Chris Navin

Movie Title: The Color Of Money (Director-Martin Scorsese). 1986.

What’s good and what’s genuine in characters who hustle for a living? Can the American pulp novella/novel be a source of both popular and high entertainment?

Visual Storytelling (end-scene pool showdown): The wiser and more experienced mentor, perhaps washed-up, is being pushed out of the business during his comeback, but he’s not going quietly (we need some dramatic tension). His lady waits for him near the edge of frame, while both of them only take about 1/5 of the frame (all four characters are on the diagonal).

Does he still have it?

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Brash, untempered (arrogant), less experienced rising talent and his lady take about 1/3 of the frame, closer to the audience. They’ve been hustled; learning the art of the con pretty well.

Should he accept the challenge? Is this it?

Possible conclusions: Maybe that’s what we get in life, a view every now and again. At the height of our powers (or past our powers), we get a moment when the conception of the game and the game become one. In a tacky hall of mirrors, no less. I hope it’s not all a hall of mirrors.

Generations stuck in a stand-off…

My point: A good visual storyteller takes his craft seriously, associating the story and the images to push the story forward. He has an appreciation for beauty. I appreciate Scorsese for working hard because the harder he works, the more my intelligence is respected.

To be honest, the movie dragged on for me and is very much of its time (this is pool for Christ’s Sake, how much can you glamorize pool?). Mythos is tough to achieve.

That said, I appreciate a director practicing his craft and trying to provide some continuity in American life through the visual arts. I appreciate someone who understands that developed characters invite us to see something of ourselves in frame.

Thanks for that.

Let’s start this off with a quote from Italo Calvino, an Italian by way of Havana:

“The city of your dream is Lalage. Its inhabitants arranged these invitations to rest in the night sky so that the moon would grant evrything in the city the power to grow and grow endlessly. “

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974. Print.

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Via the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple reflects upon his visits to New York City, Chicago, Detroit and New Orleans-Cities and Memory: An Englishman reflects on his travels in urban America:

‘The first time I visited New York, between 40 and 50 years ago, it was a place of ill repute, at least among foreigners. Rumor and report made the city sound like a low-intensity war zone, and you would find yourself regaled with advice on how to stay safe there, un-mugged and un-shot.’

and:

‘Just under a half-century later, the level of civility in the two cities has switched: New York now feels safer than London.’

It was the really pretty girls, and the tall, ambitious guys, among my cohort, who made made their way to Manhattan.

Touring the city, I was shown a dream, gazing down from Midtown; a forest of skyscrapers on a clamorous loading-dock. I saw people easily dead within a week, and people trying to write their names in marble or maybe a concrete cornerstone.

We all have ambitions.

The recently deceased Clive James (England via Australia) visited New York in the 1980’s for his Postcards series. He seems very worried about getting mugged a second time.

That’s a lot more likely these days.