I recently wrote on my FaceBook page that "He who frames the issue determines the outcome.". I think that that is true. I have had dealings with banks and other enterprises handling business issues and money and for the main part always came away feeling like the apple I bit into looked good on the outside but was rotten inside. Banks have of course shown their true colours here in Britain over the past decade or so and that didn't happen without some deep-rooted badness in the core essential at the heart of banking. If you are in the business of making money without actually making anything we should ask how can the outcome be any different? When someone starts to think about starting to own their own business it's usually because they want is to take a measure of control in how their lives work into the future. For woodworkers and other crafting artisans they generally want to make things beautiful to grace their and others homes, give lovely hand made gifts, be creative with their children and friends and then make some income or a way of making a living in the future. I have a friend in Texas who paddles his own canoe, literally, around the shores of a massive lake to pick up driftwood of ashe juniper surrounding the shore line of the lake. He reshapes them into ducks and carves shaped toys from them and sells them at craft shows and he's done that for 30 years. he also makes trains and trucks from other woods too, but the point is he framed his life, became a lifestyle woodworker and got off the corporate ladder early enough to carve out a life he liked to live. Now he's retired and he still continues his work but now he has the control he wants and does what he does because he wants to.
Try to imagine walking into the bank ad asking for £20,000 to buy a canoe, some machines and have say 6 months working capital for such a project. They'd send you away first of all and say come up with a business plan, jump through a few hoops and see of you can rely on some other social media things, family money and work out an online marketing strategy like a website design and such. All stuff you could have manage without their input but you feel better because these are the experts in money matters. Well, woodworking is good DIY and so too are these things I speak of. It's surprising how little it can really take to start your own woodworking business if you have a little vision for it.
There are many ways of starting a business, but they all take a little forethought and planning to ensure startup success as early as possible. Planning such things is both part of the process and, dare I say, very ENJOYABLE! Remember that success is measured by how much money you make only by other people. Don't use that as the benchmark. Yes, you want to be financially responsible, but measure the success by more important things. Your sense of being in control. Your sense of wellbeing by spending carefully without money excess rather than borrowed excess you will be paying back for decades is payment enough. All too often I hear of people applying for some kind of funding to 'get going' and especially do I see banks somehow declaring whether a model will work or not. Try to remember that banks don't like risk and especially backing something they don't understand. Banks do not understand crafting artisans and they can be demoralising when you have an idea that you might like working with your hands and making beautiful things. Banks do however understand that crafting artisans are rarely good business people if they, they banks, define what good business is. Remember banks are ONLY in the business of making money and they ALWAYS make money off people who actually have ideas, who work hard and need a way of exchanging money for goods they need and goods they are selling.
Can a Bank Understand This?
If you can finance your business yourself by continuing in income-producing work then that becomes a better business model until you have proven your income earning capacity by selling what you make. By then you won't need a cash injection and in many cases I have seen people borrow money for equipment that will make more goods cheaper thinking making more for less is good business. That usually was not the goal in the beginning. they wanted to work for themselves and ended up working for the bank and the staff they feel obliged to care for. I don't think that that's what you were looking for. Be true to your original vision. If that's not what you want, pick up a copy of Financial Times and read no further. Remember that, for some of us at least, making money is or at least can be secondary to the lifestyle we want to carve out for ourselves. Banks don't understand that you will gladly work 80 hours a week over seven days making £10 an hour rather than £20 and hour for 40 if it's the lifestyle you are working for first. I have often worked such long days and weeks to make my life happen the way I want it to and have no regrets at all because my workshop was important to my home life and I could be with my family.
This week I made some beautiful hand made picture frames and although I am not going to make this a business plan for me, it certainly could be for some of you. Hand made frames like this cannot be made by mass makers. Mass makers need to buy in stock, stamp out the goods and sell in mass quantities. Even custom framers rely on machine moulds and finishes and their skills might rest more in combining frames and mounts and sizing borders than actually creating the whole from from raw stock. That's where you come in; to fill the niche for truly hand made, beautiful frames. There is a demand for the combined work of framers and the images and artwork installed in the frames. Creating frames as I have here means you can configure dozens of components to make highly desirable and distinctive frames for customers looking for the kind of quality money generally cannot find to buy. Exclusive work doesn't necessarily mean exclusivity. You can make all kinds of frames using hand methods ranging from using paint to finish the wood and the actual wood itself. In the frames here I have used no machines at all. I have used standard moulds available in moulding planes and the grain I have planed and shaped has awkward wiry grain. In some cases I have used a scratch stock because of the awkward grain, but, regardless, all nine frames are made without any machine methods.
I have used basically one wood to make the frames from; sapele. One of the frames I inlaid with some figured maple and there are a dozens of other configurations I could use just for a change or to compliment my offering. Soon, in a matter of a few weeks, I will be showing all of the techniques I used to make these frames in a video series. I have chosen the unplugged methods because I feel that they give me a way of life that is quiet and gentle, peacefully manageable, clean and healthy and they give me peace of mind in my work. By now you will hopefully see that it's the way I work I strive for and not merely money. This for me is wellbeing. You can learn to make frames like this in a few hours. You may already have the skills but have never used them for this application of the tools. Regardless, start working on a business plan that excludes your banker and borrowing is a great place to start. Read this blog post to your spouse, partner, parents, children and friends. Consider it. Go to a craft show. Host a party and invite family and friends to see your framing options. There is no comparison between a mass made frame and one you designed and made by hand. Frame the issue and take control of the outcome.
Wonderfully inspirational, and fitting for this time in my life. I've been reading some 'business books' recently on recommendations of those that think they have possession of what it takes to 'make it' in this world… None of it has as much value as I have found in the piece above.
I can't wait for this series 🙂 I mentioned it to my wife and she is excited for me to try my hand at making them. If all goes well, I might just send some to family at Christmas.
Wonderful, simply true. I understand that there needs to be services surrounding the real creation of wealth by production or manufacture, but they should not be rooted simply with the aim of 'making money'!
I was a Bank Lending Officer for most of my working life. It has been my experience that most people don't understand what a Bank is or what it does. First and foremost a Bank is a business, just like a woodworking shop, a shoe store or a grocery store. People invest their capital to start the Bank operation, and share in the profits and loss from the business. It is not a charity or a non profit operation. They are in the business of renting money. Just like a landlord expects the return of his property at the end of the lease, the Bank expects the return of the money at the end of the loan period, along with the agreed upon rent. To operate a successful lending operation, the lender must judge the risk involved. After you have been in the business for a short time, you soon learn that most small business operations fail. Just because someone has a dream, doesn't mean it is a practical idea. The mark of a successful lender is the ability to tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one. Every one makes mistakes in that process, and sometimes a good loan is rejected, and sometimes a bad one is made. Make enough bad ones, and you will soon be out of business, so sometimes a lender can be too cautious, but better too cautious, than too liberal. Too cautious and you live to see another day. Too liberal and you are gone. I have seen operations that disappeared because they were overly liberal in their lending standards. I could go on about the need for a Banking system of some kind, but this is getting too long, so I will stop.
Paul it's a little more than deep rooted badness I think. Banking is now a system that creates "wealth" through the packaging and sale of debt and through selling the perceived worth of organisations. i.e the stock market. There is no better example than the recent CYNK fiasco. No assets; produced nothing; owed $59k and yet valued on the stock exchanges at $6 billion.
Sheesh, it's just plain broken and I've no idea whether it's even fixable.
So I agree if it's at all possible we aught to reclaiming our own futures rather than leaving them in the hands of a system that's demonstrated time and time again that it's busted.
Thank You Paul. I have been looking at starting a business for some time now. I keep thinking about how you sold walking canes. But I really like the frames they are very wonderful and would look great in anyone's home. I am so glad that I found you and your Artisan course when I was recovering from an injury. Woodworking has changed my life in so many ways so why not pursue a business that will promote what I love to do. I am also thinking about helping others like me who are in physical pain through woodworking. We both now that using your hands to create things of beauty heals the body and mind. All I know is it works and I love working with wood.
I wish you success in your venture we look forward to seeing positive news keep us all informed. It sound a great idea.
Anytime we can avoid debt so much the better. My wise grandfather had graduated in the school in accounting but instead decided to farm with his brother. They worked 10 years with out debt to make their farm a success and then split into two farms one for each brother. I always look at my grandfathers avoidance of debt as a way to live my own life and any debt I undertake.
You suggestion to start a business slowly and steadily growing in a sustainable rate is a good idea and a good way for a person to live a live they control.
I have a friend that was as ships right and was unemployed when the company discontinued business. It took a few years for him to redirect his skills and now makes world class furniture he sells all over the world.
I believe you can control your life you just need skills and desire..
thanks Paul for sharing this .
Very helpfull at the moment!
just like in your blog a few years ago.
Is there another book in the works? I would be very interested.
Paul, I really love your blog.
Your texts are real gems.
You are a philosopher as well as an artisan.
Thank you for both the vision and the craft.
Thanks Paul, I'm very fine, working wood and progressing a lot by following your path. Real woodworking is very rewarding and your classes/videos are brilliant!
Looking forward to this. I'm wondering if this could be possible here: from what I know, I can be self employed as a picture framer or woodcarver without falling foul of the Guild and their rules. I'm not sure and information is hard to come by as I can't exactly go and ask the guilds…. Will have to dig a bit further.
I love these entries that describe, stimulate and stir the spirit into action to make woodworking a real part of my life, in the income-generating sense. I absolutely love working wood for my own quiet enjoyment, and the satisfaction of creating, of making, objects of beauty for my home, friends and family. I haven't done much of it yet, but I can see very satisfying it really is. At the same time, I make no bones about wishing woodworking as a lifestyle and add-on income in addition to my current business. In fact, I need something in addition to my current income source in order to stay solvent with a young family in this increasingly unaffordable and crazed world. Also, as a business owner, any type of hedge against slow downs or loss of clientele, be it from technology or simply the ebb and flow that comes from being self-employed, is always welcome.
Allow me to explain. I was searching for an add-on income. Some experiences and successes earlier in life when a younger man (I'm in my late 40s) doing tile setting and concrete work led me back recently to doing construction. Not having finished my woodworking workbench yet, I could neither sell it nor envision using it to make furniture to sell pieces just yet, as much as I would have liked to.
So I recently set 200 sq. ft. of porcelain tile for a kitchen floor, as well as set a glass mosaic backsplash. While it did provide a way to another income, I discovered that while tile-setting and construction work does provide a chance to make extra income, it was very hard on the body. I did not expect this as I have generally always been healthy and active. But I concluded, after the swollen knees and aching back subsided, that although you do use your hands, and you are involved in a creative process, and it can be satisfying to construct and remodel for clients, it is just plain hard work that I can't picture myself doing on any kind of regular basis for money as I approach my 5th decade on this Earth. I will work on my own home, and friends and family, but not necessarily in a production environment for builders or other homeowners.
There is also demand for trim carpentry, building cabinets, stairs, and other things. This may be easier on an aging body and of course their is a natural affinity between this type of work and furniture making. However, it would still be a production environment, with the concomitant need for hiring a helper, and expensive outlay for power tools. I don't see it as nearly as fulfilling as creating a niche for yourself as a New Genre or Lifestyle Woodworker as written about here in this blog. Working wood in the hand-tool, artisanal way, making furniture pieces, as a working craftsman, is something that this blog shows is possible and quite doable if you frame yourself right. My next step may be to develop a two-pronged approach where I develop woodworking skills that I will need on my path to establishing myself as a hand-tool Lifestyle Woodworker, able to sell my services and pieces, and also develop building and installation skills for trim carpentry, which at this point, for me in my area, there may be greater demand for. The objective, at every juncture, would be to dial down the carpentry and continue moving in the direction of cabinetmaker and hand tool woodworker as skills develop and progress.
Thanks for reading and indulging me in this long post. I love how this in this blog and in Woodworking MCs, there is often a reference to how to actively have an income from your woodworking. Be it staffs or canes, benches, instruments, spatulas or spoons, it's great to see how a skilled craftsman in hand tool woodworking is in fact in demand. Skills will generate income as things of beauty are created in an artistic process where each piece is lovingly made and the result can only be high-quality.


