• Fact: For a while there, Liam Neeson was attached to play the role of Abraham Lincoln.
• Fact: At the red-carpet premiere of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg told Access Hollywood he would not consider directing Disney’s upcoming Star Wars film.
• Fact: Daniel Day-Lewis became so immersed in the role of Lincoln, he would sometimes sign off on emails and texts using the president’s trademark “– A“.
• Fact: The names of several Senators who voted against the 13th Amendment were changed in Spielberg’s film in deference to their descendants.
• Fact: Daniel Day-Lewis will win the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln.

• Opinion: Tony Kushner’s script feels extremely hunkered down, as if it were specifically written to be performed upon a stage (and may very well end up there).
• Opinion: James Spader’s performance is very good. Tommy Lee Jones’ performance is even better.
• Opinion: After two remarkably miscast roles in The Amazing Spider-Man and Lincoln, it may be time to set Sally Field back in mothballs.
• Opinion: Daniel Day-Lewis’s transformation into Lincoln is so complete that, more often than not, audiences will find themselves hard-pressed to spot the slightest hint of an actor hiding underneath all that pallor.
• Opinion: You can feel the able hand of Steven Spielberg throughout, inserting feel-good elements to keep the entire film from veering into darkness.
• Opinion: Lincoln will be nominated for AT LEAST five academy awards – Score, Costumes and Make-up among them.
• Opinion: We used to look to textbooks as a means of rewriting history. Now we look to movies.
• Opinion: Forget everything you might’ve heard about states’ rights. The major point Spielberg’s film seems intent upon driving home, time and again, is that the Civil War begins and ends with the struggle to abolish slavery.
• Opinion: Politicians have been using God as justification for their own prejudices since the dawning of mankind.
• Opinion: Daniel Day-Lewis will win the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln.

(Lincoln is currently open in limited release, with a national rollout to follow this Friday.)

Skyfall is the best James Bond film of the modern era, and it may very well be the best Bond film of all-time. None of which should come as a huge surprise given we’re talking about a movie directed by Sam Mendes, starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes (among others).

Skyfall is also the first Bond film to portray 007 as an aging – if not wholly antiquated – relic from a bygone era. This is a brave new world, so to speak – one in which both James Bond and his long-time coterie need to either prove their worth or face extinction. To that end, Skyfall favors a more nuanced approach, substituting the term “Mother” for M, “Quartermaster” for Q, and the not-so-subtle shaking of a tumbler in lieu of James Bond’s usual drink order.

We’re dealing with a conflicted 007, as well … one who ultimately returns to the trials of his youth in a vague attempt to confront – and perhaps even exorcise – long-lingering demons. This is an overt tip of the cap to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy – one of several throughout Skyfall, including a central subplot that’s torn almost entirely from The Dark Knight‘s playbook.

Despite the inexplicable parallels, Skyfall still manages to stand tall on its own, moving a 50-year old franchise into unprecedented territory. Javier Bardem will – and should – go down as one of the most diabolical villains James Bond has ever faced. And Daniel Craig, while not necessarily the most iconic Bond of all-time, should probably be considered the best.

(Skyfall arrives in theaters nationwide today.)

In the beginning, it was a simple idea: Put aside all of my freelance gigs for a period of one year and channel that energy into a series of side projects that might not otherwise find a home … projects that wouldn’t require me standing on the shoulders of others in order to get my prose across.

What spiraled out of that idea has proven the single most rewarding creative experience of my life. In 12 short months, IFearBrooklyn has given birth to:

• One full-length novel
• 20 well-received editions of Moving On – an ongoing non-fiction series about Wildwood, childhood, and life after drinking (That series winds up its 2nd Season on December 5th, BTW, so – by all means – get your read on, will ya?)
• 26 installments of Good Pictures/Bad Camera, including various slideshows from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Asbury Park, Bar Harbor, Philadelphia, The Chesapeake Bay and beyond.
• 34 capsule-style movie reviews/half-a-dozen show reviews
• A handful of timely editorials
• several obscure, long-form quotes, and, of course,
• The post that started it all (IFB’s actual anniversary falls on the 10th of this month, but, I mean, really, who goes out blogging on a Saturday, right?)

