My Oscar Ballot

Picture: The Hurt Locker

Actor: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Actress: Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air

Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Original Screenplay: A Serious Man

Adapted Screenplay: In the Loop

Cinematography: The White Ribbon

Art Direction: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Editing: The Hurt Locker

Costume Design: Bright Star

Score: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Song: “The Weary Kind”, Crazy Heart

Sound Mixing: The Hurt Locker

Sound Editing: The Hurt Locker

Visual Effects: District 9

Make-Up: The Young Victoria

Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon

Animated Feature: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Animated Short: Logorama

Live Action Short: The New Tenants

Color Me Bor3d

Well, Avatar is now the phenomenon of the season and 3D has found yet another foothold in the public’s consciousness, once again hoping to be more than a flavor-of-the-month attraction. As the postcard reminds us, 3D made its first serious cinematic splash in the 1950s, with the classic anaglyph image (faithfully reproduced on the stamp) that required the red/blue cardboard glasses. The stamp is from the Celebrate the Century series (Scott #3187o) and represents one of the middle-of-the-road novelty attractions in movies at the time—not as important as widescreen or stereophonic sound, but not as brazenly goofy as those used by William Castle (“Emergo”, “Percepto”, etc.)

But while the technical components of 3D have improved dramatically since then, I’m still not convinced that the Emperor is sporting more than a Navi loincloth. Think back to the introduction of sound or 3-strip Technicolor to the movies: within just a couple of years, film directors were already going beyond the gimmicky phase of those technologies and creating beautiful, provocative pieces with those new tools in their kit.

But 3D has been around for over 50 years, and the number of genuinely innovative, artistic, non-gimmicky uses of the device can still be counted on the fingers of one hand. Henry Selick's recent Coraline was so unusual, and satisfying, because it effectively used the technology to enhance the theme and tone of the film, exploiting the multiple visual planes to create an increased sense of disorientation between Coraline's real world and the creepy mirror world she visits. The feeling was an immersive one, not just for its own sake, but to put ourselves in her state-of-mind, going beyond a Cinema of Sensation and really mining emotional territory from the effect.

But that has not happened in any of the other examples I've seen recently (including Pixar's Up, which used the device so unobtrusively that there was hardly a point to the 3D in the first place). For something to have existed this long and to have made so few genuinely creative inroads into the medium after all this time, I still have to consider it a gimmick—just one with more bells & whistles (and studio money behind it) now.

Predictably, every game in town is revamping their production slates to shoehorn as much additional 3D as possible into their choice tentpole flicks this year—even after-the-fact if necessary. I’m skeptical. We’ll see what the tipping point is before a public backlash occurs. For while people will pay premium pricing for Cameron’s magnum opus (as tedious, predictable, and visually superficial as I personally thought it was), are they going to be willing to shell out those bucks for every 3D film that comes down the pipe? I think we’ll have a much better idea by the end of the year.

Merry Christmas

This is a good example of how, once I got the first year’s Disney issue FDC on a postcard, I decided to get the subsequent ones’ too, completing the set. In this case, these are all the Mickey stamps—chronologically, Scott #3865 w/Donald, followed by 3912, 4025, 4192, and 4343). The Christmas tree on the front dates back to 1973 (Scott #1508).

Toy Tinkers (Hannah, 1949) has probably been seen more than most Chip ‘n’ Dale shorts since it gets a lot of play this time of year, with Donald undertaking a military campaign against the rodents. I’ve never been a huge fan of this era of Disney shorts—colorful, polished, and utterly bland. Oscar nomination aside, this one is no exception.

Merry Christmas everyone. May your holiday season be a safe and happy one.

Smudge Dread

Unlike the last installment on bad postmarks, sometimes they aren’t anyone’s fault, but just a byproduct of the materials you’re working with.  Above are two postmarks that went very bad, for obvious reasons.

Long before I began my First-Day-of-Issue efforts, I had hundreds upon hundreds of postcards of movie posters and one-sheets.  These were typically on regular card stock.  However, once I started adding additional cards, buying them specifically in anticipation of certain stamps scheduled to come out, I started to run into this problem:

These postcards were picked up at tourist locations rather than stationary stores or postcard shops, so they have glossier finishes, making the postmark stamp unworkable.  This isn’t true of all such postcards, though, and some that appear to have a glossy finish work just fine, so it’s always a calculated risk.

