Discover Top Posts Tagged with #thomas mccarthy

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Budget Fact: George Clooney was paid one dollar each for writing, directing, and starring in the film. This helped keep the film's costs low, coming in at a budget of just $7.5 million. He also mortgaged his own house in Los Angeles to help raise the film's budget.

ESE: 100/100

50 +5 for film made in 2005 being shot in black and white +5 for Jeff Daniels +5 for Alex Borstein +5 for Rose Abdoo +10 for Robert Downey Jr. +5 for Patricia Clarkson +5 for the use of actual footage of McCarthy +10 for George Clooney -10 for McCarthy’s bizarre targetting -10 for holding a trial with no evidence, ruling guilty, and deeming someone a security risk -5 for threatening head of news stations because you disagree with what they’re doing +5 for the jazz performance every 23 minutes +5 for “Should I turn the phones back on?” +5 for the reinstating of Radulovich -10 for McCarthy’s attack on Murrow +10 for Murrow’s bravery and direct and honest response +5 for the Senate investigating McCarthy -10 for Hollenbeck’s suicide +5 because “everyone knows they’re married” +5 for going down swinging +5 for ending on “Goodnight, and good luck”

#Good Night and Good Luck #George Clooney #Grant Heslov #Patricia Clarkson #Ray Wise #Jeff Daniels #Robert Downey Jr.#David Strathairn #Frank Langella #Reed Diamond #Tate Donovan #Thomas McCarthy #Glenn Morshower #drama #history #world record #films #movies #review

The Visitor (2007) Thomas McCarthy

#gosh.#hiam abbass #the visitor #thomas mccarthy #tom mccarthy

Spotlight (2015) dir Thomas McCarthy

#spotlight #2015 #thomas mccarthy #gif #mine

#pretty vicious #music #brad griffiths #thomas mccarthy #elliot jones #jarvis morgan #indie #rock #alternative #alternative rock

These brown discolorations on a faded black- and-white photograph are not at all like a defect In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of “Crystallization” as Stendhal described it, in One of his more eccentric books about love. In truth, my childhood was cast down like a twig Into an abandoned salt mine near Salzburg From where it emerged, of this I’m certain, As something much richer than my own life, A jeweled branch of living history, now Retrieved by my mother from the well at Twig Bog Lane. I’ll never know who it was, and anyway Why would I want to know who it was, Who slid the black hard plastic button to On One late summer afternoon in nineteen fifty-seven, So that not only did some kind of shutter flick open In my head, but the full force of color saturation Hit my brain. The effect was high-speed Ektachrome And life as it is now, that studio of constant poems — It’s just that as my mother hauled the metallic Home Assistance milk gallon from the deep well In Twig Bog Lane, the light of deprivation reflected Back from her face and got lost in me, and I knew How biography is the steadying of only one kind Of lens, how memory offers different iterations; How, somewhere, a paper was being coated with Such chemicals that even deeper colors would form Over time. During that summer, a world away, The first International Color Salon was organized In Hong Kong and, while restrictions on dollar Imports meant that Ireland couldn’t reach a speed Of 100 ASA, faster colors kept rushing in. There Was no holding life back once it swarmed; biography Was ready for color, our brains were marked That year for realities more personal, realities brighter Than a boxed-in lens. Huge Blackwater river rats That knawed through the doors of our dry toilets in Twig Bog Lane were as ignorant of color as me; and Could not have known that their multi-layered bristles Would soon be seen in more subtle shades of brown.

Thomas McCarthy, “The Beginning of Color”

#thomas mccarthy #the beginning of color #poetry

A poem by Thomas McCarthy for St. Patrick's Day

St Patrick’s Day with Neil

We start this day in an embarrassment of March, St Patrick’s Day. My wide-awake displeasure is not of interest to you. After a year in the US you think Bill Clinton is Taoiseach. You still hope for the yellow truck from Schwans. What is your nation? It’s still unclear. Are you from Cork or the Minnesota Twins? Don’t decide, not on this day of green beer

and things gone haywire for the umpteenth time. You lie in our bed for comfort and praise, the fresh weave of a blanket on your delicate face. St Patrick’s Day in bed with the radio on. Their public façade, their cupla focail. Your turtle- head clears the eiderdown. You wait for the storm of rain that always comes; then leave the place of refuge abruptly. We’re the rejected Church

and watch you leap across the shaggy room. St Patrick’s Day begins in kilts of heavy rain. You were first to hear the pluralist hailstorm and the noise of life beyond the eiderdown. And there you speed, hero of daylight, head forward into the day’s Fontenoy: the battle is yours, brilliant, irredentist boy. No panel on the radio could get this right –

how one small boy in his native country (Prince William at Eton, Sheridan Lowell in Mass.) can define completely his parents’ place. I rise and follow you to better see what you make of the drenched and native earth: only to find you before me at the kitchen door laughing with the daft warmth of a Celt, your plastic beaker held aloft in the downpour.

This day you carry with an air of confidence. I know it’s because you’ve something hoarded, a cup full of hailstones in a freezer, salted away like a trust fund offshore. I watch you, bare-headed in a teeshirt, holding the blue beaker to a bountiful sky. The grey hail of St Patrick’s Day bounces like nuts of wisdom on your head.

The freezer, then, has a kind of inner knowledge that you have rights over. I can understand from my own boyhood the strength of a hoard. I hid coins and copies of the Hotspur from enemies of boys. My hoard was concealed. The loose brick in Nanna’s wall had a Swiss number. But I never had the audacity to hide, like you, the mysteries of weather, a hoard of hail.