Catching Up

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Movie: Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973) (TCM).

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

TV: Station Eleven: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren't Dead; The Severn City Airport (Netflix).

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Movie: Mind Game (Masaayuki Yuasa, 2004) (Criterion Collection). 

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.

TV: Chopped: Pasta, Pasta, Pasta (Food Network); The Book of Boba Fett: Stranger in a Strange Land (Disney+); Death to 2021 (Netflix). 

In quick succession, Peter Bogdanovich made three terrific movies: The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon. And then ... who knows what happened? Some blame his abrupt career decline on his infatuation with Cybill Shepherd, whom he miscast in Daisy Miller (1974) and the musical At Long Last Love (1975), after which he never recovered his status as a director. Whatever the reason for Bogdanovich's decline, there's something valedictory about Paper Moon when we watch it today, and not only because it was the precipice from which he was to fall, but also because it launched the troubled career of Tatum O'Neal, who won an Oscar for her debut performance, but became fuel for gossip as she grew p. It also marked the peak of her father's career: Ryan O'Neal went from being a star of the magnitude of contemporaries like Robert Redford and Al Pacino to fodder for tabloids, winding up as a supporting player on TV series like Bones. But set aside all that, and appreciate the crispness of the black-and-white cinematography of László Kovács, the skill with which Bogdanovich brings Alvin Sargent's screenplay to life, the cherishable Trixie Delight of the great Madeline Kahn, the superb work of Polly Platt in recreating small-town Kansas in the 1930s, and the easy rapport of the two O'Neals. One quibble about the closed captioning on the movie: In the diner scene below, Moses orders what the captions call "a knee-high and a Coney Island" for Addie. The "knee-high" is actually a Nehi, a now-defunct soft drink, as you can see on the label in the film.

Tatum O'Neal and Ryan O'Neal in Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)

After finishing Troilus and Cressida, I have to conclude that the only way it could be staged today is as a knockabout bitter comedy. Taking it seriously is to endorse either the antidemocratic politics of Ulysses's speech on order or the nihilism of Thersites. A problem play indeed. 

The two episodes of Station Eleven I watched Tuesday night brought me up to date, but left me still confused about where it's going. So far, the series has alternated scenes from the immediate outbreak of the virus and scenes from 20 years later, the group of survivors it has chosen to follow continue their journey as traveling players. The function of Station Eleven itself, the graphic novel created by Miranda Carroll and cherished by Kirsten, remains one of the more intriguing mysteries of the series. I'm beginning to glimpse how things connect: Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony, and Clark (David Wilmot), the Rosencrantz to Arthur Leander's Guildenstern, and his outpost at the Severn City airport, but there are so many characters that it's hard to keep them in mind. Thank god for IMDb. 

I've always been fascinated by the Japanese imagination, which seems to bridge surrealism and pop culture with ease. I'm no devotee of manga or anime, so I can't speak with any confidence on the subject other than to express my appreciation of what bits of it I encounter, usually filtered through the films of Hayao Miyazaki or the novels of Haruki Murakami. I stumbled last night on Mind Game, the 2004 animated film by Masaaki Yuasa which is somewhat about the afterlife, and was left grasping for stability. I can't say I enjoyed it -- the film induced eyestrain as I tried to keep the images whole -- but I can see where its cult status came from. It's certainly a barrage of styles of animation, so much so that I can't choose any one image to represent it. The one below is from a "realistic" moment in the film.

A quiet moment in Mind Game (Masaaki Yuasa, 2004)

From Shakespeare to D.H. Lawrence. St. Mawr is a short novel (or a long short story) about Lou Witt, one of Lawrence's sexually frustrated women, who buys a beautiful but high-spirited stallion named St. Mawr. There doesn't seem to be any canonical saint by that name, and Wikipedia tells me that mawr just means "large" in Welsh. I've only just begun the story, so no reliable opinions yet, other than it seems to be following the author's familiar pattern of conflict between the civilized and the wild. 

The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett was promising, setting up the characters of the bounty hunter (Temuera Morrison) and his sidekick Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), but not giving us much clue as to the direction of the story. I also watched Death to 2021, a spoof of year-in-review shows featuring some very funny performances by actors like Lucy Liu, Stockard Channing, and William Jackson Harper playing commentators, the standouts being Hugh Grant as an über-Tory Brit outraged by what he sees as the decline of everything that made Britain great, and Tracey Ullman as a Fox News-style personality. 

This Is the Way the World Ends

Movie: Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) (Netflix).

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

TV: Holiday Wars: Champion Cake Off (Food Network); Landscapers: Episode Four (HBO Max); Station Eleven: Hurricane (HBO Max). 

