Mid-week Movie ~ Desierto and Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Around a couple of weeks ago (HERE) I was scribbling about allegory and mentioning how it is often used in movies - sometimes without simple-minds like mine being aware of that intention, until prompted. I, all unknowingly, happened upon this circumstance again last week. As a change from undiluted Netflix we decided to rent a handful of DVDs from our local video store. One of these, chosen purely due to its leading man, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, turned out to have been ...yep...an allegory.

We first came across Jeffrey Dean Morgan (hereafter referred to as JDM) in his part in the later seasons of The Good Wife when he joined the cast to play an investigator, and a new love interest for leading lady Julianna Margulies. Very engaging, thought I! He'll go far! He has, but in what I consider the wrong direction - but then, I'm old, what do I know?

I backtracked in JDM's career and found on Netflix (or maybe Amazon?) a series in which he had played the lead in 2012/3: Magic City. We watched both seasons of that - not bad! He was sans beard back then, and a tad heavier I think. I also read that he had a minor part in Grey's Anatomy (season 9) but so far we've not caught that one, not being big fans of hospital series. However, though JDM has said, in interview, that he could probably have spent his career playing romantic-comedy-type roles, when he was offered a change he gladly took the opportunity to widen his range. He has now played, and quite unromantically I guess, The Comedian in Watchmen and Negan in The Walking Dead. In Desierto, the movie I began to write about earlier, before falling down the JDM rabbit hole, JDM is the arch-villain.

I wasn't expecting to actually enjoy Desierto or admire the character JDM depicted, but decided I ought to sample this one to catch up with the arc of his career, as my stomach would probably not take kindly to either Watchmen or The Walking Dead.

In a nutshell, and basically that's what the theme of Desierto amounts to - a nutshell's worth of plot, with a very nasty nut in the lead! "Sam" [Uncle?] is a seriously obsessed murdering vigilate-type who lives near, or stalks around, the US/Mexico border, with a beautiful dog called Tracker, who has been cruelly trained (I blame not dogs - ever!) Tracker will, by the way, before the film ends, comply with my "Rule of Dog in Film".

David Sims' review in The Atlantic: Desierto Is a Horror Movie for the Age of Trump is a good and, for me, an enlightening read as to the film's allegorical intention. Maybe the heat is getting to me, but I hadn't connected the vigilante's name, Sam, to the US iconic avuncularity thing.

Jonas Cuarón’s film sees a racist vigilante stalking and murdering Mexican migrants as they cross the border. Sims' review begins:

The premise of Desierto is simple, and blunt. A truck full of Mexican migrants, attempting to cross the U.S. border illegally, is attacked in the desert by a lone gunman. For the next 90 minutes, the truck’s occupants are hunted by this demented figure toting a sniper rifle, a horror-movie villain who mumbles to his dog about keeping his country safe. If the metaphor seems obvious, well, it’s supposed to be — the Mexican director Jonas Cuarón has manifested a villain out of recent anti-immigrant sentiment, and is terrorizing viewers with it.

Desierto is not a good movie, but it’s an interesting pop-cultural footnote, especially given its release in the final weeks leading up to a U.S. presidential election in which Donald Trump seized the Republican nomination partly on the back of his extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s a horror movie first and foremost, although not a particularly original one.

Later in the piece:

Perhaps that’s Cuarón’s larger point — that viewers can reconcile themselves to this awful violence, especially when it’s presented in a genre format via an action thriller playing out in the landscape of a wide-open desert. But the film’s battle lines are drawn so quickly, and its point made so unsubtly, that it’s hard to go much deeper. Yes, the rhetoric of politicians like Trump, who tar Mexican immigrants as monstrous rapists and murderers, is worth investigating, and Cuarón’s obvious anger over it is both palpable and understandable.

But because of its one-note message, this film isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind about anything. Desierto succeeds in portraying the savagery of racism, but in the end, it’s completely cold.

Without at first being aware of the wider, allegorical, intention of the movie, I hated Sam anyway, which was the whole simple point of this movie. I suspect that JDM was offered the part of Sam due to the rather unromantic reputation he has been gathering from Watchmen and Walking Dead - obviously not from his yummy, and rather believable character in The Good Wife! Sadly, it seems that JDM could go the way of another of my early romantic favourites, Bruce Willis, with whom I fell in love aeons ago in Moonlighting; then fell out of love with a clatter after seeing him in his Die Hard evolution - as well as discovering that, politically, he's a Republican supporter. I don't know whether a similar fate awaits JDM, but I shall be watching for clues and evidence!

Arty Farty Friday ~ Edward James and His Folly, Las Pozas.

