Oscar Sunday

Will election observers monitor the Oscar votes this year since a new system of voting has been installed? I have no favorites this year but it's always fun.

But for next year I nominate Johnny Depp as the mad-hatter in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The sequence where he recites the Jabberwocky is memorable. "Who are yoou?" says Alan Rickman as the hookah smoking caterpillar. And the Cheshire Cat is a fine imagined creation except when over-used near the end. Helen Bonham Carter was great as the Red Queen but Anne Hathaway played the White Queen too spacy for my tastes. Tim Burton's re-imagining Alice in Wonderland as a tale told on the day a young woman is being asked to marry a young, obnoxious Lord is inspired. The orchestral score is a bit too much canned adventure movie. And I get bugged by this need in movies like Harry Potter to bring all the characters together at the end for some notion of closure. The death of Dumbledore was a prime example of this. Here in Alice in Wonderland it wasn't necessary. For music lovers, the album has virtually no relationship to the movie except for Avril Lavigne's song over the ending credits. But a fun time was had by all.

Whether we want to admit it or not, our brains contain millions of images from the films we have seen and they constitute part of our real experience and way of thinking. After my Ken Russell film festival last week, I was crushed to learn that Video Vault, the place where I rent films is closing next month. It took a few days before the extent of this calamity seeped into my head. While they advertise having the worst films and they have an extraordinary collection of the truly awful, they have every film by every great director ever made as well as the new auteurs from Europe and Britain. And if you want to see all the American noir they have them. For me, I can't do things like have a Rondo Hattan film festival or run a series of Fellinis during the week.

Part of the enjoyment with a local, privately owned establishment is you can talk about films and smooze. I'm sure I can do Netflix or something like it but I don't have the specific memory to locate the missing Brando movie I remembered and want to see that night. Besides, I don't like the commercial aspect of having my data on line at some impersonal address.

I talked to the owner Jim about this drastic move. He said the lease was up. I helped him move his stock the last time this happened. He said the trend was totally toward downloads and the internet and that the future was all digital. Now he's going to sell 85,000 titles by the end of April. We are talking the complete everybody. And yet if you are overloaded already with CDs and books like I am, you can't indulge the fantasy of buying all your favorite movies. There is not enough space. Oh, but the whole Criterion collection is there in all its glory!

This is the second blow we've received in Old Town. The first was the closing of our local Olsson's bookstore. Olsson's was a privately-owned mini-chain of bookstores in the Washington area. They sold books and music. The employees were book mavens, documentary filmmakers waiting for new funding, freelance writers and musicians for local rock bands. My son and I would wander down about six blocks in the late evening to chat with the employees and browse. I would head upstairs to the closet holding the reviewer's copies of forthcoming titles and pick out what I wanted and then talk about more obscure books coming out in the next few months. My son would pick the brains of the musicians downstairs. Then one night we headed down there as usual and discovered a totally empty storefront. Everything had been taken away and the store was closed. In the paper we learned they had gone bankrupt and evacuated all their stores within 24 hours. We have not seen any of our old friends since. And I haven't had a good conversation about books since. The chains simply don't have people that actually follow books like a bibliophile does.

I've decided that if Mischa's the coffeehouse goes under, then it's time to sell the house. Starbucks has deteriorated to the point of no return. Mischa's lugs in bags of coffee and roasts their own every day. But even Mischa's is having trouble because the no-smoking ban forced them to close the back room where people hung out all day. But at least here in Virginia we can openly carry firearms into restaurants and coffeehouses. I could defend myself in case a patron gets over-caffeinated.

The death of these locally owned institutions dramatically affects our quality of life. I always loved college bookstores because you can find out the latest books in specific disciplines and see whether you should upgrade your knowledge. I went to my son's college bookstore to find its part of the Barnes & Noble chain and that any special books were ordered for classes and limited to enrollment. Now I have to crawl around town to find a good used bookstore. They still exist but are disappearing just as fast.

What if we used the stimulus funds to support these local businesses? At least they would create jobs? Next I'll start looking for old 5 and dime stores.

A couple of CD recommendations: For a mature movie about the Danish Underground, Flame and Citron is an excellent portrayal of the greys in such situations. Nazis are still the best villains and the red-haired Danish assassin must confront a maze of interactions to determine whether he is being used to cover up his bosses' collaboration or really fulfilling his missions.

Stephen Soderbergh's two movie Che is superb movie making. If you want to get the feel of guerrilla warfare, both movies produce. The first covers the Cuban Revolution. It has some of the more obscure figures in it but omits my old friend Carlos Franqui, the editor of Revolucion, and Huber Matos, who was a major figure until erased from the official history. I also felt it waffled on the series of executions right after the Revolution. These basically ended support in the United States and Europe and triggered alot of the defections of major Cuban writers and artists. The second film covers the failed Bolivian venture of Che to create a peasant uprising among primarily indigeous people. You get to see Regis Dubrey in his revolutionary writer's role--years before he became best friends with Jeane Kirkpatrick. Did Castro betray Che or was the East German woman a Stasi agent? This is avoided by the movie. But it is still riveting. The films are based on the biography by an old colleague John Lee Anderson.