Opua: the best movie you (probably) don’t want to see
Opua: the best movie you (probably) don’t want to see
I saw THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? when it was first released in 1969 and not again until last night. I remembered it as an uncompromising dark view of humanity, with an ending unforgettable this side of senility. And it is, all that and more.
What I didn’t remember was the exceptional acting and direction.
The movie is set in the first years of the Depression, when dance marathons were the equivalent of the Roman Colosseum. People paid to watch other people suffer. Couples dancing, or at least moving, around the clock for days and nights and weeks, with only ten minute breaks every two hours, until only one couple is left standing.
I don’t watch American Idol or Survivor, but I have been exposed to promotional clips while watching something else and during programs that pose as news. It does not seem that human nature has noticeably improved since 1930.
The movie received many nominations for Academy Awards: Jane Fonda for best actress; Suzanna York for best supporting actress; Gig Young for best supporting actor; Sydney Pollack for best director. Only Gig Young won. They were all suburb. How it was decided that Gig Young was ‘supporting’ I do not know. His role as the dance marathon promoter/MC was at least as important as any other and completely at variance with his usual light comedy parts.
For some reason, perhaps because it is so dark, the movie wasn’t even nominated for best picture, which went that year to the light-hearted MIDNIGHT COWBOY.
I can’t recommend that anyone watch this film without warning them that it is grim; but from the beautiful opening sequence of a horse running free to the final line, “Obliging bastard.” it is also great.
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The trail is publicly maintained, and I came across a dozen places where crews had obviously repaired damage from the March storm, moving felled trees, cutting new steps, filling slips.
When I came to the small stream where the trail forks, the way inland up the ravine, which was never much frequented, no longer exists. I walked right past the fork and then backtracked when I realized I had gone too far. I finally found a semblance of the inland trail, took about ten steps along it before it vanished on the first incline. Maybe in time it will be cleared again, but I retraced my steps back to Opua. Still a good walk and one that got me back to the boat in time to see the second World Series game.
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In the CHICAGO TRIBUNE online yesterday I saw an article about a boating accident on Lake Michigan. The same incident was mentioned in a spot promoting the local news broadcast after the World Series game, so I watched that as well.
Four men, described as experienced sailors, one of them the boat’s 45 year old owner, were taking a J-35 from one of Chicago’s municipal marinas, which must be vacated during the winter, to a harbor ten miles south of the city where it would be hauled out and stored.
A small craft advisory was up. Apparently they started out once, returned, and then left again.
Just about sunset and just off the breakwater, one of the crew went to the mast to lower the mainsail. The wind reportedly was blowing 30 to 35 knots and the seas 9’-10’. He fell overboard. The helmsman tried to turn to recover him, lost control of the boat, which was blown against the breakwater, knocking the three men still aboard into the water. Water temperature was reportedly 59ºF. Although the Coast Guard got them out of the water within 50 minutes, three of the four men died.
The media coverage of this was amazingly stupid, or would be if this was not to be expected, concentrating on all the banal wrong things, such as that all four men were wearing life jackets.
While it appears to me that these men made some obvious mistakes that truly experienced sailors would not have, such as waiting to lower sail too close to the breakwater where waves would be expected to increase and be confused by rebound, the detail that impressed me most about the incident is that the force of the waves was such that within two hours the biggest piece of the boat left measured less than five feet long.
I searched online for survival times in cold water and found a table that states in water between 50º-60ºF exhaustion or unconsciousness within 1 to 2 hours; death 1 to 6 hours.
However the same table also shows in water 70º-80º exhaustion or unconsciousness 3 to 12 hours, which I and a few others have proven is too conservative; death 3 hours to indefinite.
Saturday, October 27, 2007