That Evening Sun

Posted by toni-s on: Sun 7th Feb, 2010

We attended a screening of "That Evening Sun". It was shown Friday night and Saturday morning at the Metro 4 as part of the Santa Barbara Film Festival. It played to a well-deserved full house. Taken from the short story by William Gay, who writes sensitively about the south, this movie was poignant and exquisitely crafted. Hal Holbrook beautifully plays the complex character, Abner Meecham, an old farmer, who finds himself alone in a nursing home environment he did not choose. Determined to go "home" he makes his way back to his farm, to find that his son has rented the place to the family of Lonzo Choat, who Abner views as "good-for-nothing" white trash. As Abner makes his choice to stay on the farm, against the wishes of everyone involved, he is presented with several opportunities to help or hinder. As the movie progresses we learn that Abner is feisty, unflinching and unwilling to reach out to any of the helping hands that are offered to him. Ray McKinnon plays Lonzo Choat, a man who has always been a "failure" and still struggles to transform himself and the life of his family, who tries and fails, and still tries to do the right thing. Carrie Preston's performance as Ludie is nuanced and touching as a wife who has watched her husband fail, has suffered his abuse, but who still loves him. Mia Wasikowska is the daughter, Pamela, who reaches out in friendship to Abner, who has also experienced abuse at her father's hands. Her performance was lovely in it's tenderness and confusion.

The rest of the cast, Walton Goggins as Abner's neighbor and Barry Corbin as Abner's son Paul, are perfectly pitched and satisfying complex, in this story of the south that vibrates with the beauty of place and human conflict.

Directed by Scott Teems, music by Michael Penn, Produced in part by Santa Barbara local, Laura Smith.

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Tags: Santa Barbara Film Festival, c2sbiff, sbiff, sbarts, santa barbara arts, That Evening Sun, Hal Holbrook, Raymond McKinnon, Carrie Preston, Mia Wasikowska, Walton Goggins, Barry Corbin, Scott Teems, Michael Penn, Laura Smith

The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine

Posted by toni-s on: Tue 13th Jan, 2009

This film by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, which was made in 2008, was shown at Campbell Hall at UCSB last night, January 12.

Louise Bourgeois' work has been shown this past year at the Guggenheim in New York and now is at MOCA in Los Angeles.

The film was a touching and intimate portrait of the artist, much of it filmed at her studio in New York City, referencing earlier life events in France where she was born, and her history in the art world for sixty years.

Bourgeois spoke movingly about her life as a child in a difficult family situation. As a child, she traveled with her mother following her father who was fighting in WWI. Her relationship with her mother and her father and her father's live-in mistress as well as both of her parents deaths, informed and inspired her work, which she describes less as objects and more as representations of her deep feelings.

Her materials of choice are harder materials, and larger scale works. She uses found objects to create enclosed "cells" that are laden with her personal and historical meaning. Her reflections on family relationships, illness in all its physical and psychic manifestations have resulted in work that is profound and visually memorable. She uses marble, wood, metal and delicate glass things, like empty perfume bottles and glass formations that have a medical resonance. She uses the color red, which she explains means pain, blood and all attendant meanings, and says with finality, that it is perfectly clear what the color red "means".

Some of her most memorable creations have poetical and "meaning-full names", "Nostalgie", "Passage Dangereux" and most poignantly, "I Do, I Un-Do, I Re-do".

For anyone interested in art that touches the mind and the spirit, I recommend Louise Bourgeois and this film, The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine.