Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Seraphim Falls Review


My work schedule is a little strange, but I really like it because it affords me a lot of alone time to do whatever I want. Normally-sunny Denver has had snow on the ground for a record 40th day in a row, so on Monday (my Sunday) I went to the local movie theater and caught a double header. Both movies delivered for this finicky critic. Letters From Iwo Jima was amazing, but this blog is for the immortal Western.

Seraphim Falls. I saw exactly one commercial for this movie but really liked the scenery. I also love historical movies. Seraphim Falls almost lives up to some of the best Westerns of all time. There were several themes that ran through the movie; post-traumatic stress disorder from war, how tragedy fuses two opposite characters into two sides of the same coin, and an old-fashioned manhunt by a bounty-driven posse.

Pierce Brosnan plays a man roaming the West in 1868, surviving off the land and going from area to area on his horse. He is a former Union captain in the Civil War and seems to be trying to run away from the past and the tragedies and atrocities he committed. We learn through eyewitness accounts that he lost both his sons at Antietam, went beserk and killed 40 men himself. Brosnan is being pursued by Liam Neeson and his hired posse of 4 mercenaries, played by famous actors you have seen in a bunch of movies but you never know their name. Neeson was a Confederate Colonel who had left his unit to return to his farm with his family. Brosnan is sent to get him after the Civil War and finds him not home, mistakenly burns down his property killing Neeson's family. You learn this only through alluding during the first three quarters of the movie, only fully understanding the grievance and reason for the pursuit then.

Caught by surprise, Brosnan gets shot in the arm and has to ditch his horse, having only his knapsack and a coat in the mountains in winter. The posse tracks him, down a river, over falls, down the snowy pass into the desert valleys. The scenery is amazing and seems a lot like Colorado. They call it the 'Ruby Mountains' but this film was definitely shot in the Rockies. The movie touches on the lawnessness and the hardships faced by people in the Frontier at that time. Everyone is a thief, even the clergy. Men, women and children of all ages steal. Everyone just steals from each other trying to eke out their survival.

Several scenes in the movie are hardcore gory, I was actually squirming in my seat. Rambo-style, Pierce Brosnan has to kill one-by-one his pursuers, half drowned and shot with no coat. In one scene, Brosnan has to perform surgery on his arm with his hunting knife to get the bullet out. It is absolutely off the wall.

Frostbitten and freezing without a coat, he buries his hands in the slit belly of his first victim of the posse in a desperate attempt to warm them up. He finds a dead bear in a a steel trap, cuts off the trap and sets up a booby trap. One unsuspecting posse member's horse kicks the trip wire and the trap comes swinging from a tree and catches him full on in the chest. In this harrowing scene one contemplates what that must actually feel like, to have a steel bear trap clamp around one's full chest and ribcage. The dismounted posse stares at him in disbelief, wondering what to do when Neeson merely shoots the poor bastard.

The climax of hardcore, however, came toward the end. A horse that Brosnan had acquired died while trying to get across the Desert. At this point there is one posse member left and they are hot on his heels. Realizing he has nowhere to hide and his pursuers within a mile of him, Brosnan slits the fallen horse's neck. When they come upon the body of the horse, the last remaining posse member dismounts to examine it. Neeson remains mounted and scanning the horizon. The horse's stomach and intestines are ripped from its belly and strewn in front of it. The last posse member walks up to it and turns to Neeson and wonders aloud why Brosnan would do such a thing.

At that point I was thinking that maybe he ate the liver or something because he was starving and wanted to get away and whatnot, when all of the sudden Brosnan leaps OUT of the horse carcass and has the posse member with his hunting knife to his throat! I nearly leaped out of the seat! Brosnan stands there dripping with horse blood and guts, having totally achieved the surprise. I couldn't believe it. Awesome.

I won't report on how it ends however, but it was slightly confused. Without specifically mentioning it, the movie tried to depict the mental anguish and attachment disorders of blame and guilt that war veterans experience. I picked up on that, but the exploration of those issues wasn't enough. You had to always just guess by the look in a character's eyes to tell what their motivation was. But that also was the way the West was too. You couldn't trust anyone. You had to look someone in the eye and go with your intuition. Double-crossing and thievery were done by everyone all the time, that was survival.