Anyway, all of this is to say, “Thanks,” to each and every one of you who has either visited or supported IFB over the course of the past year. Your ongoing advocacy means the absolute world to me and I only hope that I can find an opportunity to repay that kindness at some point down the line.

For now, I fully encourage you to have a look around the place. Read the first chapter of Subhuman, check out a few editions of Moving On, get your photog on with Good Pictures/Bad Camera, and – assuming you’re so inclined – “Like” IFB on Facebook; follow IFB on Twitter.

There’s plenty more to come in 2013, including the 3rd and 4th Seasons of Moving On, Good Pictures with a better camera (I hope), and a handful of new features … along with oodles more of what you’ve already come to expect.

All the Very Best, Always.

Bob Hill

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

“For the last 30 years I’ve been writing in my music about the distance between the American dream and American reality. I’ve seen it from inside and outside: as a blue collar kid from a working class home in New Jersey – where my parents struggled, often unsuccessfully, to make ends meet – to my adult life, visiting the 9th Ward in New Orleans after Katrina, or meeting folks from food pantries from all around the United States, who work daily to help our struggling citizens through the hard times we’ve been suffering. The American Dream and an American Reality: Our vote tomorrow is the one undeniable way we get to determine the distance in that equation. Tomorrow, we get a personal hand in shaping the kind of America we want our kids to grow up in.

I’m a husband and a dad, my lovely wife Patti is here with me. We’ve got three kids growing up and on their way out into the world. I’m 63 (Patti is much younger), but we have both lived through some galvanizing moments in American history: the Civil Rights struggle, the Peace Movement, the Woman’s Movement, we played in East Berlin one year before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and we were with Amnesty International a year before the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. These were days when you could feel the winds of change moving and the world shifting beneath your feet. And we both remember another galvanizing moment, the night that President Obama was elected … Continue reading →

“The story is in the ice, somehow.”

So says global photographer-cum-activist James Balog, who has spent the past five-plus years of his career documenting – and subsequently lecturing about – the clear and present danger presented by global warming on our planet.

Back in 2007, Balog embarked upon a multi-year mission known as the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS). The goal: To document the day-to-day impact climate change is having by setting up real-time camera posts in high-risk areas spread across the glacial regions of Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Switzerland, and beyond.

Chasing Ice chronicles Balog’s journey from brash rebel to weary traveler, incorporating oodles of scientific data along the way, almost all of which supports the need for change. The film is beautifully shot, wrought with panoramic views of the great northwest in all its majesty. On top of which, Chasing Ice delves almost metaphorically into the personal price Balog has paid for his vigilance – sacrificing his own body and spirit in order to ensure the work is completed and preserved.

In a cinematic sense, it’s important to keep in mind that Chasing Ice is slowly leading up to something … something very big, in fact. Something so substantial that it may cause even the most fervent of skeptics to step back and consider the need for action on a global scale.

For, as Balog very bluntly points out toward the end of the film, “You can’t divorce civilization from nature. We totally depend on it.” It’s a timely message, to be sure. One that deserves to be both seen and heard. Thanks to James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey team, moviegoers now have an opportunity to do both.

(Chasing Ice arrives via limited release in Toronto and New York this Friday, with a staggered rollout for most major cities to follow. For a full list of theaters and dates, click here.)

