1. The Criterion issued six Blu-ray box set of movies produced by BBS entitled America Lost and Found arrived today and I am fired up. I immediately got out the box set's booklet entitled The BBS Story and began to thumb through it. If you are at all familiar with movies issued on DVD/Blu-ray by Criterion, you know that they issue superb essays with the movies (this parallels all the insightful material available at www.criterion.com). I turned immediately to the essay by Graham Fuller written about The Last Picture Show.
Now, I already knew that Peter Bogdanovitch (died in Jan 2022) was one of cinema's eminent film historians, but only in a general way. This essay unfolds Bogdanovitch's debt to director John Ford as well as the homage he pays to Ford in the making of The Last Picture Show.
Ah!
This was just what I wanted to learn and now, since I haven't watched many John Ford movies, I'm going to watch some, if not all, the movies Graham Fuller cites in his article, and see if these movies deepen my appreciation for The Last Picture Show.
If we Westminster Basementeers agree to watch The Last Picture Show and talk about the movie over ZOOM, who knows? Maybe I'll learn a thing or two worth sharing with the others.
2. After looking at the box set's booklet, I put The King of Marvin Gardens in the Blu-ray player and watched the disc's supplemental material.
I watched interviews, mostly with director Bob Rafelson, but the material also included parts of interviews with the movie's Director of Photography, Laszlo Kovacs, actors Bruce Dern and Ellyn Burstyn, and others. I also watched an video piece just over an hour long of Rafelson's commentary on specific scenes from the movie.
Listening to these interviews and this commentary broadened and deepened my understanding and appreciation for how the movie was made and how Bob Rafelson worked with Laszlo Kovacs and with the movie's actors. When I watch movies, often my first impulse is to try to sort out the movie's meaning, especially its philosophical or political substance. I am still thinking hard about what The King of Marvin Gardens invites its viewers to think about. But learning more about how Rafelson wanted scenes to be shot, about the extraordinary work Kovacs did with lighting and framing, and learning more about how the actors, both in rehearsal or by improvisation, brought specific scenes to life fascinated me.
The King of Marvin Gardens is about being lost in America. It's about loss, isolation, alienation, delusion, and the intoxicating make believe qualities of the American Dream when lived out as a fantasy.
Learning more about the production of the movie strengthened my understanding of the ideas it explores.
Today I also took a break from studying movies from the 1970s and watched the first two parts of 30 for 30's four part documentary entitled, Once Upon a Time in Queens. It's the wild story of the rise of the New York Mets in the mid-1980s, culminating in their 1986 World Series victory. It's also the story of the seeds of demise that existed within the Mets right alongside the greatness that made these Mets such a powerful baseball team.
3. I arrived at family dinner with a head full of baseball and movie history and three Heidelberg beers in hand for Christy. I poured myself a glass of tonight's cocktail, Bobby Flay's Mediterranean Lemonade, and eased out of the Vizio room and into the present moment, seated for family dinner on Christy's back deck.
Christy served dried tomato crostini with salmon dip as an appetizer and in a short while we all filed into Christy's kitchen and made ourselves a ranch bacon pulled chicken sandwich. Christy had combined chicken breast, cream cheese, a packet of ranch dressing mix, and bacon in her crockpot and we put this pulled chicken on a potato bun. Debbie made a cabbage, cucumber, and dill salad and after we finished our dinner, we ate Carol's cherry crisp for dessert.
I don't handle heat well, especially as I age. I hoped Christy's deck wouldn't be too hot and it wasn't! She ran a fan, which helped, and we were out of the sun which was good. We didn't get together until six o'clock and I think that made a difference, too, because from six o'clock on, the temperature got gradually cooler and cooler.
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