Trees and Jack

Yesterday, Bow and I went down to Monterey to do a home assessment visit for a nice family wanting to adopt this basenji-boy named Jack from Michigan. They have been approved, and he should soon be making his trip out west. He sounds like a very nice boy, and I hope I might get to meet him someday. Bow was on her best behavior for the trip, and she especially enjoyed exploring the Monterey beaches and marina.

One of my favorite parts of the journey down is driving through The Avenue of Tall Trees, a quarter mile stretch of towering eucalyptuses that appear just before the climax of Vertigo. There has always been something mysterious about this stretch of the 101, and I'm not sure why. I've always wanted to walk through it and learn its history. There doesn't seem to be much on the web about it.

Aficionados of Vertigo and California geography know that there is a continuity goof in the film which implies that one drives through this grove when heading south from San Francisco to San Juan Bautistsa when, in fact, it's a few miles south of the town. It's featured in the book and website Footsteps in the Fog about Hitchcock's northern California films, but not many details are provided.
Trees figure prominently in Vertigo, first Muir Woods and then in the Avenue of Tall Trees. I've wondered if there is an Internet movie tree database. How many movies are there were trees play a leading role? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, of course, Gorillas in the Mist to a degree and in the climax of The Fox. I remember dozing off on a flight during one of those dreadful Harry Pottery Barn movies where a possessed tree was a character, but a CGI tree, I suspect, so that doesn't count. I don't think tree movie stars are as big as they were in the golden age. Perhaps that's why Barbara Walters asked that notorious "What kind of tree are you" question to Katherine Hepburn. What an insult to all those oaks and firs out there. They would never use all the quirks and melodrama of Hepburn.

Felt Just After 8

Nearly a dozen years here, and this was the first time I absolutely felt one. I was sure that it was the funky plumbing upstairs again but heard no water when that familiar feeling came, though this time with the windows humming. I switched from Kind of Blue to KQED but heard nothing for sure until a good 45 minutes later. Hearing a wave (as I did) and not a jolt is reason to stay calm and a sign you're 45 miles aways from the epicenter as I was. I'd already forgotten about it until deciding to watch the 11 p.m. news. There is seismic activity in the Pyrenees too.

More Things That Happened

So what's up with all those damned rabbits? First What's the Matter with Helen? and now this. I really don't like or dislike rabbits, but I was very fond of the Uncle Wiggily series as a child.

Junk Thief may be your go to spot for junk and crime but not for pithy reviews of what is hot and current in the arts. I've been really slow in getting around to watching and commenting on my ever mounting stacks of DVDs, let alone weekly stash of books. But over the past week I finally got around to watching two seemingly unrelated, but oddly criss crossing and equally frustrating (for very different) DVD releases.


Let's start with the obviously frustrating one, David Lynch's Inland Empire. Supposedly people are hot or cold with Lynch. I've been both, loving him in the early to mid-1980s, throwing my hands in the air after about the third appearance of the log lady and slowly coming back to him. Supposedly he's a Rorschach test for his viewers, and if I can approach his work without trying to find meaning, I can accept it. A lot of people said that Inland Empire will turn off his non-fans, but it actually won me back. I think I had trouble with the films that tried to lace in his weirdness in conventional story lines. This one is weird to the core and works for me as a result. I'm not going to try to figure out what those damned bunnies are about except maybe an Uncle Wiggily story gone wrong, gone really wrong.

The DVD packaging and format is Lynchesque itself. No director's commentary or even chapters on the main disc but lots of information on how to light your room and adjust the contrast on your set. Not sure how to make quinoa? Well, mine always tastes just fine, but Dave gave a handy little demonstration, allowing time for a weird story about a Yugoslavian girl having her first Coke in Vienna and trouble with the carbination while he has a smoke and glass of red wine on the porch. I have the same problems too.

I'm not even going to get into any analysis of the story and what it meant to me since I think I'll remember the film because of lighting, sound design, random images. However, in the deleted scene extras called "More Things That Happened", Laura Dern's white trash character has a hilarious story about her sister forcing her to keep all of her stuff on one shelf at the bottom of the refrigerator. This character reminded me that in my Midwest-rooted family, the really trashy ones migrated to the Inland Empire and had kids with names like Tawana and Billy Ray while those that stayed behind had fancy tea parties and behaved like Connecticut gentry, clenched teeth accent and all.

Seemingly unrelated, and radically different in style and causes for frustration is Zodiac, I've always had trouble David Fincher's films because it seemed to make the killers the most interesting, complex characters and the victims worthy of their fate if only for being dull. And his stylishness seemed to be too self-obsessed. Zodiac feels more like Sidney Lumet in his prime. I usually groan at movies longer than 88 minutes, but I could have sat through this story for another two hours the way I did with Lumet classics like Prince of the City. It is a dense, action packed, complex and compelling story. It is stylish but also very straight forward. It may have even restored my faith in CGI. I assume that's what is used for the fantastic recreation of the construction of the Transamerica Pyramid. If that's the case it's a much better use of the craft than those stupid monsters in the insufferably overlong King Kong or Lord of the Rings movies.

What I'd dreaded in the film was the violence. I can rarely sit through any violent movie, especially in a theater. I chuckled at my fear when the MPAA rating warned that the film contained "strong killings", which I think is up there with being sort of pregnant. Fortunately those strong killings represent less than one percent of the screen time. They focus more on the victims and are mercifully brief in their explicit depiction of the act itself.

I liked that there was not a single, clear cut hero, no one coming to the rescue and that solving the murders was a complex, group process never fully resolved. If the true killer is the person that is implied, what is most spooky is how utterly banal the man is. A dull, probably bored man with so little respect for life -- not some colorful raving madman.

The attention to production details was amazing. The costumes, for example, were always convincingly from the era and a reminder that not every in the 1970s wore apricot leisure suits with long winged collared sparkly shirts.

What weaved these two films, set in opposite ends of California, is the mild evil lurking around the brightly lit corners of the state.

What was especially frustrating about the Zodiac DVD release is its absolute lack of extras. Chapters, language selection and nothing else. Such a complex dense and fact based story screams out for survivor interviews, commentary and more. Though the sound and visual quality are excellent, I hope a worthy re-release of this is on the horizon soon.

Sorry to cut this post short, but I am going to see if those girls hanging out on the corner want to come in and join me in dancing to The Loco-Motion. Then they might want to join me in watching the first 22 episodes of Maude with me.