Month: March 2020

Burger Boy

/ Benn Bell / 2 Comments

Flash Fiction

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I was having breakfast in one of my favorite hamburger joints, Burger Boy, down on Burnett Street. I was concentrating on my reading when I noticed a shadow falling over me and a rush of wind as someone walked past. I looked up and caught the figure of a young woman in a black leather jacket. She walked up to the lunch counter and sat on one of the stools that had seats covered in red vinyl.  She ordered some food and then stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. She never came back. She left behind her leather jacket and her purse. The jacket she set on the stool and the purse she set on the counter.  When she spoke to the counter person, she ordered breakfast to go: scrambled eggs and hash browns with rye toast. As I recall, officer, when I looked up from the book I was reading, I noticed a single black female, short in stature, with long black hair and fake eyelashes. She was wearing a black ball cap with the black leather jacket. The jacket had silver studs on the collar and along the half circle for each of her shoulders. She had on tight blue jeans and brown suede fringed moccasins that went half way up her well-shaped calves. There was a red leather purse with a gold chain sitting on the counter in front of her. It’s still there. I figured her for a pretty wild character. Judging by the way she was dressed she might have been a working girl. Although I, doubt it. She had an air of confidence about and looked like she wouldn’t take shit from anyone. Especially a pimp.

I noticed just before she went outside, she kept glancing at her cell, scrolling through her messages. Yeah, she might have been an independent all right. When she turned around to leave was when I witnessed and felt the full force of her great beauty. She was quite a looker. Shame about what happened. Do you think you will catch the guy?

Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico

/ Benn Bell / 7 Comments

Photo Essay Chapala

Chapala, Jalisco is eleven kilometers (7 miles) from Ajijic, an easy taxi ride or bus trip. To take a taxi it was 50 pesos, to take the bus it was 10. I usually took whatever came first. But the bus rides could be quite an adventure. They were always crowded and some times if you got a local they got off into the neighborhoods and the traversed the narrow cobblestone streets.

Chapala is a pretty little town a little larger than Ajijic and is a bit nicer. A lot of of tourists come down to visit from Guadalajara which is about 50 KM away. It is nestled between the mountains on one side and Lake Chapala on the other.

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The Fishermen of Chapala

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On the Malecon

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Parish of San Francisco

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Parish of San Francisco Interior

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The Fisherman of Chapala

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I am the way and the light

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Meat Market

 

The Comfort of Strangers (1990)

/ Benn Bell / 8 Comments

Movie Review

Poster Strangers

Never has Venice been more beautiful, photographed more sumptuously, or depicted with more foreboding since Nicholas Roeg’s, Don’t Look Now (1973). The Comfort of Strangers (1990), directed by Paul Schrader, is a horror movie but you don’t know that until the startling climax. That’s when you look back and see all the clues.

Venice

A young couple, Mary (Natasha Richardson) and Colin (Rupert Everett) travel to Venice to try to rekindle what is left of their lukewarm relationship. They walk around the streets of Venice in what seems like a bored stupor. They get lost one night and are rescued by an older man dressed in white (Robert, played with understated menace by Christopher Walken) who takes them to a bar and regales them with stories of his family and plies them with wine.

Lost in Venice

“My father was a very big man. And he wore a black mustache. When he grew older and it grew gray, he colored it with a pencil. The kind women use. Mascara.” This we learn from Robert not once but three times. This is our first clue that something is not quite right with Robert.

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When Mary and Colin leave the bar, they get lost again and spend the night outside leaning against a wall. They make their way to a café on the piazza the next morning to order breakfast. Robert spies them and comes over and apologizes for abandoning them last night and invites them to his luxurious palazzo to get some rest. They accept. Later, they wake up naked in bed. It seems Robert’s wife,  Caroline (Helen Mirren), has hidden their clothes with instructions from Robert not to give them back until they accept an invitation to dinner. Caroline admits to Mary that she has sneaked into their room and watched them while they were sleeping. Another clue. Things get weird from there.

Christopher Walken

When Mary and Colin depart and go back to their hotel, they somehow find the spark that they were looking for and have wild passionate sex. They are lured back again to the mysterious couple’s abode and things do not end well.

CAROLINE AND MARY

A lot of things don’t quite add up in this stylish thriller but it is so interesting to watch you don’t seem to care. Excellent acting all around with Christopher Walken standing out as the creepy Robert. The film might best be summed up by the police detective investigating the crime at the end, “I don’t get it,” he says. I didn’t either, but I sure did enjoy it. Quite a literary pedigree, I may add, based on the novel by Ian McEwan and screenplay by Harold Pointer. Paul Schrader is known as a literary type of director and this is his kind of material.

The Plague

/ Benn Bell / 8 Comments

Social Distancing in Elizabethan England in the Time of the Plague

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William Shakespeare

In William Shakespeare’s time, London was ravaged by the bubonic plague. Public health regulation was haphazard at best in Elizabethan England, but one official measure that people seem to understand was that isolation of plague victims seem to slow down the spread of the disease. Hence the nailing shut of quarantined houses. They grasped too the relationship between the progress of the epidemics and large crowds. Authorities did not cancel church services, but when plague deaths began to rise they did shut down the theaters. This, of course, included the Globe Theater in which Shakespeare mounted his productions. The rule of thumb to shutter the theaters was 30 deaths per week. The enemies of the theaters became even more strident in their criticism, shouting that God had sent the plague to punish London for its sins, above all whoredom, sodomy, and playacting.

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The Globe Theater

Source: Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt

Photos: by Benn Bell

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

/ Benn Bell / 18 Comments

Movie Review

Birds od Prey poster

Birds of Prey (2020)

Directed by: Cathy Yan

Starring: Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Rosie Perez as Renee Montoya, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as The Black Canary, Ella Jay Basco as Cass,  and rounding out the cast, Ewan McGregor as the Black Mask.

Some of you might be surprised that I went to see this movie. To be honest I am a little surprised myself.  First of all, I am not a big fan of Marvel movies. I agree with Martin Scorsese that Marvel movies aren’t really cinema. I know, this is a DC Comics picture. DC Comics, Marvel Comics, the same thing. So, what possessed me on a bright, sunny, Sunday afternoon to enter a dark cavern in a multiplex and witness mayhem at its finest? Margot Robbie, that’s what. Plus, there isn’t a whole lot to choose from right now and I have actually heard good things about this movie. So, I hustled there inside, and friends, I am here to tell you I am glad I did!

Harley Quinn

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn

I don’t know much about the source material because I stopped reading comics when I was 12, but this movie has legs and stands on its own.

This is 109 minutes of pure entertainment! A tip of the hat to Quentin Tarantino for some of the action scenes sure looked familiar. If you are going to steal, steal from the best, I always say! Also, there were some memorable dialog, lines, cultural references, and T-Shirts, such as:

“You make me want to be less of a terrible person,” spoken by One Harley Quinn.

She has the word “Rotten” tattooed on her right cheek, and she sports at times a T-shirt that says, “Daddy’s Little Monster.”

At one point she refers to a character as “You Frida Kahlo looking mother fucker!”

Rose Perez sports a T-shirt that says, “I shaved my balls for this.”

And at the end Harley Quinn reveals her new calling cards: “Harley Quinn and Associates – Bad Ass Motherfuckers!”

Black Canary

Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Margot Robbie in Birds of Prey

Written and directed by women, with strong female leads, this movie is a towering monument to female empowerment.  Lot’s a diversity on display here too. Visually stunning, Gotham City never looked better as photographed by lensman Mathew Libatique. Add a killer sound track that perfectly matches the action and you have  movie that is solid entertainment and a lot of fun. Two thumbs way up!