The idea of a much-anticipated animated family blockbuster premiering to a discerning crowd of highbrow film enthusiasts may not seem like such a big deal nowadays — after all, Shrek 2 somehow opened Cannes in 2004 — but in 1991, it was downright inconceivable to many. “We got a fair amount of flak for it at the time,” recalls Richard Peña, who was then in his fourth year as program director of the festival. “I remember my dear friend, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, asking, ‘What’s next? A retrospective screening of Casablanca?’”
Peña himself hadn’t been entirely certain what to make of the idea when he’d gotten a call in early August from the Walt Disney Company. “Listen,” the voice on the other end of the line had said, “we were wondering if you would be willing to have a look at Beauty and the Beast.” The programming team had been putting the finishing touches on that year’s festival slate, which included pictures like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique and Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse — not exactly the kind of movies among which one would expect to find a musical romance from the Mouse House. Disney was seen as corporate, antiseptic, G-rated, while the New York Film Festival had introduced American audiences to the early work of Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Martin Scorsese.
Clocking in at 4.8 magnitude, the temblor damaged numerous buildings and injured four people. It also left scientists buzzing over a number of curious features. For one, while France is no stranger to temblors, they are often quite small, explains seismologist Jean-Paul Ampuero of the Université Côte d'Azur in France. Monday’s event was only of moderate intensity by global measures, but it was a “very large one for French standards,” he says.
Even more surprising is that the temblor cut clean to the surface, cracking Earth’s crust like an eggshell. Such breaks are common for hefty earthquakes, such as the 7.2 magnitude Landers earthquake that struck California in 1992. The formation of a surface fracture during the Le Teil temblor therefore left researchers scratching their heads, prompting a hunt for the curious quake’s source.
Advertisements tell us about much more than the products and services they promote. They tell us about desire, how it changes, and how it and thus we are manipulated. Like many revelatory urban features, advertising signage is ubiquitous to the point of becoming almost invisible. Yet we read cities as much as we inhabit and traverse them.
In cinematic aerial footage of cities, we are often presented with the blank facades of skyscrapers. But the closer to street level we get, the closer to the part of the city we navigate, we find that cities are a riot of lettering and symbols. The city itself is a form of visual language. Advertising is everywhere. It is a pictorial cacophony that we’ve grown used to.
We are not as immune as we might think to its powers. It reflects who we are, or want to be, while threatening to overwhelm us. And yet, often despite itself, it can connect us to the past, to the local, and to senses of meaning.
Typically, people come to London to experience the best of a culture as it manifests itself in its great museums, libraries, and performance venues. London’s green spaces, however, present an allure equally powerful. Indeed, some of the city’s trees have the distinction of being older than London itself—the Totteridge Yew, for one, has been around for over 2,000 years. To put this stunning fact into perspective, in the Evening Standard, self-described guerrilla geographer and explorer Dan Raven-Ellison reminds readers that “everything that has ever happened in London has happened in its lifetime.”
But Americans’ insatiable hunger for drugs — and Mexican drug lords’ race to supply them — has since turned a luminous nation into a battlefield. Nearly 300,000 Mexicans have vanished or been killed since December 2006, when then-president Felipe Calderón tried to dismantle the cartels. A decade later, the United States elected a president whose rallying cry was “Build that wall,” despite the ineffectiveness of the 670 miles that already existed.
So when Paul Theroux left his Cape Cod home for the southern border in early 2017 in a Nissan Murano with license plates lettered “Massachusetts — The Spirit of America,” just about everyone echoed the warning issued first by a man on a Harley: “Don’t go thar! You’ll dah!” This only fueled Theroux’s mission to show that Americans and Mexicans are “at two ends of the same road.” The resulting travelogue, “On the Plain of Snakes,” chronicles seven month-long trips that spanned the length of the border and as far into the interior as Chiapas, which neighbors Guatemala.
Basinger’s exuberant style — the exclamation mark in her title almost seems to declare the book a kindred spirit to “Oklahoma!” — coupled with her dry wit, is hard to resist. Her writing zips along with the same razzle-dazzle she so loves in the movies she discusses, while the sumptuous selection of photographs included in the book offers the perfect visual counterpart. Whatever reservations she may harbor about certain recent movie musicals, Basinger has not lost her faith. “Who today can outsmart the old musical?” she asks, inviting a challenge. “Who wants to try?” The heart of this book lies in her answer: “Someone, I hope.”