If a couple of friends whose taste I trust hadn't praised Don't Look Up I might not have watched it. My local newspaper critic gave it a rave and even put it on his top ten list for the year, but he and I don't always see eye to eye, and his opinion of Adam McKay's film was out of the mainstream. Don't Look Up currently has a 55% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the negative critics used words like "leaden," "sluggish," "slapdash," "smug," "bombastic," "frantic," "laborious," "toothless," "messy," "smarmy," and even "disastrous" to describe it. Several compared it unfavorably to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 similarly apocalyptic satire Dr. Strangelove. But this time audiences seem to be out of step with the critics: Not only did my friends praise it, but negative reviews like Peter Bradshaw's in The Guardian have been met with a barrage of online comments from people who thought the movie was brilliantly effective in its satire on the Trump era, social media, capitalistic excess, and journalistic ineptness. The movie also made the top position in viewership on Netflix, contradicting George S. Kaufman's observation that "satire is what closes on Saturday night" -- i.e., after opening on Friday. Okay, I enjoyed it, too, especially Meryl Streep's take on what Donald Trump would be like if he were a woman, and Jonah Hill's merciless parody of Donald Jr. I don't think it's the best film of this or any other year, but it hits the mark more often than not. I'm one who doesn't wholeheartedly worship Dr. Strangelove, for the reason I set forth on this blog: "It may be that reality has outstripped satire. Who could have invented Donald Trump?" All too often, our public figures, our politicians, our business leaders, our media darlings seem to be satirizing themselves. Who could have invented Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, or Tucker Carlson, either? Who could have foreseen a time when people would be taking horse dewormer for a viral plague and calling for the head of Dr. Fauci? I credit McKay with a lot of insight and wit in even daring to take our common plight and sink his teeth into it.

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)

Landscapers ended last night with its characteristic surreal embroidery on the crime of Susan and Christopher Edwards, imagining the two, as they sat on trial for murdering her parents, as characters in a Western movie -- an echo of their love of films like High Noon. I appreciated the series' attempt to go beyond a mere restaging of the crime and the trial, and the work of Olivia Colman and David Thewlis in portraying the couple, but I'm not sure the story demanded four hour-long episodes.

Station Eleven made another switch in time and place to tell the story of Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) and her affair with Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) at the onset of the pandemic. I don't know how the episode links with the first two (except for Arthur's death in the first one), or what Miranda's graphic novel has to do with anything (I expect a lot), or even why the episode is called "Hurricane," but I intend to stay tuned to find out. 

Memory Lapse

Movie: Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960) (TCM).

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

TV: The Witcher: Dear Friend ... ; Voleth Meir; Family (Netflix). 

I don't usually binge-watch, but when you're down to the last three episodes of a season of a show as entertaining and complicated as The Witcher, it's hard not to sit through all of them at once. I still don't have the backstories of the characters as well sorted out as I might, but I don't have the kind of devotion to the series that its die-hard fans have. Suffice it to say that there's a whole lot about Ciri and Yennefer (and even Geralt) that I don't fully understand, but I'd rather go with the flow of the action than spend my life digging into source material. At least I'm glad that they and my boy Jaskier (who gets a shirtless scene in a season when Geralt mostly stays clad) survived for another season. Too bad about Roach, however. 

Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)

I watched Shoot the Piano Player almost five years ago, according to this blog, and I'm surprised how much of it I had forgotten. Usually I get an occasional déjà vu when I'm rewatching a movie after several years, but there were only a few moments when that happened this time. Is it a sign of age? I like to think instead that it's because this loosey-goosey tragicomedy never quite goes where you're expecting it to, so it's hard to keep its plot turns and unpredictable characters (other than Charles Aznavour's Charlie/Edouard) in mind.   

I'm trying to give Troilus and Cressida its due attention, so I'm making my way through the play slowly, stopping to read the notes in the Arden edition when I feel the need. It's a better play than I remembered, with well-delineated secondary characters. I'm finding its bitter comedy rather bracing, and wonder why it isn't performed more often. The play's cynicism seems like it would have a lot of appeal to contemporary audiences.

Happy Boxing Day!

 Friday, December 24, 2021

Movie: Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967).

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

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Ultimate Holiday Party (Food Network); The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World (Amazon Prime); The Witcher: What Is Lost (Netflix).

Thursday, December 25, 2021

Movie: Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985).

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

TV: Money Hungry (Food Network); The Witcher: Redanian Intelligence, Turn Your Back (Netflix).

Jaskier (Joey Batey) is back! The snarky, motormouth bard is just what The Witcher needs to liven it up. One of the things that set The Witcher apart from the other current fantasy streamer The Wheel of Time, whose season-ending episode I watched on Christmas Eve, is the former's occasional lightness of tone. Imagine The Lord of the Rings without the antics of Merry and Pippin, or Game of Thrones without the sarcastic wit of Tyrion and you get something like the heaviness that often makes Wheel a bit of a slog. I will probably tune in to the next season of that series, but I hope its producers find a way to lighten up. Mat (Barney Harris -- the role has been recast for the next season) provided some darkly irreverent humor in the earlier part of the series before he got left behind, and there's some mild comedy inherent in the character of the Ogier Loial (Hammed Animashaun), but the show has mostly focused on establishing its places and characters and the nature of the central quest. 

