Oscar Bits and Bites

WoodyAllenPages has a rundown on the MoMa screening for Blue Jasmine. Most of the tweets are what you would expect from a special screening like that, very enthusiastic. But you find them interesting nonetheless.  The site also has a link to some of the locations in San Francisco used in the film.

The daughter of Oscar Grant, the subject of Ryan Coogler’s upcoming Fruitvale Station, is excited that the film is going to be released soon, but she won’t be able to see the film until she’s much older.

The real Captain Phillips, the subject of the upcoming Paul Greengrass film of the same name, said this about the upcoming film:

“I  hope it isn’t completely Hollywoodized.  Hollywood changes things a bit I hope it stays as much as it can for the viewer to understand what did happen. I’m afraid it’s focusing too much on me. I mean my crew was there.” He also said, “We’re stronger than even we realize, we spend our time worrying. We should just go ahead don’t quit don’t stop just plug away do the best you can and you’ll find most things come out positively we have to keep going stick to it and persevere”

In case you were wondering about the story behind Saving Mr. Banks, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks, there is an archived New Yorker story on the author, P.L. Travers and the early origins of her life and how she came to write Mary Poppins. The piece is from 2005, and can be read here.  If you don’t have a subscription, you can read the full piece here.

Children’s authors are not known for their happy childhoods, and Helen Goff—the little girl who at twenty-one changed her name to Pamela Travers and never looked back—endured one that was almost archetypal in its sadness and its privations. She was born in Australia in 1899, the eldest daughter in a household of girls. Her father, Travers Goff, was a bank manager and a drinker, and he died when she was seven. Valerie Lawson, the author of the only comprehensive biography of Pamela Travers, notes that “epileptic seizure delirium” was given as the cause of death, but says Pamela Travers “always believed the underlying cause was sustained, heavy drinking.” Her mother, Margaret, who was pretty and feckless, soldiered on for a few years, and then, when Helen was ten, she did what a mother is never supposed to do. She gave up.

One night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Margaret left Helen in charge of the two younger children, telling her that she was going to drown herself in a nearby creek. As an old woman, Travers wrote about the terrifying experience: “Large-eyed, the little ones looked at me—she and I called them the little ones, both of us aware that an eldest child, no matter how young, can never experience the heart’s ease that little ones enjoy.” Helen stirred the fire and then they all lay down on the hearth rug and she told them a story about a magical flying horse, with the small ones asking excited questions (“Could he carry us to the shiny land, all three on his back?”). As she tried to distract her siblings, she worried about the future. She later wrote, “What happens to children who have lost both parents? Do they go into Children’s Homes and wear embroidered dressing-gowns, embroidery that is really darning?” That predicament—the fate of children whose parents can’t take care of them—haunted her for the rest of her life.

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody on The Bling Ring, “In their selfies and their videos, the teens broadcast themselves living out crude fantasies of what, as one of them says, “everyone” aspires to be. What isn’t shared is the way they actually live: the teens don’t depict themselves breaking into houses and cars, stealing, selling stolen goods, or driving drunk. They don’t talk about their own lives in terms of stories. Rather, they live in a world that detaches effect from cause, and they depict only the outcomes.”