Why, of course it was Dr. Richard P. Feynman, nobel laureate (1965) and noted quantum physicist. However, my theory that everyone is out to get me still rings true despite several experiments which exhibit contradictory findings.
Alexander the Great was a fearless leader.
Fearless leaders are larger than life.
Life is a dirty business.
Dirtiness comes from not washing frequently.
Not washing frequently causes dandruff.
Therefore, Alexander the Great had dandruff.
The first computers were female! Everyone knows they were power-hungry, finicky, and they were always breaking down.


text:
Tag: tom hardy
Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan 2017)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Christopher Nolan's latest clunkily structured storm und drang indulgence, Dunroamin' (2017), which is all about his bungalow in Weymouth, is the emotional rollercoaster of the last few minutes, which starts you thinking that leaving Europe might actually be worth it if we get to abandon Kenneth Branagh on the beaches, but then moments later it turns out that losing Tom Hardy to the Germans is the true cost of Brexit…
Posted on February 2, 2018 February 3, 2018 Categories Film, One-sentence reviewsTags christopher nolan, kenneth branagh, puppy!, tom hardyLeave a comment on Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan 2017)
Legend (Brian Helgeland 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Legend (2015), the most recent attempt to glamourise and whitewash at least one of the Kray twins, is not Brian Helgeland's decision to hire Emily Browning, an actress every bit as inept at voice work as Daniel Craig (see Renaissance (Volckman 2006)), to do the voiceover narration, nor Brian Helgeland's decision to let someone as inept at writing voiceover as Brian Helgeland write the voiceover script, nor is it Brian Helgeland's decision to cast David Thewliss, Christopher Eccleston and Tara Fitzgerald but not bother to write roles for them to play, nor is it Brian Helgeland's stunt casting of the lovely Tom Hardy as both of the Krays, thus forcing him to stop doing all the accents at the same time and to instead create two distinct characters – the loyal, beautiful, misunderstood but handy in a fight and not at all auditioning for the role of James Bond Reggie Kray, and the psychotic gurning-like-a-Gumby jealous queer in NHS glasses Ronnie Kray – nor is it the inclusion of a unicorn just in case Sir Diddley Squat needs some outtake footage for yet another reissue of Blade Runner, no, the best thing about Legend always was and remains the poster's chutzpah in pretending The Guardian's overly generous two-star review was – look between their ears – yet another of the utterly mystifying four-star reviews…
Posted on November 6, 2017 November 6, 2017 Categories Crime, Film, One-sentence reviewsTags brian helgeland, christian volckman, christopher eccleston, daniel craig, david thewliss, emily browning, Ridley Scott, tara fitzgerald, tom hardyLeave a comment on Legend (Brian Helgeland 2015)
The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Revenant (2015), Alejandro González Iñárritu's bizarre picturesque slapstick epic of wilderness survival, in which beardy absurd terminator Leonardo DiCaprio repeatedly treads on the ends of rakes that slap him in the face as he – always out-bearded, always out-gurned – pursues Tom Hardy through Werner Herzog's old stomping ground and a maze of try-hard-wannabe allusions to Tarkovsky, is not the indigenous-washing sequence in which Leo's magical negro is played by a native American indian, nor is it the faithful historical reconstruction of a world without exposure, hypothermia or women, no, the very best thing about The Revenant is the sheer chutzpah of beginning with the line "It's okay son… I know you want this to be over"…
Posted on April 7, 2017 April 7, 2017 Categories Film, One-sentence reviewsTags Alejandro González Iñárritu, andrei tarkovsky, leonardo dicaprio, puppy!, tom hardyLeave a comment on The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu 2015)
Introducing Jacques Feyder and Visage d'enfants
I was asked to introduce a screening of Visages d'enfants (1925). Here, more or less, is what I said.
I first encountered Jacques Feyder in 1992 when doing my Masters. He was lurking in the final footnote of François Truffaut's Cahiers du Cinéma essay 'A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema' (1954), which savages the staid-and-not-very-cinematic 'tradition of quality' represented by such directors as Claude Autant-Lara.[1] (more of him later). The footnote reads:
In fact, 'psychological realism' was created parallel to 'poetic realism', which had the tandem Spaak–Feyder. It really will be necessary, one day, to start an ultimate quarrel with Feyder, before he has dropped definitively into oblivion.
I remember not being very clear what it means, or who Feyder was or why he was destined to obscurity even if Truffaut didn't stick the boot in.
The second time I encountered Feyder was when I was rewatching French poetic realist films in order to write that part of Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City. Feyder's name kept cropping up as the director of two less well known but significant early films in the cycle. But I could find no substantial critical engagement with his work (in English, since I am pathetically monolingual), and of course neither Le Grand Jeu (1934) nor Pension Mimosas (1935) were available on video or DVD.
The third time was when I was writing Science Fiction: The Routledge Film Guidebook, and I discovered the DVD boxset that included L'Atlantide (1919). But still no Anglophone critical work. Indeed, unless my google fu and library database kata have utterly deserted me, the couple of pages I wrote about L'Atlantide constitute one of the most sustained Anglophone treatments of any of his films, and especially of his silent films.
(Surely I am wrong about this? There must be more. Also, this is why there are no screening notes for the tonight's film – we couldn't find anything to use.)
So I have pulled together an overview of his career, silent and sound, from a couple of online bios, fleeting mentions in about twenty different books, and the half dozen or so of his films I have seen. And I will end with some comments about tonight's film, Visage d'enfants (1925).
Jacques Feyder was the pseudonym of Jacques Frédérix, adopted when his father discovered he wanted to be an actor and forbade him to use the family name. He was born in Ixelles, Belgium in 1885 to a grande bourgeois family, well-known patrons of the arts with a strong military heritage. He was destined for a career in the army but he failed the entrance exam to officers' school – and went to work in a canon foundry instead (which is a military career of sorts, I guess). He began appearing on stage in 1908 and became a drama critic, before moving to Paris in 1911 to become an actor.
After several small stage roles, he was cast in Georges Méliès's Cendrillon ou La pantoufle merveilleuse/ Cinderella or The Glass Slipper (1912), which was followed by more film roles, including episode 5 of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires (1916). He became an assistant director at Gaumont in 1914, working with Gaston Ravel, who had directed him in Autour d'une bague/Around a Ring (1915); they co-directed Monsieur Pinson Policier (1916), in which Feyder also appeared.
However, it was World War One that gave Feyder his big break into directing – because so many French directors were called up. In 1916-1917, Feyder directed 18 shorts; the only commentary I have found on them is limited to the phrase 'nondescript little comedies'.[2]
In 1917, he married the actress Françoise Rosay, who became a major collaborator on his later films, and was himself then called up by the Belgian army, in which he served until 1919 – as an actor in a military troupe.
After demobbing, he returned to Paris to make his first feature film: L'Atlantide (1919). Feyder paid 10,000 francs for the rights to Pierre Benoît's recently published novel of the same name, a highly regarded[3] and popular foreign legion knock-off of H. Rider Haggard's She (1886).[4]
The film, with a pretty much unprecedented budget of 2 million francs, was shot over eight months in Algiers, including 50 days in the Sahara. Apparently, this mad folly gained a lot of coverage – aka free publicity – in the French press,[5] and as the costs spiralled out of control, the original backers pulled out, selling the rights to the three-and-a-quarter hour film to distributor Louis Aubert. The film was a massive hit, the first of postwar French cinema; and it had a successful reissue in 1928. The contemporary film critic Louis Delluc said of it, 'There is one great actor in this film, and that is the sand'. I have no idea whether he meant this as insult to the human actors, but it is an astute observation about Feyder's use of vast desert spaces to render humans insignificant, and to present the desert as an object of desire in itself, as well as a metaphor for the Queen of Atlantis.
Feyder followed this with Crainquebille (1922), an adaptation of Anatole France's 1901 short novel. A costermonger is wrongfully arrested and imprisoned; after his release, he declines into bitterness and alcoholism, and becomes suicidal – until he is redeemed by the intervention of a young street street urchin, played by Jean Forest, who plays the boy Jean in Visages d'enfants (he was, or so the story goes, a Les Halles street urchin discovered by Feyder to play a Les Halles street urchin).
Crainquebille demonstrates one of the things that perhaps led to the high regard in which Feyder was once held, and perhaps also to the precipitous decline of his reputation since the 1950s. He does not have the distinct or idiosyncratic personal style one might associate with an auteur, but instead has tremendous facility with multiple styles of filmmaking, often combining them in a single film. Crainquebille, shot largely in Les Halles, is dominated by the kind of street level realism one might associate with, say, De Sica's neo-realist Bicycle Thieves (1948) or even Truffaut's own neo-realist New Wave debut Quatre cent coups (1959). But it also has an extended expressionistic trial sequence, all nightmarish distortions of scale and perspective; and it dallies with the Chaplinesque, both in the character of the protagonist and in his not-quite-sentimental relationship with the urchin who saves him.
His next film is the one we will watch tonight, Visage d'enfants. Co-written and co-directed with his wife, Françoise Rosay, it was filmed on location in southern Switzerland in 1923, but not released until 1925. Despite favourable reviews, it was not a big hit, and was long thought lost. It was reassembled in the 1990s from various archives and reissued in 1993. I will say more about it in a while.
In 1923, Feyder relocated to Vienna to become artistic director of Vita Film in Vienna, and to direct three films for them; but he made only one L'Image/Das Bildnis (1923), before they went broke.