The Witcher did much of the expository work in its first season, so perhaps it can afford to get a little looser in tone, although there was humor even then, much of it centered on the role of Jaskier as sidekick to Geralt. In this season so far he's paired with Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) instead, which is even more of a mismatch than that of bard and witcher. Even before Jaskier turned up, however, there was some humor evident in the tensions of the relationship between Geralt and Ciri (Freya Allan). Henry Cavill is wonderful at showing Geralt's exasperation with her, as he did with Jaskier. 

I complained about not being able follow the Yennefer plot in the first few episodes, but I'm getting the hang of it now.

Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

As for the movies I watched, Cool Hand Luke is one of Paul Newman's signature roles. Looking back at my comments on the movie in Oscar A to Z, I see that I regarded the film as somewhat pretentious in its treatment of Luke as a "Christ figure." I was less bothered by that on this viewing, although there is a shot of the beaten half-naked Luke with arms outstretched and feet crossed that's clearly a crucifixion pose, and a whiff of a suggestion at the end that Luke dies for his fellow prisoners' sins. But what one really remembers about the movie are its raucous moments like the egg-eating wager and of course Strother Martin's "failure to communicate" line. 

Kris Kristofferson and Divine in Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985)

Trouble in Mind is "stoner noir," a subset of neo-noir that also includes The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). It's not quite as good as the Altman film, partly because it doesn't have the underpinning of Raymond Chandler's novel. Alan Rudolph, who also wrote the screenplay, tries a little too hard to be cleverly off-beat. Still, it has Divine (out of drag) as its villain, managing to accomplish the film's eccentric aims more fully than its stars do. Kris Kristofferson and Geneviève Bujold sometimes seem like they don't get the joke; on the other hand, Keith Carradine does, maybe because he had worked with Altman and is used to this sort of thing.  

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. 

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. 

Vivat Academia!

Movie: Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000) (Cinemax).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, edited by Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Behind the Buttercream (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Landscapers: Episode Three (HBO Max); The Witcher: Kaer Morhen (Netflix). 

I've been having flashbacks to my days in academia lately. I mentioned a couple of days ago that some of them had been triggered by reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, with its somewhat snarky allusions to the Pre-Raphaelites and mild satire on Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens. I might have missed those if I hadn't spent so many years long ago trying to become a specialist in Victorian literature and culture. But I really think the nostalgia for the old university scene was touched off a few months ago by the Netflix series The Chair, which had fun with the tempest-in-a-teapot quarrels of a college English department. It brought to mind what's known as "Sayre's law," that academic politics are especially bitter because the stakes are so low. 

My latest surge of academic memories comes from having finished The Warden and turned my attention to re-reading Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. I had a heavy dose of that story in graduate school not only from a course in Renaissance literature, but also from the earlier version I read in my Chaucer course. But what tugs at my memory is what happened at my Ph.D. orals: One of my inquisitors was the professor from that Renaissance course, for who I wrote a paper about Shakespeare's Troilus. I don't remember much about the paper except that it was something about the self-consciousness of the title characters of the play. But then, a couple of years later, as I stumbled my way through my orals, the professor (who had given me an A, or maybe an A-, on the paper), thought he was doing me a favor by asking me questions about the play. At least I think he did it out of kindness -- I hadn't slept for two nights before the exam, and it must have shown -- but I couldn't remember a thing about Troilus and Cressida. It was agonizing, but somehow I passed anyway. 

Granted, T&C is one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, often rhetorically difficult, with ambiguous, dislikable characters and lots of classical allusions that go over the heads of contemporary readers or viewers of the play's comparatively infrequent performances. But I feel it my duty to bone up on the play once again, which means reading the academic prose of the Arden edition's introduction. I haven't gotten to the play itself yet; I'm still plodding through Prof. Kenneth Palmer's discussion of its parallel structure and other features of interest mainly to scholars -- of which I am no longer one. 

My other dip into academia lately was watching Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys last night. It's set in a college in Pittsburgh, where Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), a novelist teaching in the English department's creative writing program, goes through a variety of improbable but funny trials and tribulations, some of which pivot on his affair with the college's chancellor, who happens to be the wife of the English department chairman. The movie was well-received by the critics, especially Douglas's performance, but it bombed at the box office. I had seen it before and remembered being amused by it, but I have to say it feels a little dated. For one thing, the sexually predatory edge to the gay editor played by Robert Downey Jr. looms a bit larger than it might have 21 years, and our ability to respond with laughter to his "transvestite" girlfriend has shifted a bit toward discomfort. Still, it features some good performances by Douglas, Downey, Frances McDormand, and Tobey Maguire, as well as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning song "Things Have Changed." They have indeed. 

Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon, 2000)

I also watched the latest installment of HBO's beautifully performed "true crime" drama, Landscapers, which is being eked out slowly with a new installment every Monday. I don't understand why it's being released this way, as it's not a particularly suspenseful drama. Maybe HBO is just counting on our waiting eagerly for another chance to watch Olivia Colman and David Thewlis create fascinatingly complicated characters. 

On The Witcher, Geralt (Henry Cavill) and Ciri (Freya Allan) make their way to his home, which is full of other witchers who wind up fighting this week's monster, which has possessed one of their own. Great special effects, but I haven't quite figured out what's going on in the other plot of the series that involves Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), who falls in with a bunch of elves.