Beginnings and Endings

Movie: The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980) (Criterion Collection).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Ultimate Holiday Party (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Maid: Sky Blue (Netflix); Station Eleven: A Hawk From a Handsaw (HBO Max). 

Every actor has to start somewhere, so it's fun to see Pierce Brosnan as "1st Irishman" in The Long Good Friday, a role that gives him no lines but a couple of key moments in the unfolding of the plot. It was only his second screen appearance and his first in a theatrical film, but it's clear to see that the camera loves him. He's cast as a killer, seducing and stabbing a gay henchman of London mob boss Harold (Bob Hoskins). The plot of The Long Good Friday is complicated in the manner of such noir thriller writers as Raymond Chandler: Harold wants to go semi-straight with a property development that he bloviates will make London the capital of a new Europe, but he needs funding, so he invites a New Jersey mafioso, Charlie (Eddie Constantine), to attend a big presentation of his plans for the project. Somehow, however, things don't go as he hoped. In addition to the murder of his man Colin (Paul Freeman), Harold's mother narrowly escapes death when her Rolls-Royce is blown up, killing the chauffeur. And when he tries to take Charlie out to dinner at a pub Harold owns, it blows up just before they arrive. There's no Philip Marlowe on hand to figure out who's out to get Harold, so he has to do it on his own, with the help of his mobsters, one of whom, of course, is disloyal. The plot twists eventually involve the IRA, some stolen money, and a corrupt cop, among others. Hoskins is wonderful in the role, and the ending, in which he finds himself hoist with his own petard, is a tour de force: an extended closeup in which Hoskins's face reveals the range of emotions he's experiencing, from fear to frustration to desperation. Helen Mirren is cast as his ... I suppose "mistress" is the word, a role that doesn't give her enough to do, but she does that little bit brilliantly. 

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980)

Maid's conclusion was as much of a happy ending as the series could properly allow: Thanks to a somewhat unconvincing change of heart on Sean's part, Alex and Maddy are able to leave for Montana and their new life. For a bit it looks like Mama is going to join them, but as usual nothing she decides is set in stone. I liked the series -- it kept me coming back for more. But it needed a little more grit to offset the sentiment. Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet in earlier episodes, Angelina Pepper in the last three) is a little too winsomely precocious to be entirely credible as a child tossed around in a dysfunctional marriage. 

Station Eleven jumps 20 years ahead in its second episode, with Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) grown up and touring the pandemic-blighted landscape with a touring group of Shakespeare players. But the series keeps jumping back to the days of the outbreak, with young Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) living in the high-rise apartment of Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and his brother, Frank (Nabhan Rizwan). There's a stunning sequence in which Kirsten plays Hamlet with the company, her lines triggering flashbacks to the moment when she learned of the death of her family. This is shaping up to be a rich and often weird series. 

In the Pink

Movie: Ma Vie en Rose (Alain Berliner, 1997) (TCM).

TV: Holiday Wars: Santa's New Ride (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Hawkeye: So This Is Christmas? (Disney+); Maid: Sky Blue (Netflix). 

Gender dysfunction has become such a familiar topic that Ma Vie en Rose (aka My Life in Pink, mainly to keep American audiences from confusing it with the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic) sometimes seems tonally off-base, frequently taking a humorous view of matters that we now commonly regard more seriously -- particularly the treatment of young Ludovic Fabre (Georges Du Fresne) by his parents. Would any movie made today, for example, treat Ludovic's suicide attempt as casually as this film does -- i.e., more as misbehavior than as a lacerating cry for help? The ending, in which Ludovic, the boy who wants to be a girl, meets a girl who wants to be a boy, and his family unites behind him after moving to a less pretentiously affluent neighborhood, seems a little cooked-up. Still, Ma Vie en Rose mostly succeeds as satire on bourgeois convention and homophobia because of its exaggerated characterizations and its pop-culture fantasy sequences. And there are often some funny-sad moments, as when Alex decides he must really be a girl because he has a stomach ache, which he has learned is something that girls have when they get their periods.

Georges Du Fresne in Ma Vie en Rose (Alain Berliner, 1997)

About the only thing Ma Vie en Rose has in common with Maid is the sometimes uneasy balance of substance and style. The ninth and penultimate episode, titled "Sky Blue," is not so wildly eventful or soap operatic as the previous one. It begins with Alex back where she began: a captive of Sean. What follows is a recapitulation of the beginning of the series: flight, refuge, rehabilitation. While the episode is mostly a triumph for Alex, it ends with a disturbing note, as Alex, rejoicing in her anticipated escape from Sean and move to the writing program in Montana, discovers that her mother is apparently living in her truck. Tune in tomorrow.

