The Books: Passions of the Mind, ‘Toni Morrison: Beloved,’ by A.S. Byatt

Posted on May 3, 2015 by sheila

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On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind, a collection of essays by A.S. Byatt.

Toni Morrison’s harrowing and brilliant Beloved came out in 1987, and it swept through my group of friends like a brush fire. I was in college. Everyone was broke, and there were only a couple of copies of the book in the university library, so we passed around one copy. It passed from hand to hand through the theatre department. And it was understood that we had to hold back talking about it until we all had read it. It was like watching a TV show, and trying to avoid spoilers until everyone was all caught up. That’s how major the book was – not a revelation, of course it was major – but that was how its major-ness was felt in one small group of college kids in Rhode Island. The book was dog-eared by the time it made it through all of our hands. It was a group experience, reading that book. Sometimes it happens like that. The same thing happened with The Shipping News, although that was localized in my own family. Everyone else had read it, I hadn’t, and everybody could not believe I hadn’t read it yet, and demanded I read it, so that I could join in the discussions. I was busy at the time, and was like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it,” until finally my mother couldn’t stand it anymore and sent me a copy through the mail. I love my family.

So every time I think of Beloved, I think of my group of friends (we are all still friends today), passing it around amongst us. “You have to read it.” “Have you read it yet?” “What part are you on?” “Can I read you a passage that just killed me?” “Tell me when you finished it. Tell me when you finished it.”

There is so much about it that is brilliant and unforgettable, wholly separate from the theme/story of the book. One of the reasons why the book is so important is Morrison’s sui generis use of the English language. If you’ve read it, you know what I’m talking about. She’s up to something different, something so complex and so focused that it seems to alter language itself. What is language meant to do? Convey meaning? Information? Or is it not up to that task? And how do we use it to express certain things? There is supposed “agreement” on that point, and yet sometimes a figure comes along who calls all of that into question. Who asks, essentially, “Why are these the rules? Cannot I write in THIS way instead? Who says I can’t?” This is Joycean territory. This is the Modernist tradition, the crack-up of certainty that followed WWI, when all of language – which could not avert that catastrophe – lost its power. A new language was required. That’s what Toni Morrison is doing. And you really need to know what you are doing if you enter that territory. Morrison does. Her associations are multi-layered, and almost dream-like (or nightmarish) in their subjectivity and personal quality.

Like most great books, Beloved requires that you submit to it. You are subordinate to it. It is not meant to be an easy read. Again, not just because of the subject matter, but of how she uses language. It is not kitchen-sink realism, nor is it meant to be. It is in the great Modernist continuum. The vision in the book is so grim that it is often unbearable. And the language is a forest of images and symbols and associations, with deep incantatory repetitions, and visions, and confusingly similar names (making a point about the naming convention itself, and how “names” – and therefore identity/individualism were erased in slavery) – all adding up to one harrowing and grim whole. An unendurable vision, and yet that somehow becomes the ultimate point: the characters in the book DID endure such horrors, and so it is beholden upon the reader to endure as well. It becomes a moral responsibility.

There’s nothing else quite like Beloved. It is sui generis.

A.S. Byatt is slightly obsessed with Beloved (she has written on it a lot, and it comes up a lot in her other essays). She ranks it as one of the all-time greats. Byatt describes Morrison’s writing as “singing prose” and that seems to me just right.

I’ll excerpt just a bit of her essay on Beloved.

Excerpt from Passions of the Mind: ‘Toni Morrison: Beloved‘, by A.S. Byatt

The book is full of the colors whose absence distresses the defeated Baby Suggs so that she hungers for yellow, or lavender, or a pink tongue even. It is also – and connectedly, through the name “colored people” – full of the marvelous descriptions of the brightness and softness of black bodies – pewter skins of women skating in the cold, Sixo’s indigo behind as he walks home naked after meeting his girl. Whiteness is evil and nothingness – Melville in his chapter on Whiteness in Moby-Dick called it “the colorless no-color from which people shrink.” Beloved perceives whites as skinless. Sethe, full of rage and distress, turns on Paul D. “a look like snow.”

Another profound and patterning metaphor is related to Sethe’s horror when the two brutal and inhuman nephews of her schoolmaster owner write – with ink she made for them – “a list of Sethe’s animal characteristics.” When Paul D. discovers what she did and attempted to do to her children in desperation, he reproaches her, “You got two feet, not four.” This image works subtly all ways. During her escape Sethe crawls towards the river, pregnant, desperate to reach her other unweaned baby (already in Ohio), ripped open by whipping, reduced to animal level by white man’s beastliness. The child she is trying to get to – Beloved – is always described as “crawling – already?” moving on all fours and aspiring to walk straight. The slaves whose stories lie behind Toni Morrison’s novel were thought by whites at this time to be in some way animal. The case for slavery was argued on these grounds. What Toni Morrison does is present an image of a people so wholly human they are almost superhuman. It is a magnificent achievement.

