Did you see Man of Steel? I did. I liked it well enough for a summer blockbuster, but as usual, the Batman movie was way better. All of them. This is as it should be. Below is not a full review of the movie, but a discussion of a very specific issue that occurs in it.
Storytelling Through Movement
I saw Scott Pilgrm Vs. The World yesterday. I won’t do a full scale review of it, but I will say that it’s an awesomely fun movie. There was one fight scene that reminded me of a film I saw at a Terra Cotta Warriors Kung Fu Film Festival last winter that I wanted to post about but forgot.
The movie is called . . . wait for it . . . Dirty Ho. Gotta love unintentionally hilarious translations. The scene below may have been the inspiration for the one in Scott Pilgrim where the lead character is “led” by his romantic interest in his fight against one of her evil Ex’s.
Swingtime Abridged
Woefully behind on the blog between the upcoming Big Big Benefit for Laurie Gilkenson and ILHC. Which is a good hing I have a bunch of old writings stockpiled for this sort of occasion. I'll have some stuff up about Camp Jitterbug, updates on ILHC, and try to dig into my backlog of cool videos as soon as I can. The Atomic Ballroom blog put up a nice top 10 list of ballroom dance sequences in vintage films. It lists quite a few Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire sequences including two from the film Swingtime. Although I am disappointed that they didn’t include the finale to that film, “Never Gonna Dance,” which I consider their best performance, period. Anyway, it reminded me of this post I originally put up as a note on my Facebook profile a couple of years ago.
Echoes of a Revolution
In 1965, long before coming to Capitol Hill, future Congressman John Lewis led 600 people on a march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama to question Governor George C. Wallace's role in subverting black voting rights in his state. Wallace is the same man who less than a year before famously declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Having already been beaten several times from participating in the Freedom Rides and numerous other marches throughout the South, Lewis crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge into a wall of state troopers. So bent on conflict, those officers had already donned their gas masks and had their billy clubs at the ready. They had every intention of kicking Lewis’s ass. Not only did he and the marchers keep going forward to meet them, but they did so with no intention of fighting back.
Congressman Lewis still bears scars from that day now remembered as Bloody Sunday.