The opportunity represented by this venture perhaps tells us quite a bit about Feyder. Probably the main critical debate about film in 1920s France was whether film could be an art form. Avant-garde directors, such as Germaine Dulac (who I adore) and Maurice L'Herbier (about whom I am rather ambivalent), would say – and I am paraphrasing here or, more accurately, putting words in their mouths – that films were and industrial product not art (except, of course, for their own films, which proved it was technically possible films to be art). Feyder himself argued that one should not think in terms of art vs. popular culture, but instead set out to mark art as popular film (or popular film as art). Now the greater relative autonomy that a director might enjoy if he were also the company's artistic director might enable such a project. In a similar vein, Feyder, like like Dulac, L'Herbier, Abel Gance and Julien Duvivier, innovated the director-package system of production. Rather than being employed by a studio, the filmmaker would form a company (of which he would be the director) to produce a specific film, which he himself would direct. The company would obtain funds from various sources, including wealthy patrons, bring together the script, cast and crew, and hire a studio if necessary (or if the budget permitted). This system afforded the director greater control – for example, Feyder liked to rehearse his cast, but would only make decisions about how to shoot a scene once they were all on set or location at the start of the day – but also required a commercial sensibility to ensure the company's success. Thus, combining the roles of company director and film director produced a distinctive combination of art and the popular.
After his Viennese diversion, Feyder made Gribiche (1926), again starring Jean Forest, this time as a working class boy adopted by a philanthropic American heiress, with reputedly amusing consequences. He then returned to literary adaptations, with a location-shot, neo-realist-ish adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's Carmen in 1926, and – in Germany in 1928 – an adaptation of Zola's Thérèse Raquin. The latter was considered a masterpiece, and brought Feyder to the attention of MGM, but it is now lost, so we cannot tell.
Before relocating to Los Angeles, Feyder took out French nationality, and made his last silent film in France, Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1929). A political satire in which a theatre electrician and trades unionist who plays a central role in a major strike is subsequently appointed to a ministerial post (cos, y'know, that happens). There, he comes into conflict with a wealthy minister who is the third point of a love triangle involving a not-too-talented ballerina. There were calls for it to be banned for 'insulting the dignity of parliament and its ministers' (cos, y'know, parliaments and dignity used to be a thing).
From January to March 1929 Mon Ciné ran a feature asking filmmakers 'Do you believe that the sound film has a future?' Jean Renoir was ambivalent, seeing it as a mixed blessing; Marcel L'Herbier said 'It's of little interest to me. The faithful reproduction of the words of an actor or the arrival of a locomotive in a station have no real artistic value'; Feyder replied, 'I believe in the talking picture'. And he went to Hollywood to make them.
Although Hollywood was importing a lot of continental talent – Paramount and MGM had recently gone toe-to-toe over Maurice Chevalier – they did not really consider French directors that important (and should they need a director who understood French, Robert Florey and Jacques Tourneur were already well established there). Indeed, Feyder was one of just two French directors invited to Hollywood in the period – the other being, of course, Claude Autant-Lara, who among other things directed Feyder's wife, Françoise Rosay, in the Francophone version of Buster Keaton's Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1931). During the transition to sound, it was not uncommon for film's to be shot in multiple language versions, usually on the same sets at night, with a different director and entirely different or perhaps overlapping cast. That wasn't why MGM brought Feyder to Hollywood, though.
His first Hollywood movie was The Kiss (1929) – his, Greta Garbo's and MGM's last silent film.[6]
But then he did find himself directing alternate-language versions: the French versions of The Unholy Night (1929) and His Glorious Night (1929), both directed by Lionel Barrymore,[7] and of Chester Morris's The Big House, from which he was removed partway through; and the German language versions of Chester M. Franklin's Olympia (1930) and Clarence Brown's Anna Christie (1930), starring Garbo again – in both language versions.
Arguably adding insult to injury, he then found himself directing a pair of Roman Novarro exotic-ish romances, Daybreak (1931) and Son of India (1931).
He returned to France.
His first three French talkies are the films on which his reputation now stands – all feature Françoise Rosay, all were written by Charles Spaak, and have as Feyder's assistant director Marcel Carné, who would become the major poetic realist director.[8]
The doom-laden foreign legion melodrama Le Grand Jeu (1934) and crime melodrama Pension Mimosas (1935) are the early examples of poetic realism I spent ages trying to track down (the former is now readily available). La Kermesse héroïque (1935), which Feyder shot in French and German versions, is an elaborately staged historical comedy-drama. It includes an open-air set representing a Flemish town in the style of the Dutch masters that is so massive that it is hard to believe it is a set. In 1936, La Kermesse héroïque won the first New York Film Critics award for best foreign film, and Feyder best director at the Venice Film festival. A story of a Flemish town briefly occupied by Spanish troops in 1616, it seems, from one angle, to advocate peaceful collaboration rather than violent resistance, which might explain why the Nazis loved it. However, from another angle, it seems to advocate subtle resistance to and manipulation of occupying forces, which might explain why, after the invasion of France, Goebbels banned it.
Feyder came to the UK to make Knight without Armour (1937) for Korda, a lumbering pudding of a film starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat, unhampered by a single trace of chemistry.[9] Back on the continent, he made the French and German versions of Fahrendes Volk/Les gens du voyage (1938), and the French melodrama La loi du nord (1939).
Feyder and Rosay fled from the Nazi invasion to Switzerland, where Feyder directed one last film, Une femme disparaît (1942),[10] and with Françoise Rosay published a memoir, Le Cinéma, notre metier (1944). In it, Feyder describes himself as an artisan or craftsman, not an artist; but perhaps it was the high degree of relative autonomy he often enjoyed that allowed him to see his work as collaborative – and surely the popular artist, freed from all that guff about solitary genius, is an artisan, and the artisan is not something to be looked down upon.
Feyder died in 1948; Rosay kept working in film until her death twenty-five years later.[11]
His reputation has steadily declined ever since. André Bazin respected his work, but much preferred the kind of realist filmmaking he associated with Renoir, Jean Vigo and Maurice Pagnol (who, he argued, were able to find some kind of spiritual truth in the real just by looking at it long enough and hard enough) to the 'synthetic décor' (faked or heightened reality) of Carné, Duvivier, René Clair and Feyder. In 1970, Clair himself observed that 'Jacques Feyder does not occupy today the place his work and his example should have earned him'. And David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film says,
There was a time when Feyder was claimed as a great realist director, when Kermesse héroïque was thought of as an important French film. … Feyder may be unfairly neglected today just as once he was injudiciously acclaimed.
Visage d'enfants
Perhaps the greatest achievements of Visage d'enfants are inventing the youtube cat video and giving an origin story to needing to raise funds to repair the church roof…
our town from that hill
It is more commonly praised for its location shooting, which captures stunning alpine landscapes through various seasons, creating a vast natural arena for what is actually a small story its small story of human relationships, of grief and love, of coming to terms and growing up. This is an intriguing contrast to the use of the Sahara in L'Atlantide. There are now-fascinating views of labour – farming, waterwheels, logging tools – and tumble down barn architecture.
The film is also praised for the performance of Jean Forest, former Les Halles street urchin, who plays he film's young protagonist, Jean. Pierette Houyez, as his little sister Pierette, is also good – adorable, and absolutely fearless when herding livestock twenty times her size.[12] Arlette Peyran, as their step-sister Arlette, is easily the weakest of the three child actors, but her failings of her perfomance also highlight the flaws in the other two – whenever they are required to signify something specific through gesture, they become mannered: you can almost hear Feyder and/or Rosay instructing them off-camera.
The opening of the film fluently contrasts the young Jeans's attempts to be older than he is, and the younger Pierette as someone playful and full of wonder, and uses her relationship with her cat to model a mother/child relationship. Later, both Arlette and Jean will pray to the exemplary mother, the Virgin Mary. In English, the film is often called Mother – which I think should probably be cried out in your best Anthony Perkins voice. The location realism modulates such melodrama staples as unpayable rent coming due, insurance not paying out, a mother's death, a distant father, a step-mother and step-sister, a child in peril, another child in peril, avalanches, deadly waterfalls, desperate searches. Indeed, the whole film can be seen as a Freudian case study of bourgeois family formation, but mostly without the foregrounded Freudianism of, say, Hitchcock. Although there are some potentially Hitchcockian fetish moments around a portrait, a broach, a particular dress arranged, far more creepily than the film seems to think, in a mannequin pose (hell, it's halfway to Vertigo by that point). There is also an important contrast between the image of mother pouring milk and the stepmother milking cattle and bringing milk home.[13] This contrast is picked up on by shots of the waterfall that, thanks to the step-mother's intervention, goes from perilous to mere bountiful nature.
