now garnered two Oscars in as many years for his camera work, and looking at 1917 it’s hard to see how anything could compete. Here’s to many more Oscars for the master.




Roger Deakins. The master at work.

Monsoon season

Photographs

In Scottsdale.

‘Monsoon season’ is the hype used to describe the few rainy days here at the end of July. In practice that means a few bursts of intense rain and the occasional flash of lightning, invariably in the middle of the night.

But the sunsets are worthy of anything that Turner or Constable conjured up.





iPhone 11 Pro.

Jeff Bezos

Photographs

Saver of lives.

We constantly read about how badly Amazon warehouse employees are treated, yet we never read how many hundreds of thousands of lives Jeff Bezos has saved.

He has done this by making low risk grocery shopping possible for old people. People like me.




Winston unpacks our weekly Amazon Fresh contactless delivery.

But there’s an even greater long-term contribution which is in the reduction of airborne pollution. Every Prime van takes 50 cars off the road and a couple of malls close. Both are major polluters.

Of course, the politics of envy dictate that the masses resent his vast wealth and forget the 15 years of struggle he had before Amazon even turned a profit.

And none of those complainers got two 4.0 degrees from Princeton University.

Ennio

Movies

A giant passes.

It’s no accident that many of the greatest movies made include the credit “Music: Ennio Morricone” and, indeed, one easy way of watching the best of the best is to simply search on that statement.

The Italian master died today, aged 91, further proof that there is no God. Were that the case we would not have scum in #10 and in the Oval Office, and Ennio would still be happily composing.

It’s hard to know where to begin when speaking of his music, a visual style which probably originated with Prokofiev and his story telling “Romeo & Juliet” score. But Ennio was unconstrained by traditional instruments as even a casual listener will hear in his “Man with no name” Eastwood/Leone trilogy of westerns, movies which redefined the Western genre and made a star of Clint Eastwood. The famous theme in “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” is played on an ocarina, and the sound track includes whip cracks and various other artifacts of a western life. Move on to “Once Upon a Time in the West“, the definitive American western, also directed by Sergio Leone, and you have the pan pipe theme which defines the gunman on a mission, Charles Bronson. The comedic offset, Jason Robards, is represented by a honky tonk theme whereas Jill, the whore with a heart of gold, is portrayed in soaring magnificence, never more than when exiting the new railroad station to a rising camera which literally shows how the west was won. It’s called the railroad. Ennio was to repeat the pan pipe theme in the early, childhood section of “Once Upon a Time in America”, again helmed by Leone, a long retelling of the Jewish mob’s rise to prominence in prohibition New York.

And Ennio was not just about expressionist excess. Take a listen to his score for “Cinema Paradiso”, the telling of a young boy’s discovery of the cinema or, better yet, what is probably the master’s greatest composition, the score for “The Mission” which documents in searing detail the fight between Brazilian and Portugese colonists for the heart of the Guarani tribe and establishment of what we now know as Brazil. (The Portugese won, as the native language of the Brazilians discloses).




Jeremy Irons plays the main theme of ‘The Mission’ on the oboe.

Watch some Ennio and see what great movie music is about.