I liked Hawkeye, the latest Marvel miniseries on Disney+, though not as much as I did WandaVision or Loki, with their fantastical and often wacky settings. I find that some of my own fun is spoiled by all of the series catering to the fanboys, the Marvel mavens, with in-jokes, Easter eggs, and surprise characters that I don't get because I'm not steeped in the lore of the movies and the comic books. When did pop culture become so esoteric? 

Fighting Vainly the Old Ennui

Movie: La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1989) (Criterion Channel).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Buddy vs. Duff, Holiday: Winter Wonderland (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Maid: Bear Hunt.

Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider) are types familiar to viewers of French films: lovers with too much time on their hands and not enough to occupy them. He's a failed novelist who has tried to get his life back on track by giving up alcohol and going to work for an advertising agency, and the two of them have been together for two years -- or two and a half, as he insists, perhaps a little touchily, when they're asked. Now they're on vacation in a villa on the Riviera, where they don't seem to do much but lounge around the titular swimming pool, make love, and occasionally quarrel a bit. But then they're visited by Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his 18-year-old daughter, Pénélope (Jane Birkin). Harry was a kind of mentor to the younger Jean-Paul and he was also Marianne's lover for a while. in this leisurely sun-drenched paradise they don't have much to do other than pick at one another. Pénélope is the image of boredom as she slinks around the pool, never going in. When she picks up a book, it's a mystery novel she's read before. (Jean-Paul tells her who did it. She replies, "I know.") The sexual tension relieves itself with Harry and Marianne reigniting their relationship and Jean-Paul hooking up with Pénélope, a state of things that eventuates in murder. But the murder is backgrounded to the exploration of the principal characters in a kind of morality tale about the dangers of dolce far niente. A less skillful director than Jacques Deray or a screenwriter other than Jean-Claude Carrière might have begun with the murder and based the plot on discovering the killer, but La Piscine is more about why this particular killing took place -- what led Jean-Paul to drown Harry in the pool. The bit of detective work that's shown almost outs him, but the complexity of motivation is up for the viewer to piece together. The film ends with Jean-Paul and Marianne ambiguously together. 

It has to be said that a lot of the film's effect has to do with its stars and their own pasts: Delon and Schneider had been lovers, the delight of the French gossip press, some time before they reunited for this film. Birkin had come to prominence as a model in the Carnaby Street era of Swinging London. And Ronet was known for his performances as haunted men in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and The Fire Within (1963), not to mention the previous film in which he was offed by Delon, Purple Noon (René Clément). 

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider in La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969)

Then I turned from a tale of the bored and the beautiful to the further tribulations of Alex (Margaret Qualley) in Maid, a story which still treads lightly above the pit of soap opera. Things look up for a bit in Bear Hunt as Mama (Andie MacDowell), gets committed to a mental facility. But she has made a disastrous choice by sleeping with her ex, Sean (Nick Robinson), which angers the kindly but also horny Nate (Raymond Ablack), who essentially forces her to move out of his house. And then she not only loses her job with the maid service but also the car that Nate had loaned her when Sean, who has fallen off the wagon, returns it to Nate in a jealous snit. Meanwhile, she's offered a scholarship in the creative writing program at the University of Montana, but Sean protests about her leaving the state with Matty. Moreover, Mama is sprung from the hospital by her ne'er-do-well husband, Basil (Toby Levins). If all of this weren't so sensitively told and finely acted, it might have been called The Agonies of Alex instead of Maid. 

Guilt-free Pleasures

Movie: Walking a Tightrope (Nikos Papatakis, 1991) (The Criterion Channel).

Book: Anthony Trollope, The Warden. 

TV: Guy's Grocery Games: Fieri Family Holiday Showdown (Food Network); Station Eleven: Wheel of Fire (HBO Max); Maid: String Cheese (Netflix).

I don't care for sports. There's too much noise and hype surrounding the efforts of people to move a ball from one place to another. But I do like competitions if they involve doing something constructive: designing a dress, decorating a room, even making tchotchkes with glue guns and papier-mâché (i.e., Making It.) And food competitions are the best, which is why my DVR fills up with the latest episodes of shows like Chopped and Top Chef, among many others. I even learn something from them about ingredients and techniques in my own piddly efforts in the kitchen.

Guy Fieri has gotten a bad rap from a lot of critics: His restaurants, they say, aren't very good. He hasn't really distinguished himself as a chef. And his personality is somewhat over the top. I'm not much interested in his explorations of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, reruns of which seem to take up a heft portion of the Food Network's real estate. But I think he's good at heart, and he's done a lot of charitable work assisting restaurants hit by the pandemic and/or burned-out by California wildfires. And like DDD, as he abbreviates it, Guy's Grocery Games is a showcase for chefs around the country who often haven't made a big name for themselves except in their own towns. 