The film also demonstrates Feyder's technical mastery of missed styles. There is an expressionism to the design of the graveyard, dominated by a cross that looks like it belongs in a James Whale Frankenstein movie,[14] and to the rapid cutting that leads up to Jean's collapse. There are inverted shots and superimpositions and an intriguing use of subjective shots: Jean looks at the villagers feet, not exactly Caravaggio exactly, but focused on peasant footwear,[15] and we see his mother's coffin from his point of view as he follows it at the head of the procession to the graveyard. We see his mother's portrait come to life, and later to fade – and the portrait is given a reverse shot of him, not as dramatic as Paul Leni's potrait pov a couple of years later in The Cat and the Canary (1927) but a brilliant key to young Jean's emotions at that moment. (And, a couple of years before Lang gave pov shots to explosions in Metropolis, Feyder gives them to the avalanche.)
And there are relatively few intertitles. Feyder used over 200 in L'Atlantide, he grew rapidly to hate them; like Murnau, he thought that you should be able to convey a story visually. That said, there are several which strike me as unnecessary and, late in the film, a pair that really annoy me. The latter of the two explains that Jean, realising the enormity of what he has done, begins to regret what he has done. It is utterly superfluous – all of this is conveyed by Forest's acting, shot construction, and so on. The former of the pair exonerates Jean from the worst of intentions, disrupting a far more compelling ambiguity about his potential for murderous intentions.
And on that bombshell, the film.
Oh, I should warn you, Antonio Coppola's score completely misreads the film – chirpy in all the wrong places, and determined to make it more sentimental than it is.
Oh, and the hats. Watch out for the hats. Not Tom Hardy insane, but crazy nonetheless.
[1] More of Autant-Lara later. I can't vouch for Truffaut's assessment of his work since the only film of his I can swear that I have seen (because we watched it for that class) is the Bourvil/Jean Gabin comedy, La traversée de Paris/Pig Across Paris (1956), which, as the title suggests, is about transporting a pig across (Nazi-occupied) Paris.
[2] Though James tells me he has seen one of them, La faute d'orthographe (1918), which has a brilliant premise and execution. A man applies for a job in a bank, but that night worries he has misspelt something in his application – so breaks into the bank to correct it. He then begins to suspect he has made other spelling errors, and while he pores over the papers, someone else breaks into the bank for exactly the same reason! And then … the final reel has been lost.
[3] It won the Grand Prize of the Académie française.
[4] It is better than I just made it sound.
[5] The newspapers, not the cafètiere.
[6] Actually, it does have a synchronised soundtrack, mostly music from Tristan and Isolde, and a few sound effects, including a pair of narratively vital gunshots.
[7] The fate of the latter was the inspiration for the disastrous Laughing Cavalier movie in Singin' in the Rain (Donen and Kelly 1952).
[8] Le Quai des brumes (1938), Hôtel du Nord (1938), Le jour se lève (1939), Les enfants du paradis (1945).
[9] It is, however, worth seeing for her ill-advised gowns in the middle of the civil war, and for Miles Malleson's turn as an inebriated proletarian commissar.
[10] He had co-director and supervisor credits one two films just after the war.
[11] And, I discovered by freak earlier this month, she does have an extraordinarily tenuous Bristol connection. She made a couple of films in the UK late in the second world war, The Halfway House (Dearden and Cavalcanti 1944) and Johnny Frenchman (Frend 1945). In the former, there is a wide establishing shot of Bristol Temple Meads station, labelled as such, and an interior shot of the station back when there was footbridge (rather than a tunnel) connecting platforms. Who knows when it was actually shot or for what purpose? And even if it was shot specifically for this film there was certainly no reason for her to be in Bristol. So, yeah, tenuous.
[12] She always reminds me of Willa Vy McAbee in Stingray Sam (McAbee 2009), but I don't think the reference will mean anything to tonight's audience, which is why it's down here in the notes.
[13] Though rather less sexualised than the pornographic montage celebrating automated cream separation in Eisenstein's Old and New aka The General Line (1929).
[14] Later, the cross on the roof a church buried by an avalanche will protrude from the snow like a gravestone.
[15] We also see a lot of shoe soles, which is unusual.
Posted on March 17, 2017 March 18, 2017 Categories FilmTags abel gance, alfred hitchcock, André Bazin, anthony perkins, antonio coppola, Arlette Peyran, basil dearden, bourvil, Buster Keaton, caravaggio, cavalcanti, charles spaak, chester m franklin, chester morris, clarence brown, claude autant-lara, cory mcabee, David Thomson, eisenstein, emile zola, Françoise Rosa, francois truffaut, Freud, fritz lang, gaston ravel, gene kelly, Georges Méliès, Germaine Dulac, goebbels, greta garbo, h. rider haggard, Jacques Feyder, jacques tourneur, james whale, jean forest, Jean Gabin, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, julien duvivier, korda, lionel barrymore, louis aubert, louis delluc, louis feuillade, Marcel Carné, marlene dietrich, maurice chevalier, Maurice L'Herbier, Maurice Pagnol, Miles Malleson, paul leni, Pierette Houyez, pierre benoit, Prosper Mérimée, René Clair, robert donat, robert florey, roman novarro, stanley donen, tom hardy, vittorio de sica, willa vy mcafeeLeave a comment on Introducing Jacques Feyder and Visage d'enfants
Child 44 (Espinosa 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best fackin' thing about Child 44 (2015) is not all the proper fackin' swearing Tom "fackin'" Hardy does, cos there is no fackin' swearing in it, nor is it the unbearably cute juxtaposition of Tom "fackin'" Hardy and a puppy, cos there's no fackin' puppy in it either, even though Tom "fackin'" Hardy and his MGB goons raid the apartment of a fackin' vet, nor was it Gary Oldman's ridiculous fackin' overacting because for once there is very fackin' little of that either, which I guess leaves Tom "fackin'" Hardy's fackin' accent as the best fackin' thing in Child 44 cos of the way it wanders right the fackin' way across the Soviet Union, from the fackin' Ukraine to fackin' Vladivostok to South fackin' Africa, which was, I fackin' swear, secretly part of the Soviet fackin' Union…
Posted on August 19, 2016 August 20, 2016 Categories Crime, FilmTags daniel espinosa, gary oldman, puppy!, tom hardyLeave a comment on Child 44 (Espinosa 2015)
Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Mad Max Fury Road (2015), George Miller's hilariously overblown and rather sandy remake of Waterworld (1995), is not the way it captures with uncanny precision the realities of the post-Brexit British utopia, nor the way Max is captured by a Duran Duran-worshipping cult led by Simon LeBon, who, frankly, has let himself go a bit (see above), nor the way Max's straggly mullet is promptly shaved off so he looks less like Mel Gibson and more like the love child of Daniel Craig and Kenneth Cranham, nor the way Imperator Furiosa persuades Immortan Joe's brides to escape with her in a big lorry to Tom Hardy's myspace or something, but the way in which if you think about the film's style and themes alongside Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and Happy Feet (2006) you finally have utterly incontrovertible evidence that auteurism is a genuine thing that explains films…
Posted on June 24, 2016 June 26, 2016 Categories Film, One-sentence reviews, SfTags daniel craig, George Miller, Hugh Keays-Byrne, kenneth cranham, Mel Gibson, puppy!, simon lebon, tom hardyLeave a comment on Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller 2015)
The Drop (Michaël R. Roskam 2014)
and so anyway it turn out that the best thing about The Drop (2014) is not that we get to see James Gandolfini in action one last time, nor is it the reminder of quite how good a writer Dennis Lehane is, nor is it the way that it confirms that the sole motivation left to men in contemporary cinema is protecting or revenging their dogs, as in Equilibrium, I Am Legend, The Rover, John Wick (and presumably John Wick 2) and the Fast and Furious franchise (let's face it, Paul Walker was basically Vin Diesel's adorable little stray), as well as Human Target on the telly, no, the best thing about The Drop is every single scene in which Tom Hardy picks up young Rocco (or Mike, as he would have preferred to call him) and it becomes impossible to decide which is the cutest puppy of all…
Posted on October 4, 2015 October 5, 2015 Categories Crime, Film, One-sentence reviewsTags dennis lehane, james gandolfini, paul walker, puppy!, tom hardy, vin dieselLeave a comment on The Drop (Michaël R. Roskam 2014)
The Mad Maxathon, part four: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Part one, part two, part three
Let there be no doubt. Mad Max: Fury Road is without question the very best film I saw yesterday (the other one was La momia azteca contra el robot humano (1958)).
It is also the very best Mad Max movie since Road Warrior. And like Road Warrior, it needs to be seen on the big screen (albeit for slightly different reasons, which I will get into below).
I can see George Miller's pitch even now: Ice Cold in Alex (1958) meets Pumzi (2009), but faster. And we're gonna steal all that crazy shit about pregnant women and bags of seed from The Ultimate Warrior (1975). And just one more thing from Island of Lost Souls (1932). And Dune (1984) was set on a desert planet, too, so we'll throw in some of the unsavouriness of the Harkonnens, but without the obvious homophobia.
And, the executives asked, will there be an unexpected homage to Duran Duran and fellow ozploitation alumnus Russell Mulcahy?
You betcha, said George.
But even more unexpected than that there will be, when Max comes to desert after the big sandstorm scene, a tribute to Derek Zoolander's friends who died in a freak gasoline-fight accident.
Except with supermodels.
Pregnant supermodels.
And water, not guzzle-een. We'll save the tanks of wet-nurse milk for later. When Max has to wash blood off his face.
But don't worry, it's not his blood.
There has been a lot of commentary about how Fury Road gets it right by mostly eschewing CGI in favour of actually staging the action with real vehicles and actual stuntmen. Which is both true and a little misleading. There is quite a bit of CGI, albeit more judiciously deployed than one would expect in a $150 million movie, and there is an awful lot of compositing and post-production digital enhancement. (This is why you need the big screen – not so much for the profilmic car-crunching of Mad Max and Road Warrior, but for the setting of similar action in massively spectacular landscapes.)
There is also – and this is what most people seem to be missing – a lot of attention paid to classical conventions of spatial construction. Unlike in a Christopher Nolan movie, spaces actually make coherent sense, and thanks to John Seale's camera being held that little bit further from the action and Margaret Sixel's less-rapid editing you can, unlike in a Michael Bay movies, always tell who is doing what to whom and where they are in relation to each other and their setting.