Great Western. Better than Tombstone but not quite there with The Good, The Bad, And the Ugly. 8 out of 10 stars.

Friday, January 26, 2007

THE DISTRESS OF THE ANT


In Memoriam - Maury


I befriended an ant one hot, dry, Saturday afternoon
baked in Pueblo, Colorado
I watched him so closely, fascinated
as he sat up, balancing on two fragile splayed legs and rotated his proboscis

Athletically he covered the cardboard-edge terrain that I held aloft before my observing eyes
an impossible height to him

I flicked him on my futon mattress, my place of peaceful rest
I mercilessly manipulated his incredible little life
I raced him before me over and over as I studied his amazing little intricacies
how the legs received commands from the tiniest of brains

Red and orange with a black bulbous rear
pincers for a mouth
I imagined all that he might eat
crumbs, other wonderfully detailed insects
I thought about the constant murderous predation of all life

Wonder unexpectedly turned to a barbaric urge-
I hit the ant as he scurried along his way, my pen cap crashing on him
as an asteroid falling to earth would

Pinned beneath the overhead impact of the black plastic pen cap and the soft futon mattress beneath
his panic evident not by his expression
but by the blurring, rapid motion of his thinnest of twig legs
The Distress Of The Ant
while fleeing, again the pen cap came crashing close
then directly hit, and hit again, and missed, then hit, then missed
another miss, then a hit, then another, and another...

I unceremoniously beat my ant friend to death
his curled corpse and I were close together
both of us suffering in the consequence of my decision to murder
The irreversibility of my actions




A Classic From 1998 New Jersey

The booty call is resounding
seems to blow through treetops
I don't want to ignore it
don't want to pretend that it doesn't pull me

The alcohol fuels it
the flames higher, licking
a starry sky with flicking tongues

Tantalizing bonfire
I want to call Berkley Heights
drive there if I could remember the number
Damn
Alcohol

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Close Call For One Aussie

I read about a Great White shark attack in Austrailia recently. An abelone diver was about 15-20 feet underwater looking for those pesky mollusks along a reef when he claimed out of nowhere a 15-foot Great White bit his head. It knocked out his oxygen mouthpeice.

This is one of the luckiest men on Earth that day. The shark bit his mask. But that wasn't it. Jaws repositioned his grip and half swallowed the man. Medical evidence, injuries and eyewitness accounts all relate this part - the guy was being swallowed. His head, right shoulder and arm and most of his torso were inside the shark. The Great White's teeth were clamped down on the guy's weight vest! Abelone divers wear weights to keep them grounded as they search. This actually acted as body armor. The man tells a tale of absolute horror. As he was feeling the sharks teeth grinding on his vest he was searching around in the fish's gullet with his free arm, pounding away. His left arm and shoulder were still outside of the shark's mouth and the guy actually felt along the shark's head and jammed his thumb in its eye as hard as he could. The monster coughed him up.

The diver found his mouthpiece, connected to him by the breathing tube and tried to take a breath and figure out where the surface was. He found it and started up, but the shark wasn't going away. He swam up slower than you would think to possibly fend off another attack. Reports say the diver was a black belt in some martial art, which really cracked me up - like that would even matter. Probably a 6-foot 180lb. karate-knowing land mammal underwater vs. the 15-foot, 2,500lb. greatest predatory ocean fish of our time. Yeah right. Anyway, the shark was circling below his legs as he tried to surface, expecting it to come up with full speed and force. Imagine how unbelievably terrifying this is?

The diver's son and nearby boaters hauled him right out of the water and got him to shore to medical attention. He is going to be fine, didn't lose a single limb. I would never set foot in so much as a puddle after that. The diver reported from the hospital that his fleeting thoughts while being almost swallowed were total disbelief that he was going to die as fish food. The top half of your body is down the throat of a Great White and it occurs to you that you are about to be bitten in half.