On GGG, they compete in goofy games that test their skills by limiting the ingredients or techniques they can use in preparing food for a panel of "celebrity chefs" -- usually best known for their appearances on the Food Network or Top Chef -- like Antonia Lofaso and Alex Guarnaschelli. The most recent show, which I watched last night, was a special competition centered on the Fieri family: The competitors were Fieri's sons, Hunter and Ryder, and his nephew Jules, each of them assisted by one of the frequent judges on the show, Lofaso (Hunter), Michael Voltaggio (Ryder), and Aaron May (Jules). The judges were Guy's wife and his parents. The winner got $10,000 to donate to charity. (It was Ryder, who donated it to his high school -- not, I think, the most needy of charities.)

This sort of thing is not to everyone's taste (dubious pun intended), I know, but I find it the perfect unwinding mechanism, the sort of thing people call a "guilty pleasure." I reject that term. I feel no guilt at all watching such shows -- which I do most nights after dinner, as I drink a mug of tea, and before I submit myself to heavier fare on television. The heavier fare last night included Nikos Papatakis's Walking a Tightrope, a 1991 French drama starring Michel Piccoli as a character based on Jean Genet: a successful and famous writer who likes to pick up handsome young men, not only for sex, but also to meddle in their lives. In the film, he takes on an impoverished youth (Lilah Dadi) who works for a circus scooping up elephant dung and tries to make him a star tightrope walker. Things don't go well, as you might suspect. Much of the film is quite good, but it falls apart at the end when the complications are resolved with a suicide that feels less like a sufficiently motivated act than one that fits the themes and symbols of Papatakis's screenplay. 

Maid last night continued Alex's woes, as she struggled with her attraction to Nate (Raymond Ablack), the good Samaritan who has taken in not only Alex and Maddy, but also Alex's maddening mother, who has a spectacular breakdown at the end of the episode. It's all very well-played, but I still think the series teeters on the edge of soap opera too often. I also watched the first episode of Station Eleven, a series that has gotten good reviews, partially because it begins with a pandemic that echoes our current plight, but which was scripted and partially filmed before the Covid outbreak. Patrick Somerville, its writer-producer, made one of the most intriguing TV dramas of recent years, The Leftovers (2015-2017), so I look forward to following this one. 

Miss Me?

 So on Christmas Eve last year, I gave up movie blogging. A lot of effort for not much return, it seemed to me at the time. But with Christmas looming again, it feels right to re-enter the blogosphere, maybe this time with a wider scope. 

Last night, I watched Death at a Funeral (Frank Oz, 2007), a sometimes amusing, sometimes stupid British farce with some performers I like, namely Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Dinklage, and Rupert Graves. It was remade in 2011, and that version lies somewhere in the queue of movies on my DVR that I've recorded. Dinklage apparently plays the same role -- a gay man who crashes the funeral of his lover after being cut out of the man's will -- in the remake. On the whole, not a total waste of his and the other actors' talents, but not a movie I'd urge upon anyone who hasn't seen the classic Brit farces like Kind Hearts and Coronets or The Lavender Hill Mob or The Ladykillers, all of which do this sort of comic larceny and mayhem with greater finesse.

Matthew Macfadyen and Peter Dinklage in Death at a Funeral

On TV I started the second season of The Witcher, a well-made Netflix fantasy series starring Henry Cavill as some kind of fantasyland soldier of fortune dedicated to killing monsters. The first episode of the season opened with highlights supposedly recapping the first season, which started two years ago. I watched that season and enjoyed it, but I have to admit that the recap didn't really refresh me on what happened then, much of which I've forgotten. No matter, the new season started off very well on its own, and I didn't really need to be au fait with the backstory to enjoy it. 

I also watched the sixth episode of Maid, an often depressing Netflix series about the struggle of a young woman, played well by Margaret Qualley, to make it on her own with her 3-year-old daughter after leaving her emotionally abusive alcoholic husband. The series focuses on the complications and contradictions of the American welfare system, as the heroine, Alex, tries to keep her head above water despite the snares of its red tape. Andie MacDowell is wonderful as Alex's air-headed, gray-haired hippie mother, who hinders more than she helps. The series often seems to be on the verge of sinking into sentimental mush, but it hasn't done that yet. 

I'm also reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, which takes me back to my days as a Victorian literature scholar. More on that later, maybe.