Sometimes, I solve the problem by doing this:

However, this can get a bit pricey so I don’t resort to it too often—only when I think a postcard’s finish might otherwise get me into trouble. 

The Pain in Spain

I’ll be blunt. I hate My Fair Lady (Cukor, 1964). The 60’s were a critical time of transition for the movie musical, competing with Rock ‘n’ Roll, fully abandoning original premises for Broadway blockbusters, and becoming more bloated and elephantine in the process. Lady was a sensation at the time, but it all feels so fake to me, from the phony baloney London sets, to the fact that neither lead ever actually sings, to the contrivance of the “romance” between Eliza and Henry. Shaw’s Pygmalion was always quite precarious in wielding and yielding the power dynamic between the two characters (which was effectively conveyed in the 1938 film adaptation).

But the movie musical is all over-orchestrated, with big hats and boisterousness. The light touch of George Cukor (sublime with Holiday and David Copperfield from the 30’s) is leaden here. And don’t get me started on the insufferable duel between Harrison’s sing-speak and Hepburn’s Aym-a-Good-Girl-Ayam. It’s telling that the best song, “Ascot Gavotte”, features neither lead at all. It’s a simple, funny respite in an otherwise tedious and overlong enterprise.

In fact, my two favorite things about Lady has nothing to do with this film, but with two other Cary Grant pictures. In North by Northwest (1959), Roger Thornhill says he has tickets to the theater, and then later drunkenly sings "I've grown accustomed to my bourbon", so I've always preferred to imagine he was going to see the Lerner & Loewe musical, which was in its Broadway run at the time. And then in Charade (1963, the year before Lady came out), he ushers future-Eliza Audrey Hepburn off the elevator by saying "On the Street Where You Live".

I love this postcard because the one-sheet itself so closely resembles the My Fair Lady stamp (part of a Broadway musical series, Scott #2770). Add to that the Audrey Hepburn first-day-of-issue postmark and it’s a nice little gem in my collection.

Postage Overdue

This is the first in a series, exploring cinematic subjects who have not yet received a stamp but seem overdue.

Lillian Gish was as big a female silent film star as existed, and while the Stars of the Silent Screen issue found space for the likes of the completely worthy Clara Bow and Zasu Pitts, Gish was MIA. It’s often hard to account for these absences other than that the estates of the deceased are very protective of their images and haven’t yet given the USPS permission to use them for a postal issue.

I haven’t seen The Whales of August (Anderson, 1987), but it was Gish’s last film and on my (incredibly long) To See list. But I have seen Maine. The best road vacation I probably ever had was my wife and I driving from Boston, through Vermont, across New Hampshire, B&B’ing all the way. This was years ago, in October when the foliage was in full bloom. It was a gorgeous drive and I remember driving along, never turning on the radio, just absorbing the sheer beauty around every turn. Because of the tree cover, you couldn’t even see any signs of civilization on the highway so it was just trees and mountains and vistas. Amazing.

But perhaps the best part was when we drive across Maine and hit the coast. We fell in love with it instantly, the entire stretch north of Portland (before you hit all the old money estates), and swore that if we ever got tired of the Bay Area and chose to retire in a small cabin with some cats, that we would do so in Maine. One of my favorite documentaries of all time is Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour Belfast, Maine (1999) which is epic in length but thrives on the intimacy of examining daily life in this small town, in all its variety of cultural, industrial, and personal settings. It’s an absolutely exquisite film.


When Gish finally does get her stamp, she’ll join Bette on the front here. In the meantime, The Blue Whale (Scott #4069) from the Wonders of America series was an excuse to also include the 1970 Maine statehood stamp (Scott #1391), while a separate Maine stamp (Scott #3579) from the Greetings from America series also features a lighthouse (they’re everywhere in Maine and great fun to visit).

Big Black Book

 

Happy Birthday to Paul Verhoeven, who turns 71 today.  Though most famous for his wry, self-aware science fiction films (RoboCop, Starship Troopers) or his overwrought “erotic” dramas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls), his most recent, the WWII thriller Black Book (2006) made in his homeland the Netherlands, is my favorite of his—and not just because stamps play a prominent part.

