1. Carol and Paul had a big day at church this morning and asked me to come over to their house and sit with Christy while they were gone. I'm happy to say that Christy is recovering very well from her surgery. She is managing her pain, getting up and walking around (with her walker), keeping her oxygen levels where they should be, and is making good use of her time of convalescence by preparing Christmas cards to send. From where I sat, blogging, hydrating, poking around online, and being available if Christy had any difficulties (she didn't), it looked like Christy's post-operation situation was moving in a positive direction.
Next up: Monday morning I'll drive Christy to the Fitness/Therapy Center and she'll resume physical therapy which promises to help move her further toward being recovered and back on her feet again.
2. Debbie went out to school for a little while today and then visited puppies at Diane's house.
I returned to the watching another Hal Hartley movie. I started watching Henry Fool several weeks ago and the time was right to finish it today.
This is the fourth full-length movie of Hal Hartley's I've watched. He's an independent screenwriter and director whose movies play at film festivals and art houses. While Harltley's movies are not widely popular, he has an avid, if relatively small, following and I guess I'm about ready to say that I've jumped on the Hal Hartley bandwagon.
Hartley consciously writes movies in a non-natural style. People in everyday life don't talk like Hartley's characters, don't have the kinds of conversations they do, so in that way Hartley's screenwriting is, to me, kind of throwback to plays, like Shakespeare's, written in verse. Hartley's screenplays aren't written in verse, but, in the best sense of the word, they are artificial. Likewise, Hartley writes stories that, on the surface, would never happen in everyday life. They aren't fantasy movies. In fact, the Hartley movies I've watched so far involve people without much money or many resources living stressful lives in very modest homes, working low paying jobs (if they are working). Hartley creates situations for them that work to reveal their inner lives in sometimes troubling, other times admirable ways. The situations might not be "realistic", but the inward truths are.
Henry Fool is the third Hartley movie I've watched that involves a character whose has recently gotten out of jail. Henry, the title character, is a bombastic, bloviating, pseudo-intellectual who claims to be writing a book that will blow the doors off of how people understand their lives and the world we live in. He makes friends with Simon, a geeky introvert, who works for a garbage company, and encourages Simon to write poetry.
The complications of the movie's story take off from there in disturbing, darkly comic, and unsettling ways. I'll leave it at that.
Having watched this movie to its completion, I went back to the Criterion Channel's Hal Hartley collection and watched for about the tenth time the interview of Hal Hartley that Criterion conducted. I then watched two episodes on YouTube of Aaron Hunter's series, What Makes this Film Great? and listened to him discuss two of Hartley's earlier movies, Trust and Simple Men. It was fun listening to someone else who is enthusiastic about Hal Hartley's movies -- I don't know anyone here in Kellogg or elsewhere who watches Hartley's movies, and I enjoyed listening to Professor Hunter's ruminations.
Next up? Well, Henry Fool is the first of trilogy of movies so before too long I'll watch the other two: Fay Grim and Ned Rifle.
3. Debbie returned home. I'd fixed myself a baked delicata squash with steamed green beans. Debbie had eaten dinner at Diane's. I rambled on incoherently about Hal Hartley for a while and then we decided to watch another Frontline documentary. We went back to 2002 and watched Shattered Dreams of Peace: The Road to Oslo. We didn't quite finish it, but we watched about 90 minutes of the story of the high hopes many in both Israel and Palestine held after a peace agreement was reached between the two entities in 1995. But, those hopes were derailed by fundamentalists and extremists, both Palestinian and Israeli, who found the compromises and agreements hammered out in Oslo to be anathema. Cycles of violence, more negotiations, a big change in Israel's government, and still more summits and meetings to try move an establishment of peace forward ensued, but the violence and other violations of the Oslo accords multiplied. The peace process was derailed.
It was instructive, in light of the current violence in Gaza and Israel, to go back about twenty-five years and see, once again, just how intractable and deadly and very difficult this long-standing conflict between Palestine, particularly Hamas, and Israel has been and continues to be.
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