There are a number of things about Rosenabaum’s argument that plainly tick me off, but instead of enumerating that negativity let me cut to the chase: the most remarkable thing about Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Lincolnis that is creates this Lincoln as a figure of language, maybe even as a medium of language—and of the law, which is an understanding of and organization of language—, which we would do well to remember is a testament to the history of human thought. The movie is made for posterity, which may well be synonymous with prestige (and in turn slightly dubious), but as a function of argumentation, where the mise-en-scene and, yes, the lighting scheme work to serve the rhetoric of a worldview where, get this, all humans are created equal in their capacity—if not their ability—for openness, well, call me a sucker for drinking that gravy to the heart attack it might render upon my living body.
w/r/t two posts above, I read far too many of the Criterion Top Tens to not start thinking about my own. And of course I cheated. I’ll let you suss out how I paired and tripled up some of these that follow but, know this, there is a reason for the groups beyond wanting more than a measly ten.
Sat next to a man on the plane from Lisbon to Newark for eight hours who not only took my window seat before I got on the plane but used a good deal of my seat’s space and all of the arm rest between us. He stood maybe 5’8” and easily weighed over 200 lbs and after I said, No, I prefer the aisle, but I plan on sleeping a lot, he went on and on for an hour of gum smacking about how he voted for “the other guy” and how many rifles he has in his basement for hunting rare elk in the Appalachian mountains.
A brief dispatch from LEFFEST. We sleep at a five star hotel and see movies some times. The power was out at the main Lisbon movie theatre, we think, because the owner forgot to pay his bill. Pizza is reliable. There is a lot of oil in every meal except at/in the free breakfast (if you choose fruit and yogurt). We enjoy a fleet of drivers willing to ferry us from Estoril to Lisbon and back almost at our whim, give or take twenty minutes, except when that power outage happened. I have not explored Lisbon to the extent I wished to, and today it will begin to rain for each of the last of my days here.