The film follows Rachel Steinn, a Jew who is trying to survive the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1944.  Along the way, she faces tragedy, danger, and a series of harrowing, unexpected, but quite plausible turns of events.  It is a movie with a great sense of history, without fetishizing the period trappings.  It has some terrific plot twists and character reversals without ever feeling gratuitous.  And it is very astute in showing the gray areas of morality when people are forced into unthinkable situations.  To say any more would be to give too much away, and I’ll try to discuss the stamps while still remaining as spoiler-free as possible.

Early on, she is recruited by the Dutch Resistance to get close to a Nazi officer named Muntze, so she contrives an encounter on a train on which he’ll be riding.  He’s enjoying a book when she decides to break the ice.

“Exciting?”

“Very exciting.  At least to me.” (He shows her the book, a stamp collection album)

 

”Stamps.  I was crazy about them as a kid.  All those faraway countries. ”

“I started collecting them when I was six.  Maybe that’s why I studied geography.”

“May I have a look?  I promise to be careful.  Polski…France…”

“I collect the stamps of the countries I’m stationed in.  First Poland, then France, and now here.”

“It stops in the middle of our queen.”

“The Wilhelmina stamps from the Dutch East Indies.  I’m not sure I’ll ever get my hands on those.”

From our first introduction to Muntze, we get a sense of his character through the stamps.  He’s clearly not a casual collector, carrying his album around with him.  Philately was a far more common hobby back then, to be sure, but it still evokes a certain type of fussy elitism.  This is only compounded by the fact that he’s so blasé about how he associates his military conquests with opportunities to expand his collection.  Countries, resources, assets are all just commodities to be collected and displayed, like his stamps.  It’s a cold-blooded way to view his job and his pastime.

Later, she notices that a friend of hers has those stamps on an envelope in his safe, so she procures them in hopes of using them as a ploy to approach Muntze at Nazi headquarters.

“My relatives in the Dutch East Indies used to write to us a lot.  My mother kept the letters, so I took all these off for you.  With steam.”

“Unbelievable.  Beautiful.  Very beautiful.”

We then see that as his secretary opens the window, he protects the stamps from a slight draft (“We mustn’t damage the stamps”).  Again, a fastidiousness that borders on being a little precious, if not perverse.

“What will you do with the stamps?”

“Nothing, really.  They were tucked away in a drawer.”

“It’s all the Wilhelmina stamps I don’t have.”

“If you see anything you like, you can take it.”

“Thank you.  I appreciate that.”

And so now she has her access, insinuating herself into his life and eventually his employ.  A “cover” is a stamp-collecting term, and she has her own cover now, too. 

--> While engaging in espionage as a secretary in the same building, she also continues an ongoing flirtation campaign with him that culminates in the following foreplay exchange after an office party:

“I’d love to see your stamp collection.”

“But it’s enormous.”

“I’m not in any rush.”

Needless to say, this is any philatelist’s wildest dream come true (especially since, as any stamp convention will substantiate, stamp collectors are overwhelmingly male).  But, as we learn over and over in this film, not everything is as it seems, since Muntze reveals he knows her secret in what can only be described as some incredibly awkward pillow talk (at gunpoint):

“Do you think I’m stupid?  Suddenly, I meet this beautiful woman.  A few days later she shows up with the stamps I’ve been looking for.  Then that same woman turns out to be Jewish.   Right after she starts working for us, Franken’s top agent gets shot.  A lot of coincidence, don’t you think?”

So alas, any notion that a postage stamp hobby might be your “in” with the ladies is confirmed as the height of outlandishness that should leave any collector incredulous.  I won’t give away how things develop from there in the film, but it’s a remarkable roller coaster ride filled with further betrayal and bravery.  By all means, check it out.

As for the Wilhelmina stamps?  Well, upon closer inspection, we learn that the stamps she brings are not the stamps he needs.  Here’s the blank page from his book—the 1923 Jubileum stamps from the Dutch Indies:

And here’s what they look like (pulled from the internet):

But the stamps she brings and the stamp he examines don’t look anything like them.  In fact, we see that he does have a Wilhelmina page that’s already complete, and most of the stamps she brings appear to be part of that series:

However, we do get a quick glimpse of the envelope she used to obtain the stamps and a few of these Dutch Indies stamps are seen there, so maybe they’re at the bottom of the tin she brings to him, under the superfluous ones.

It should be noted that all these stamps were discontinued once the Nazis took over, replaced by Third Reich stamps, so it’s not surprising that Muntze would have a hard time finding some of them, because they would’ve been completely out of circulation by the time he arrives in Holland.