Don't get me wrong, this coherence does not necessarily lead to suspense – Fury Road is no Wages of Fear (1953) or Hell Drivers (1957) or even, though it pains me to say it, Duel (1971) – but it is able to produce an awful lot of tense moments. And this tension stems from the careful thinking-through of the action sequences, from the small scale stuff (Max fighting Furiosa, while he is chained to both a broken-off car door and the unconscious Nux and suffering from the interference of the pregnant supermodels) upwards.
Is it one long chase sequence? Not exactly. There are moments of pause, moments when the audience can catch their breath, but Miller does something inspired with them. They are character scenes, but so perfunctory – so hilariously badly written, so utterly lacking in the cheesy charm of the Fast and Furious movies – that you are happy for these layovers to be shortened and the chase to start back up again.
The only thing missing is Jerry Reed singing 'East Bound and Down'.
Is it the feminist movie those "Men's Rights" folks seemed so terrified of? (Assuming all that bullshit wasn't an ingenious piece of viral marketing.)
The answer really depends on how you define feminism. I think it passes the Bechdel test, but there is so little conversation in the movie it is hard to tell. Charlize Theron, an actress who normally makes me go meh, is implacable as Furiosa and handles a big share of the action every bit as well as the always adorable Tom Hardy. The pregnancy/supermodel/ lactation/seeds conjunction recalls something of that old school hippy female-essentialist feminism. The ageing desert warrior women are just plain brilliant – not exactly 70s lesbian separatists but, in a future where all the men are such dicks, who wouldn't be in favour of a little wimminz separatism? There is also at times a curious overlaying of female voices, often too quiet to make out many of the words, which made me think of the Kristevan chora –'Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definively posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form' – which seemed to be pointing towards something interesting to do with desert spaces and, in this company of women, the pre-symbolic (and to pick up on Max's traumatic flashback instants to events similar, but not identical, to things that happened in the trilogy).
Do these things make it feminist?
Frankly, you're having a laugh. It is just less intolerant of women than many other movies made on this scale.
But they do give the movie some powerful and intriguing cross-currents and textures. I will have to see it a few more times to even begin to figure it out.
Does Max have a mullet? That would be spoilers.
Is it worth seeing? Absolutely.
Especially if you can dodge the inflation of ticket prices by distributors/exhibitors manipulating 2D and 3D screenings. My local cinema only had the 3D version at £15+ a ticket. The big-ass fancypants cinema in town was charging less for 3D, but had put the 2D version in the "director's hall", which made tickets even more expensive than the local 3D. Fortunately, the third-rate cinema in town was showing the 2D at a price which meant two of us could see it for a fraction more than one of us could have seen the local 3D or the fancypants 2D. It is like a temporally-compacted version of classical Hollywood's system of 'runs' is being reintroduced.
And sadly the cinema we saw it in was just a sanitised pathetic relic of its former self, rather than the grunge pit in which ozploitation, however gussied up, should be seen.
Posted on May 18, 2015 May 19, 2015 Categories Film, SfTags charlize theron, christopher nolan, duran duran, George Miller, john seale, julia kristeva, margaret sixel, michael bay, Russell Mulcahy, tom hardy, zoolanderLeave a comment on The Mad Maxathon, part four: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
The Mad Maxathon, part one: Mad Max (1979) mostly
Part two, part three, part four
Waking up in post-apocalyptic Britain last Friday, and with only a week to go until Mad Max: Fury Road, it was time to get back up to speed. Thus did the Mad Maxathon commence!
Back in my Plymouth teens, one of the local free papers had a competition to win cinema tickets and related goodies. Most weeks I entered and – not having enough pocket money or, later, paper-round wages to waste on a postage stamp – would deliver it in person (in a reused envelope) to their offices. The only things I ever won were a pair of tickets for a double bill of Ghoulies and Trancers (I suspect no one else entered that competition) and, a year later, a pair of tickets for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, a film my girlfriend did not want to see, especially after the preceding year's fiasco. Oh, and along with the tickets came a Thunderdome t-shirt, which I had to collect in person and, being poor, could not just throw away despite the embarrassment of advertising a film I hated. It became a winter garment, always worn under something else, until eventually it faded and fell apart. This may well be the origin of my dislike for clothing with writing on it. And of white t-shirts.
I forget when or where I first saw the previous movies – presumably on video at a friend's house. So something good did come of those free tickets. They enabled me to reassess my opinion that Mad Max, despite holding the world record cost-to-profit ratio for twenty years, was the weakest film in the series. (The Road Warrior was always, in the words of JG Ballard, 'punk's Sistine Chapel'.) While I have watched the first two multiple times over the years, I have only seen Thunderdome twice – and not since it was first broadcast on television. So how do they hold up?
Mad Max starts off as a properly sleazy ozploitation flick: a tubby copper in leather spies through rifle sights on a couple having sex in a field; an insane car chase ensues. There will be more bare bums in the franchise (and car chases).
Mad Max was one of the first Australian films to be shot using widescreen anamorphic lenses but George Miller's real innovation was to mount the cameras on speeding cars and motorbikes so very close to the ground. It does not sound like a lot, but it was, and remains, breathtakingly perilous to watch.
Accounts of the film often take note of Miller's work as an emergency room doctor, and of several incidents during the OPEC crisis when – in full Ballardian mode – regular folks queuing for fuel violently turned on each other. Clearly some kind of autogeddon was in the ozploitation air (see also: Peter Weir's The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), one of the earlier Australian films to use widescreen anamorphic lenses, whose spikey Volkswagen is homaged in Fury Road; Ian Barry's Chain Reaction (1980), which stars Mad Max's Steve Bisley, Hugh Keays-Byrne and, as an uncredited bearded mechanic, Mel Gibson; Brian Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In (1986), based on Peter Carey's story; and, in a slightly different vein, Richard Franklin's Road Games (1981)).
I was not surprised to hear that for Fury Road, George Miller presented Tom Hardy with a 300-page 'comic' made up of storyboards, rather than a conventional screenplay because Mad Max – with its generic mix of AIP biker movie, backwoods Straw Dogs/Deliverance rape-revenge narrative, lone gunfighter/sheriff/samurai seeking revenge/justice, rogue cop brought out of retirement one last time and this time its personal – comes across increasingly like a 2000AD strip. This connection with the other Sistine chapel of punk comes full circle, first in Neil Marshall's underrated Doomsday (2008), which riffs off The Road Warrior but also in its final shots gives Rhona Mitra a Carlos Ezquerra/Mike McMahon big boots look, and then in Fury Road, co-written by Brendan McCarthy, who started working on 2000AD in the late 70s and then, inspired by Road Warrior, co-created the post-apocalyptic surfer comic Freakwave (1983). Some consider Freakwave to have been plagiarised by Waterworld (1995), which was dubbed 'Road Warrior on water' back in the day. 'All at sea', more like.
Mad Max's melodramatic transitions in particular have something comic-book about them – foreshadowing Sam Raimi's more obviously comics-inspired Darkman (1990) – and, to be honest, much of the dialogue would probably work better as speech bubbles. The stand-out dialogue scene is the one in which Mel Gibson, with his oddly immobile face, emotes, trying to say something incomprehensible to his wife about his feelings for her in terms of feelings he had for his dad but never expressed. Or something like that. Wisely, to shut him up, she kisses him. And considering how unwise kissing Mel Gibson actually is, we should thank her. She may be overly taken with the idea that running right down the middle of the road is the best way to flee murderous bikers, but right then, at that snoggy moment, she takes one for the team.
Mad Max is only Gibson's second film and, although he has yet to become completely insufferable, the construction of his image of physically battered masculinity – the shirtlessly electrocuted resistant-to-electrocution Martin Riggs getting his ass handed to him by the mighty Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon (1987), the shot-to-pieces Martin Riggs annoyingly not dying in Danny Glover's arms in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), the hammer-to-the-toes justifiably tortured hardly-Lee-Marvin of Payback (1999), culminating in all those unpleasant things people do to Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ (2004) – is already gearing up as he (somewhat ineptly) wreaks his revenge.
Given Gibson's occasional homophobic outbursts, I vividly recall being delighted to discover that, at least in the olden days, he used to have a big enough gay following to provide one of the case studies for Michael DeAngelis's Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson and Keanu Reeves (2001). I am however quite mystified as to the source of this, or indeed any hetero, attraction. Sure, in Mad Max, he is young and pretty and wears tight black leather and does not yet have a mullet. Is it that? Or is it his later tendency to be as shirtless as Matthew McConaughey while wrestling in the rain with Gary Busey or otherwise taking physical punishment? A suffering that in some ways maps onto his Judy Garland-like life of dislocation and addiction and abuse (although admittedly he is the abuser, not the abused)? Please tell me it is not the mullet.
Oh, and Main Force Patrol? Come on, people, that is not what MFP stands for.
Posted on May 14, 2015 May 18, 2015 Categories Film, SfTags Brendan McCarthy, brian trenchard-smith, Carlos Ezquerra, danny glover, gary busey, George Miller, Hugh Keays-Byrne, ian barry, james dean, jg ballard, jim caviezel, judy garland, keanu reeves, lee marvin, Matthew McConaughey, Mel Gibson, Mike McMahon, Neil Marshall, peter carey, peter weir, rhona mitry, richard franklin, sam raimi, steve bisley, tom hardyLeave a comment on The Mad Maxathon, part one: Mad Max (1979) mostly