I have been transfixed in vicarious terror about sharks all my life. My first memory is of a shark. I spent countless hours reading about them, drawing them as a child. It boggles my mind that anyone would even attempt surfing in Cali or Austrailia. You look exactly like a seal from the shark's perspective. One second you are sitting on your surf board and the next - BAM! Your leg is gone below the knee. Humans are not accustomed to being hunted by any other species besides ourselves. Stories such as this always remind me that our societies are so busy and intricate and entertainment dominates our lives so much that we don't realize that this trip could end anytime. And you can' t take anything with you. No U-Hauls follow the herse to the cemetary.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

KNOWING THE BEAST



Under the red wavy circle in the harbor
Of an island tree in the sea of plain, his eyes
His eyes beaming a supreme sinister ardor
Away, the herds live in constant forethought surprise

Living sand springs from the high grass, it's him
A collision of enamel as his
Horrible canines sink so forcefully in
Scraping spinal column, killing as is

Fawn's complacent eyes widen and glisten
Like her soul departing, drifting away
So absent this moment of human superstition
Understanding dying, pinned as she lay


He cracks shoulder blades, crushes throat
Breaking legs, he's the bobbing thorn
Branch, tearing and bloodying coat
Sucking marrow, gnawing on horn

Straining in the wind, against its velocity
Flowering is his manhood and red, the stolen blood
Stains his snout, streaming, displaying alacrity
Immolating cycle like the jugular flood

His ferocity grows
Like his strands, striations
Of muscular neck, flows
In all directions

He runs toward me, our eyes
Lock, he's concentrating
On me, out with my sigh
My fear like me soon bleeding, seeping


Wednesday, January 17, 2007





OVERFLOATER doesn't want to give credibility to all those Nostradamus-believing people who have been saying that the world will end in 2012. But damn it all, if the news hasn't been warming us up for a mega-tragedy then I don't know what. Of course there have always been those who have felt that the world was coming to an end. I can rightly see the perspective of those who lived through World War II Europe, to those who were Jewish in Poland, those who tried to resist the Nazi occupiers along the spearhead of their invasion in the Soviet Union, hell even the ad exec who was trying to get down from the World Trade Center.

Maybe it is because we live in a world where technology is so widespread that someone can record an act of terrorism - or an act of God, such as an earthquake or tsunami - with their cell phone. And then the media can take that cell phone, download its images and broadcast them to the world. So we watch entranced in our living rooms half a world away while the ocean takes buses, cars, children and adults back into the depths.


This morning it was announced that 34,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in 2006. The United States has lost 3,000 soldiers in 4 years. The cold analysis of that 10:1 ratio in casualties satisfies the unfeeling economical minds in our leadership echelon. Of course now we see the dismissal of the assistants in trying to salvage what could become the greatest lame-duck presidency of all-time. Circumstances arising from terrorism (which is not a new threat) have caused the greatest economic engine of the time to burn out its clutch and leave the transmission by the side of some desert road. My personal take on this is that the Euro was really starting to outperform the dollar and soon it would hold the power to get that second-largest oil reserve in the world under Iraq pumping again. Faced with the escalating sales of SUV's and the increasing consumption of gasoline in the States, our leaders saw an opportunity to take the oil fields by force instead of economic persuasion. A regime in power that was merely a shelled-out house that could be easily toppled, cook up a story about the possibility of WMD and sell it to the American people who want the good times to keep rolling. In turn, you develop a target for the terrorist networks away from mainland America. The rationale: let them try to attack the Army - which will only remain there in time to protect the oil fields while the country collapses into civil war - who are trained for such combat. Too bad for the poor Army fellows who are there simply to be attacked in a remote, foreign country - the leaders say - but we still got a 10:1 ratio.

Iraq is not Vietnam. The reasons are completely different. Today's war is an energy grab, Vietnam was a containment maneuver- an effort to keep poor Asian countries from resorting to communism, which could result in what the American leaders at the time referred to as a 'domino effect'. Then the Soviets would have the majority of control in Asia, making democratic allies such as India very nervous. No such circumstances this time. We have isolated ourselves from the world with our near-unilateral action of invading a country. Just say it, "...invading a country."

Some food for thought. I know getting in political conversations can sometimes be problematic. Especially at a bar, where such conversations can go wrong quickly.

Now for the bright side, let's enjoy professional sports while we can still afford to.