Commenter "mike" alerted me to today's Arty Farty Friday subject - thanks mike!
Edward James and his creation in Las Pozas, Mexico.

My goodness, though, this guy was such an amazing character, where to begin, there's so much!?
For any passing reader with just under an hour to spare, this video is excellent, and features the man himself:

For passing readers in more of a hurry: I'll begin at the end, at Las Pozas and work backwards.

Las Pozas was Edward James' folly. In England it's not unusual to find follies, they're smallish ornamental structures such as a tower, sculptured column, or a fancy quirky gazebo, they're always in the middle of nowhere, constructed by wealthy landowners or members of the aristocracy, and for reasons best known to themselves. Follies. Los Pozas was a folly of huge proportion, a peculiar but beautiful sculpture garden covering acres of Mexican jungle where Edward James had originally intended to breed orchids, but after unexpected frost killed off his plants, he began creating his wonderful folly.

A few examples - for more just type Las Pozas into Google Image search box, or at YouTube (if you can stand the adverts now almost universally inserted before content!)

Edward James was the epitome of an eccentric Englishman. Born in 1907 into a wealthy family background. His grandfather, an American millionaire had married a mining heiress, before the couple moved to England. One of their sons was Edward James' father, who married an English gal said to have been the illegitimate daughter of Edward VII, she became Edward James' mother.
James went to Eton, and Oxford University but was unhappy in both environments, despite his wealth and privilege. He wandered into the then London literary high society of Sitwells, Mitfords and Cunards, Noel Coward and John Betjeman, of Agustus John and Randolph Churchill. James was said to have been charming, lively and a good raconteur, ridiculously generous on occasion, with periods of introversion.

 Hat-tip Mondoblogo

He wrote poetry and some novels, became friends with avant-garde artists of the day, such as Dali and Magritte. He appears in one of Magritte's well-known paintings:

 Not to be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite, 1937)  by  Belgian surrealist René Magritte.  It was commissioned by poet and Magritte patron Edward James and considered to be a portrait of James .

Quinky-dink sidelight - in a DVD set of a past TV series, Eli Stone we're watching currently, during the opening credits what seems like a loose version of this painting is shown. We recognised it as a nod to Magritte's painting, but had no idea of the painting's connection to Edward James - until I began preparing this post.

He met and married dancer Tilly Losch. The marriage was doomed. Tilly sued for separation, charging homosexuality among other things. James countersued, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky. Back then, this was not something a gentleman did. James moved to Europe. Polite society had shunned him. In 1939, with war brewing, he moved to the USA. In Taos, New Mexico, he lived among a community of artists there including D H Lawrence and his wife, Frieda.

Throughout his life he gave money freely to all manner of painters and writers; he built clinics for poor nuns, bought houses in Hollywood and Malibu, land in Mexico, and supported an assortment of freeloaders. In the late 1940s James eventually found his dream situation in the Mexican jungle. There he adopted a local family and set about building a “stairway to imagination”, as he once put it, in plant and stone. He himself lived in a tiny apartment, a bedroom, living room and porch on two stories. On one wall he scrawled in pencil his poem "This Shell": "My house grows like the chambered nautilus...." His huge and incredibly valuable collection of artworks, his lands in England , America and Mexico, houses from California to Scotland all abandoned for a tiny "doll's tree house where a man could hide".

He died in 1984 after a stroke, while on a return visit to Europe. In 1964, Edward James had conveyed his family mansion, West Dean, art collection and Estate to The Edward James Foundation, a charitable educational trust. The creation of such a trust averted the fragmentation that death duties would have dictated and allowed the materialisation of Edward's vision: creating a community where the Estate supports a college dedicated to the arts and crafts. In 1971, Edward James's vision became a reality when the gates of his family Estate were opened under the auspices of West Dean College. (See HERE).


(General information sources HERE and HERE)


ASTROLOGY

Born on 16 August 1907 in the south of England, probably at his family's mansion, West Dean, near Chichester, Sussex.

For brevity's sake I'm looking only for indications of eccentricity in the natal chart of Edward James. It's set for 12 noon as birth time isn't known. Moon would have been somewhere in Scorpio though, whatever time he came into the world.

Eccentricity in astrology is usually reflected by the position of Uranus; here Uranus conjoins Mars in Capricorn, the duo is opposed by Neptune (imagination, creativity) in Cancer. That, I'd say, was the "epicentre" of James' eccentricity. The three intensely personal planets (Sun, Mercury, Venus) in dramatic Leo, though not harmoniously situated in relation to Uranus, had to have input into the way his eccentricity would manifest. What could be more dramatic and theatrical in nature (pure Leo) than his beautiful jungle follies?