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Nollywood actress, Tonto Dikeh, threw another shade after her ex-husband, Olakunle Churchill debunked claims that he squatted with her when they started dating during an Interview.
Churchill also spoke about his divorce and said his marriage to her became a movie script , Taking to her Instagram story, the mother of one wrote: 'I am learning the art of ignoring worthless men and their lies!!
She is more than an imbecile. Dikeh is an abuser and morally illiterate. She needs deliverance and full forgiveness. She is not worth being with a minor.
This woman is just a fool.
Can somebody caution poster to stop highlighting this lady? What value is she adding to the society with these kind of marital abuse? Everyday Tonto this Tonto that, Haba!
Hahaha Churchill got more beans to spill she normally does all the talking now she doesn't want to talk cos he will go deep and expose alot of things people would be suprised to hear.
Did anybody know the meaning of TONTO in Spanish? If you don't know I will tell you.It means FOOL. You can translate it in Google.Na her name dey push her. Unrepentant educated illiterate.


1986-88 Pontiac Fiero V6 Tachometer Circuit Board. Pre-Calibrated Direct replacement.
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1984-88 Fiero Tachometer Circuit Board. Tachometer with Oil pressure gauge. Pre-Calibrated.
1982-89 Chevy Camaro V6 Tachometer Circuit Board. Pre-Calibrated. LED's. Direct replacement.
1975-77 Corvette Tachometer Circuit Board. Pre-Calibrated. Direct replacement.


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text:
Obituary – Ralph Weston Landre Jr.
News | April 15, 2004
Tahoe Daily Tribune Staff Reports
Services will take place April 24 for Ralph Weston Landre Jr., who died April 9, 2004, at Auburn, Calif. He was 74.
Ralph was born May 30, 1929, at Yakima, Wash. He retired from the California Highway Patrol in Grass Valley, Calif., and moved to Loomis, Calif., to be close to his grandchildren. He recently published a biography of his law enforcement career titled "The Broken Center Line." He and his wife are members of Sierra College Boulevard Baptist Church.
He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Shirley; sons, Tim, Jon and Jeff; brother, Lowell, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Services will begin at 10 a.m. April 24 at Sierra College Boulevard Baptist Church, 4800 Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif.
In lieu of flowers donations may be sent to the Baptist Church.


text:
Q: Specify expected outcome in a docstring as hexadecimal? Is there a way to specify expected integer outcomes in a docstring in hex notation?
def identity(val):
    """
    >>> identity(243)
    243
    >>> identity(243)
    0xf3
    """
    return val

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()

Doctest doesn't interpret the hex notation, resulting in a failure:
**********************************************************************
File "hextest.py", line 5, in __main__.identity
Failed example:
    identity(243)
Expected:
    0xf3
Got:
    243
**********************************************************************
1 items had failures:
   1 of   2 in __main__.identity
***Test Failed*** 1 failures.

I'm aware that I could wrestle the docstring:
def identity(val):
    """
    >>> hex(identity(243))
    '0xf3'
    """
    return val

But it'd seem natural to have doctest understand literal integers in bases 8, 16 next to decimal.

A: Sure, you can write your own OutputChecker class to handle numbers however you want:
def identity(val):
    """
    >>> identity(243)
    0xf3
    >>> identity(243)
    243
    """

    return val

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest

    OutputChecker = doctest.OutputChecker

    class HexOutputChecker(OutputChecker):

        def check_output(self, want, got, optionflags):

            if want.startswith('0x'):
                want_str = str(int(want, 16)) + '\n'
                return super().check_output(want_str, got, optionflags)
            else:
                return super().check_output(want, got, optionflags)

    doctest.OutputChecker = HexOutputChecker
    doctest.testmod(verbose=True)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


People have believed in faeries for hundreds of years, and perhaps longer. Most of the stories and folklore about these magical creatures come out of Europe, primarily the British Isles but most European countries have tales about the fae. These beings are believed to have magical abilities and to have their own kingdom despite the fact that they also inhabit ours. While most faeries are now depicted to be of a cute, helpful, or playful nature; older tales tell of more malignant ones as well.
Beings such as goblins, trolls, and dark faeries of the Unseelie court have been said to play mean tricks on people at best and cause harm or even death at worst. There have been tales of the fae kidnapping people and taking them back to their kingdom, but the dark faeries aren't always harmful. Some of them will only do harm when they are threatened or if someone breaks a deal that they have made with them. Of course some faeries are of the helpful variety, but even they have a tendency to like to play tricks on people. To maintain good relations with the fae, it is believed that you should leave offerings as a show of respect and as a thank you for any assistance which they may offer.
Many people believe that faeries are nothing more than creatures out of the imagination, but others believe them to be as real as you and I. Regardless of where you stand on whether the fae are real or not, the stories are fascinating. Among my favorites are the stories about the decidedly unfriendly Jenny Greenteeth. The original stories about her originated around Lancashire, England. She is said to inhabit rivers and ponds, waiting for someone (usually children) to come close enough that she can drag them into the water to be drowned. Parents in England have been using stories about this vengeful water creature to scare their children about venturing too close to water for hundreds of years.
I'm thinking that a story about Jenny Greenteeth might have been enough to keep me away from the water's edge as a child. How about you?
I love hearing different folk tales! It is interesting how different yet similar they are depending on which country you are in!
V.L. I couldn't agree more! There are so many common elements, even when the cultural spin is very different. Thank you for stopping by!
how come it's always Lancashire where folks eat blood sausage and sheep are very nervous..
Hi JoJo! Many people leave things like a bit of bread with honey on it or some milk with honey in it.


