This week: a pair of bookend images from the inside of a colonial Puerto Rican guard tower.  The one above looks in one verdant direction; the one that ends this post shows the view when you turn your head 180 degrees to the right.  You can imagine what it must have been like to be the lone sentry in this tiny, fairy-tale tower of an outlook.

This week was "Winter Break" at my Nova Scotian university (the second semester is called "Winter Term," because - strictly speaking - Spring never occurs during the January to April months), so I was in Los Angeles catching up on movies, doing some reading, watching endless Olympics coverage, and soaking up some warm(er) weather.  In fact, it has hardly been the sunny beach weather I had hoped for: it has been more humid here this week than it was in Nova Scotia for months before. 

Not a lot of reading got done today, since it is my last day in California with my beloved.  I am in the midst of Sabriel by Garth Nix and The Slightest Provocation by Pam Rosenthal, neither of which has really grabbed me yet.  In both cases I feel ... I am not sure ... unengaged by the core characters.  What so you, ye who have read either of these books?  Do they become more gripping as they progress?  Am I just coming to them at a somewhat distracted time?

We spent much of today at the IMAX, seeing Avatar in 3D.  Now, after Titanic, which I found irritating in the extreme on its initial release, I swore I would never see another James Cameron film.  And I wasn't really intrigued by the whispers and tidbits I heard about this one.  But D and I finally decided that if we were going to see it at all, we should really see it in all its big-screen, bells-and-whistles, special-effects glory.  And the truth is that it was making enough noise for its innovations that we were going to want to see it eventually.

So off we went, and to be perfectly honest ... I didn't hate it.  I really, really expected to hate it.  It comes down to this: the plot was ham-handed and creakily simplistic, the villains were too wooden and obvious to be satisfyingly villainous, and some of the performances were disappointingly weak.  But the special effects were not among these weaknesses.  The Na'vi (the lanky, enormous, Disney-eyed and cobalt-skinned indigenous peoples of Pandora, the film's colonized world) are so beautifully rendered that it is almost a disappointment for us (like the hero of the film) to return to human society.  This is largely because of the incredibly expressive eyes of the Na'vi; some of their limbs are still rather awkward in slower motions.   As for the 3D - it was an intriguing first experience, but I could honestly do without it.  It had a tendency to slip in and out of focus whenever I changed the angle of my head slightly or turned my gaze to look directly at the extreme corners of the screen.  And I would rather have true depth of field and precision of focus than ferns that reach out to grab me from the screen.

While in LA, I also caught up on some of my blogging.  I will leave you with a list of the week's posts.  Happy March, everyone! Here's hoping that my return to Canada tomorrow is uneventful....

• Goin' Down the Road - in which our heroine contemplates the archetypal Maritime journey: away from home with hope, and into nostalgia and economic despair.
• Little Dieter Needs to Fly - in which she treats a similar journey of hope and endurance, with a sidebar on the symbolic connection between bears and death.
• On Dance, Ice, Aesthetics, and Competition - in which she admits her secret passion for ice dancing.  It's a sport, dammit.
• The Mystical Sport of Curdling - in which she contemplates (with Steve Carrell) another of her Olympic passions, and its zen dimensions.

A few weeks ago, a forum was held in Nova Scotia that revealed a province on the cusp of a severe labor shortage after decades in which the population aged, the birth rate declined, and generations of young workers moved west to pursue better and (perplexingly, given the current situation) more abundant jobs.  For a province that has been steeped in persistent unemployment problems for decades, this is a bewildering problem to wrap our minds around, but it may have severe consequences for the funding of social services as the number of paychecks contributing tax dollars to these programs declines rapidly.

It is against the background of this apocalyptic labor reversal that I watched the first film in my informal effort to watch more Canadian, and specifically Maritime, cinema: Goin' Down the Road.  This was, by all accounts, a landmark film for Canadian cinema, a work of neo-realism that treated the archetypal Atlantic Canadian story with greater truth than (according to Pauline Kael, so the story goes) John Cassavetes's films could lay claim to.  Two unemployed (and, such is the depressed state of the Maritime provinces, unemployable) young men leave their native Nova Scotia for the brighter prospects of Toronto.  Once there they discover that the Toronto relatives whose support they had counted on are too ashamed of their provincial broadness to answer the door (the finks are actually depicted hiding behind the curtains of their house while snarking about our heroes' behavior).  They had dreams of white collar success (symbolized by an attempt to acquire a career in advertising), but they can't get any but the most transient jobs without a university education that would have been largely useless to them in Nova Scotia.  Between them, they get and lose minimum wage jobs, frolic in the parks of Toronto, knock up and marry a girlfriend, buy three rooms of furniture out of the back of a magazine (including a color tv - "If they could see this at home!") and then lose the ability to pay for a three-room apartment.  Eventually they are crammed into a tiny tenement flat - husband, pregnant wife, and their friend (who is the only one bringing in a paycheck) - and they begin to wonder how they are going to be able to afford to eat their next meal.

So it is a jolly sort of film.

For me, the interest of this movie was largely historical and geographical.  It has all the possible faults of neo-realism - hamhanded acting from inexperienced performers, sentimentality, and shaky production values.  But it is an exquisitely typical representation of a particular cultural moment of almost Dreiserish economic deterioration and despair.  And I should note that the film's ending, although necessarily grim*, is oddly hopeful as well.  This is a film of the road, like so many films about economic depression, and the road is equally a symbol of the endlessness and the falsehood of hope and progress.

But the most appealing moments of this film, for me, were the Nova Scotian ones, the ones that are a portrait, both alien and quintessential, of my new home.  Thus the opening of the film is a grittily lovely montage of Nova Scotian still lives: a field of abandoned, rusting cars; mist rising over a lake; a fishing boat tilted and half-submerged in still, dark water.  Stunning.  It makes me reflect (both affectionately and scathingly) that this might have been a more successful film if no one ever spoke in it.

A worthy watch, but not necessarily an enjoyable one.



Goin' Down the Road
dir. Donald Shebib (Canada, 1970)
**


*It involves (SPOILER) assault, police pursuit, and spousal abandonment.