Word: companionism
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...Prairie Home Companion is an unhappy blend of their essentially antithetical sensibilities, in which a radio show, rather like, but not quite like, the one Keillor has been presiding over since 1974, is giving its last broadcast, having been decreed irrelevant by the new owners of the radio station that has long carried it. This Companion is purely local, not nationally syndicated as Keillor's real show is, and it is basically a songfest. Keillor does not do his monologue about the latest doings in Lake Wobegon. Nor are there the dramatized comic snippets about private eye Guy Noir (played...
...often enough hypnotic in their telling. I'm not saying that a movie can reasonably be expected to come to a halt while Keillor tells one of his stories. But this weightless film needs to have found some equivalent to them , and there were times in A Prairie Home Companion when I wanted the old Altman to assert himself, to let some mumbling and zooming happen, if only to obscure the paucity (and desperation) of Keillor's thin and casual plotting, to make poignantly manifest some of the sadness and confusion of people trying to do a live radio show...
...more than a technician, fearful, it seems, of intruding too heavily on Keillor's territory. But that territory is, in this case, essentially undefended by its founder-proprietor. It is waiting for someone, something, to grant its people felt and wayward lives. If A Prairie Home Companion functions at all it is as a performance film - some of the songs, though not particularly well shot, are at least lively. But that's not enough. Streep's work aside, you can pretty much get all that's worth having out of the film by skipping it entirely and buying the soundtrack...
...ramparts of the mountaintop pousada (inn) in his Army-issue shorts and thongs, rebel commander Alfredo Reinado is directing an effort to besiege Dili. Mobile phone glued to his ear, he mutters orders to subordinates 45 km away, who are fighting to recover the body of a fallen companion. "I want to see the battle," he says, "but my men will not let me. They are worried for my safety...
...canopy, mainstream shops and restaurants, which moved in over the winter, are now doing a brisk trade alongside the established stalls peddling eclectica. Among the new arrivals, only the restaurant Canteen might appeal to both the bohemian crowd and financial folk. "Is this a chain?" asked my Friday lunch companion. Not yet, but it's easy to imagine blond wood and tweedy green-upholstered clones being assembled out of flat packs across the land. Canteen offers freshly executed traditional British fare?macaroni and cheese, meat pies and all-day breakfasts?served with a mission statement that boasts of the kitchen...