Word: cameraful
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...with pictures like Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. These were set in the lower depths, populated with hookers and victims, sometimes ending in death. Those elements are here, mostly personified in Harvey's troubled lover Jack Lira (Diego Luna), as are Van Sant's old camera tropes of slo-mo and unsteady focus. But they aren't at the foreground, In the dichotomy between his audience-pleasing big movies (To Die For, Good Will Hunting) and his audience-resistant art films (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, Paranoid Park), Milk is securely in the former category...
...counts it off from four, and with a sort of animal ease, his fingers fly, and a montuno rhythm swells through the dented amp, surging until the drummer can't help joining in with the five-beat clave that is the backbone of all music here. And then the camera swings to the timbalero with a pink star dyed into his fade, cracking into the rhythm, and here comes the bass player--whose father and grandfather were famous singers with Orquesta Aragón--now he's thumping the ones and threes. This thing is really moving now; the horns punch...
Here's where the camera would pan way out, from that house in the Santo Suárez neighborhood, downhill past the official state recording studio, past the House of Music on Neptune Street, catching everyone's hips as it goes, until the whole crumbling metropolis is swaying to this montuno, all the way down to the Malecón on the sea, where the world's most humid block party unfolds on the esplanade, the way it does every evening of the summer, just across the Florida Straits from the big enemigo...
That way, the video could end on one of those sly gibes that made Cuban salsa the most heroic art form on the island through the 1990s. To pan the camera toward the Florida Straits is to raise a question that can't be asked out loud: Is this the year for change? Quizás, they say in Cuba: maybe. Quizás the new U.S. President will end the blockade. Quizás Raúl Castro, who just celebrated his first Independence Day as President, will be a big reformer. He's showing small signs that he might: some workers...
...Washington, D.C. hearing work with your clients imprisoned at Guantanamo? They actually testified by live video link. One of my partners examined them in Guantanamo in a large room with a camera and then the government cross-examined them from Judge Leon's courtroom in Washington. I think that may have been a first as far as I know...