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how to make your wacom tablet wireless!
Did you know you can convert your Wacom tablet to a wireless tablet? Wacom has a kit that you can purchase which will convert almost any Wacom tablet to a wireless Wacom tablet with a chargeable battery inside. Check out this video and watch me unbox and set this thing up.
So I bought a wired tablet, but my laptop straight up doesn't have a USB port (it's a MacBook Air, I believe the 11 inch model). I'm going out on a limb here, but would there be any way to purchase the wireless kit and be able to use my tablet without plugging in the larger of the two pieces? Or I guess, would the connection on the tablet's end work with my laptop's bluetooth alone?
can i set this up if my usb port is broken?
Is there a wireless adaptor for the Wacom cintiq 13hd ?
Dude, what device is this? Pth-660? Looks way different than mine, why u didnt say model of device you are reviewing? Intuos Pro, thats is, assuming by date it might be pth-600, but doesnt looks like.
My intuos pro came with the wifi kit. Did they stop doing that?
i lost my dongle reciever? is there a chance to use it wthout the dongle on my laptop?
This intro is so great. Does it work with a different USB Cable? I lost the original one and the replacement works only for charging.
what's the latency likke ?
Nice Tuts – hehe. I wanted to know, what monitor are you using?
Thanks and I'll be sure to support the tutvid cause.
Is there an adapter kit that doesn't require a dongle and transmits straight bt? The only reason to go wireless is to free up ports and if you have to still use port then there's no point for me.
Can the Cintiq qhd be wireless?
Does it work / is it compatable with a Cintiq companion?
Question, Can you connect your intuos pro to an iPad mini?
does it work for the cintiq 13HD?
Is it me….but after watching, I still don't know how to make the wireless connection with the computer.
Alas, my model of Intuos 4 dates to 2008 – 2009. It doesn't have the battery port or the wi-fi port built in. It only has the smooth sculpted edges on 4 sides with a single USB port.
l just baught the wirless kit and put in everything but it doesnt seem 2 work !
I'd understand why a cintiq would benefit from a wireless system, because it's a separate monitor basically, but it makes literally no sense with a tablet that you're going to need to be in front of the computer for anyways.


text:
Home Breaking News Sons of Anarchy Sixth Season Premiere Date and Details
Sons of Anarchy Sixth Season Premiere Date and Details
One of the best shows that you may not be watching – FX's Sons of Anarchy – returns for season six on September 10, 2013 at 10pm. Created by Kurt Sutter and starring Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman, Maggie Siff, and Katey Sagal, Sons of Anarchy's sixth season will kick off with a special 90 minute episode followed by one hour episodes on subsequent Tuesdays.
Season five of the critically acclaimed drama averaged 6.4 million viewers and is the highest rated program in FX's history.
In addition to confirming the premiere date, FX has also released this official description of what's in store on the upcoming season:
Jackson 'Jax' Teller (Charlie Hunnam) is SAMCRO's new President who must face the consequences of the MC's illicit deeds before they tear the club apart. Gemma Teller-Morrow (Katey Sagal) is Jax's formidable mother. Clarence 'Clay' Morrow (Ron Perlman) is Jax's stepfather, the last of the Original Nine and former President. Dr. Tara Knowles (Maggie Siff) is Jax's old lady and mother of his second son.
Having framed Clay for the murder of Damon Pope, Season Six begins with Jax's leadership uncontested, but his family life suffering from his single-minded pursuit of John Teller's vision. Jax must find a way to keep Tara from going to prison for conspiracy to commit murder while rebuilding his club and breaking from the cycle of violence and greed that ultimately led to his best friend's death."
kurt sutter
maggie siff
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WORLD CUP fever is gripping Asia after the biggest show on earth began last Thursday, seeing Saudi Arabia smashed 5-0 by the hosts Russia.
Held every four years, the World Cup 2018 has five teams from the Asian Football Confederation: Australia, Iran, Japan, Korea Republic (South Korea) and Saudi Arabia.
They're up against some of the best international sides in the world of the likes of Brazil, France, Germany, Argentina and Spain.
Brazil has won the most titles, taking first prize in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002.
Italy and the Netherlands did not qualify for the 2018 Cup.
Interestingly, the highest average turnout for games in a World Cup in history was 68,991 for the United States in 1994 – dwarfing the famous event in France 1998 which attracted an average of 43,517 punters per game.
The US has just won its bid to host the World Cup in 2026 along with its North American neighbours Mexico and Canada.
Australia played World Cup favourites France on Saturday, losing 2-1 after a goal from Paul Pogba in the 81st minute.
South Korea played Group F opponents Sweden on Monday, losing 1-0. They face two further tough matches against Mexico and Germany.
Japan will play its first group stage match against Colombia on Tuesday.


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Weekly TV Wrap Up - Jan 15 2009
by Bruce Simmons
– on Jan 15, 2009
All kinds of goodies took place this last week. Let's get on with the tidbits of TV!
1. Bruce's Public Service Announcement: Be aware that the season premiere of season 4.5 (Is that just not the most ridiculous thing ever?) of Battlestar Galactica that is airing this Friday on January 16th will run over by 3 1/2 minutes. That means you need to make the appropriate changes to whatever recording device you may employ, if that is indeed what you are doing. Me, I'm gonna be there live! Despite in-laws crawling all over my place, they've been warned. Back off when my show comes on. Go to sleep, go for a walk, go for a drive, or watch it with me, but git out of my way and don't talk during my show! I take my BSG serious! Source: SciFi Wire
2. Some of the biggest news this last week was the Golden Globes awards. Here's a list of Television Series wins that came away with some of that award glitter:
Madmen beat out Dexter, House, In Treatment and True Blood for Best Series
Anna Paquin (True Blood) took Best Performance by an Actress - Drama
Gabriel Byrne (In Treatment) won Best Performance by an Actor - Drama
30 Rock (NBC) beat out Californication (SHOWTIME), Entourage (HBO), The Office (NBC) and Weeds (SHOWTIME) for Best - Musical Or Comedy
Tina Fey (30 Rock) took away the Best Performance by an Actress - Musical Or Comedy award.
Alec Baldwin (30 Rock) won the complimentary award for Best Performance by an Actor - Musical Or Comedy
John Adams (HBO) won the Best Mini-Series Or Motion Picture Made for Television award.
Laura Linney (John Adams) won it for Best Performance by an Actress In A Mini-series or Motion Picture
Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television:Actress: Laura Dern (Recount on HBO)Actor: Paul Giamatti (John Adams on HBO)
Source: GoldenGlobes.org
3. If you're a Faye Dunaway fan, keep an eye out. Dunaway is making a guest appearance on Grey's Anatomy in February. Source: EW.com
4. Speaking of Grey's Anatomy: Melissa George who played the rambunctious, self destructive Sadie has left the show. Tuesday was her last day as she is off to "Do something else". Rumor on the street says it was a mutual decision between her and ABC. Some think the character was too flamboyant. Source: EW.com
5. Stephanie March will be reprising her role of Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot on the popular crime drama show, Law & Order: SVU. Right now, she's slated for 6 episodes. If her return is a success, will they consider keeping her on? Source: NBC
6. Pushing Daisies star Swoosie Kurtz is slated to make an appearance on NBC's Hero's this spring. Her character, Millie, will be on at least one episode. What's not known is whether Kurtz's role will become a recurring role. Depends on audience reaction I guess. Source: TV Guide
7. Remember Laura Vandervoort who played Kara on Smallville? I thought I'd follow up (Not stalking, really) on what she's been up to since her Kara days. She's had roles in The Jazzman, due out this year; she played Marcie Cutler in Out of Control, due out this year; Frankie in Damage that is due out in 2010 and presently she's working on her latest project: Into the Blue 2, also due out in 2010. She keeps everyone apprised of her whereabouts on her website, lauravandervoort.net. She has a surprising versatility to her photo portfolio. Sources: IMDB,
8. Survivor castaways have been announced and the new trick this year is they will be split up into 2 teams immediately and 2 folk will be left behind before anyone even gets to know each other. Ouch. The kid who was always picked last for kick ball will probably be left behind again! The motley rice eating, bug crunching bunch ranges in age from 19 to 53. Source: CBS
9. Supernatural and Smallville kick off the 2nd half of their seasons on January 15th.
10. Stargate: Atlantis generated some great numbers for the Sci-Fi Channel, bringing in an estimated 1.15 million adults between the ages of 25 and 54. The highest rating since their season 4 finale. Source: SyFy Portal
11. John Glover (You may remember him as Lionel Luthor on Smallville) is joining the cast of Heroes. He'll be playing the part of Sylar's biological father. He'll show up about 5 episodes into the 2nd half of the season. Source: E Online
12. Everyone is reporting the hottest news this week that Prison Break will be canceled, or more to the point, be allowed to run its course and end gracefully. For whatever reason, they may add an additional hour or two to fully complete the endless story of the chain gang constantly having to escape something. Of course, if you're a faithful Screen Rant follower, you knew this already since we reported it back in November. Stick with us... we'll keep you on top of things.
Tags: battlestar galactica, smallville, heroes, grey's anatomy, stargate atlantis, supernatural, prison break, pushing daisies, golden globes, law and order:svu, survivor
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