“Nothing came easy for him. Nothing deterred him – not the many editors and publishers who rejected his books and stories; not the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago, which rejected not one but two of the theses he wrote for his M.A. degree (awarding it to him only after he was famous); not the Guggenheim Foundation, which rejected his first application for a fellowship; not the doubting relatives and friends from home like his Uncle Alex, who said he couldn’t read The Sirens of Titan, after Kurt had dedicated the book to him, or his Aunt Ella Stewart, who would not stock his books in the bookstore she owned in Louisville, Kentucky, because she found them degenerate; not his Cape Cod neighbors who didn’t read his books and expressed no interest in what he did for a living; not the school boards that banned his books (and in one case burned them in a furnace) without ever reading them; not the academic critics who spurned and dismissed him; not the backbiting reviewers who tried to drag him down after he became famous; not the bureaucrats he battled for the rights of writers throughout the world; not the right-wing Christian religious groups that condemned this man who described Jesus Christ as ‘the greatest and most humane of human beings.’ Anyone who imagines a writer’s life has ever been easy – even one who eventually achieves fame and fortune – will be disabused of that fantasy after reading [Kurt’s] letters. And they will be inspired.”

1. A basement in Long Island (that I incorrectly assumed was a basement in Virginia)
2. A beach
3. A boardwalk stockroom
4. A boiler room
5. A car trunk
6. A cowfield
7. A full bathtub
8. A jail cell
9. A lawnshed
10. A public bathroom stall
11. A rooming house bathroom
12. A street corner in Center City, Philadelphia
13. A walk-in closet
14. Alongside the railroad tracks in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania
15. An empty bath tub
16. An equipment closet
17. Delaware (in the rear cab of a hatchback, after blacking out in Philadelphia the night before)
18. In a crib
19. In a puddle of my own piss
20. In a sauna
21. In a vacant 1st-floor apartment one block south of Madison Square Garden
22. In an apartment that I had previously lived in … three weeks after I had moved out
23. In bed with a different girl than the girl I’d fallen asleep with
24. In my friend Dave’s backyard
25. In my friend Joe’s backyard
26. In my girlfriend’s father’s house (while she & her family were away on vacation)
27. In the back of a school bus
28. Inside a children’s playhouse
29. Inside an elevator
30. Inside someone
31. On a chaise lounge in a hotel courtyard
32. On a stranger’s front porch
33. On the side of Tussey Mountain (State College, Pennsylvania)
34. The 700 level of Veteran’s Stadium (Philadelphia)
35. In an arboretum behind Swarthmore College
36. The Atlantic City Bus Terminal
37. The Atlantic City Rail Terminal
38. A business office
39. The backseat of a squad car
40. The basement stockroom of a neighborhood bar on the Upper East Side
41. The driver’s seat of an idling vehicle
42. The dunes in Ocean City, New Jersey
43. The 4th floor of an abandoned rooming house in Wildwood, New Jersey
44. The laundry room of a friend’s house
45. The New York City Port Authority
46. The Penn State Delco Gymnasium (during the first day of orientation)
47. The reading room of a public library
48. 30th Street Station, Philadelphia
49. Under my parents’ Christmas tree
50. Underneath a blanket of mineral wool ceiling tiles
51. Underneath a pile of laundry
52. Underneath a pile of trash

Day 318

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.) 

“In many films there is a great confusion – especially in my particular genre of work – there’s a great confusion between the words ‘mystery’ and ‘suspense’. And the two things are absolutely miles apart. Mystery is an intellectual process, like in a whodunit. But suspense is essentially an emotional process. Therefore, you can only get the suspense element going by giving the audience information. I daresay you have many a film that have mysterious goings-on. You don’t know what’s going on … why the man’s doing this or why that. And you’re about a third of the way through the film before you realize what it’s all about. And to me that’s completely wasted footage because there’s no emotion to it. It’s like a whodunit. And I’ve only made one whodunit, many many years ago. Because in the course of it, before you arrive at that five-second revelation, there’s no emotion for an audience. If you’re reading a book [like that], you’re terribly tempted to turn to the last page all the time. But that’s merely an emotion of curiosity. So mystery has no particular appeal to me, merely because it is a fact of mystifying the audience.”

IFB’s Quotations Page, General Index