Toni Morrison has always been an ambitious artist, sometimes almost clotted or tangled in her own brilliant and complex vision. Beloved has a new strength and simplicity. This novel gave me nightmares, and yet I sat up late, paradoxically smiling to myself with intense pleasure at the exact beauty of the singing prose. It is an American masterpiece, and one which, moreover, in a curious way reassesses all the major novels of the time in which it is set. Melville, Hawthorne, Poe wrote riddling allegories about the nature of evil, the haunting of unappeased spirits, the inverted opposition of blackness and whiteness. Toni Morrison has with plainness and grace and terror – and judgment – solved the riddle, and showed us the world which haunted theirs.

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The Books: Passions of the Mind, ‘Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford,’ by A.S. Byatt

Posted on May 1, 2015 by sheila

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On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind, a collection of essays by A.S. Byatt.

Like many voracious readers, I am uncomfortably aware that there are many authors I haven’t “gotten to” yet, many books I still have to read, many gaps in the knowledge I have acquired over my years as a reader. I am a self-directed reader. I am my own activities-planner. “Okay, so what will this year be about? Who do we want to tackle this year?” There was the one year when I said, “Let’s re-read everything you were forced to read in high school.” That was a very good project. This year I have my Chronological Shakespeare project going on (I am up to All’s Well That Ends Well.) I also finally sat down and read The Red and the Black – my first encounter with Stendhal – and the list goes on and on. I enjoy vigorous reading, I enjoy challenging reading. And once I become aware of a gap, I feel the urge to right the situation as quickly as possible. That’s what happened with Evelyn Waugh. Maybe I would have encountered his work earlier if I had taken English classes in college (which I didn’t). I had seen the Brideshead Revisited mini-series with Jeremy Irons and was mildly obsessed with it. But I didn’t pick up the book. And so I moved on with my life, blissfully unaware for YEARS that I was missing out on anything. Then I happened to read Christopher Hitchens’ review of Scoop in The Atlantic, and his review made me laugh out loud, and I thought, “You must read this book INSTANTLY.” And I did. Within two pages I realized what I had been missing all those years. How could I never have read him before? I love it when that happens.

I bring all of this up because I had already decided, as my own activities-planner, to finally read Ford Madox Ford this year. I don’t know why I never read him before. There’s really no excuse, especially since he “ran with” the crowd I love, all of those Modernists whom I revere. Hell, I’ve read Ezra Pound, and he can be pretty tough-going. And Pound knew Ford (of course – Pound knew everyone) … and yet for whatever reason I “missed” Ford in the shuffle.

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Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and John Quinn (a New York lawyer who was responsible for the world-shaking event of the 1913 art show at the New York Armory.)

I had already made my decision to read some Ford Madox Ford this year when I re-read Byatt’s essay in preparation for this post. It felt like kismet. I am very excited. I will start with The Good Soldier but there is so much else to discover! His art books. They sound fascinating. His Tudor history. What? Who is this man?? I can’t WAIT. I have a couple of other books going on right now, Silas Marner (a re-read, I love it so much and find it a very relaxing and healing book), a biography of Christopher Marlowe (what a life!), but once those two are done, I’m going to start my Ford Madox Ford project.

A.S. Byatt’s essay on Ford is lengthy, enthusiastic, and extremely knowledgeable. She explains his place in the scheme of things, why he is misunderstood, why biographers focus on the biographical details thinking that will somehow “explain” him (a pet peeve of mine), and also Ford’s various theories on language, and prose. (Ford and Joseph Conrad were good friends and collaborators, and she has a lot to say about that relationship, especially when it comes to their thoughts on prose language). Ford, like all those Modernists, thought deeply about what he was doing, and thought deeply about language and how he wanted to use it. His idol was Henry James.

Byatt adores Ford, and adores his specificity of thought in regards to language. It is something she strives for in her own work.

Excerpt from Passions of the Mind: ‘Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford’, by A.S. Byatt

In fact Ford’s literary “character” is not unlike that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also his own worst enemy. Both were men with a passion for exact thought and exact use of words who nevertheless had justified reputations as appalling liars. Both wrote major works o art, and a considerable body of writing by any standard (Ford wrote eighty-one books). Yet both were felt not to have fulfilled their promise: to have wasted their talents. Both boasted, and both devoted themselves, with tact, humility and, most important, appropriate and adequate intelligence, to the furthering of the work, and the understanding of the work of writers they felt were greater than themselves. Both were grandiose and incompetent, journalistic entrepreneurs, whose periodicals are nevertheless literary landmarks. Both rewrote, to our benefit, literary history. Both were not insular – Ford knew French, German, Italian, Provencal literature, and used it, as Coleridge knew German, French and Italian. Perhaps this last is another reason why Ford found his best reception, and his sharpest critics, among the Americans. He wrote about, and claimed that he was, the English gentleman: he was in fact a polyglot, half-German, brought up amongst the aesthetes and Bohemians who frequented the house of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown.

It is time another attempt was made to re-establish his reputation, not only as the author of three or four novels better than most English novels, but as a thinker about the nature of writing, and the craft of action, whose injunctions and priorities, far from having become outdated, have not yet been fully explored or understood. Not by critics, not by novelists. Hugh Kenner, writing in 1950, on the occasion of the American republication of Parade’s End (remaindered eight years later), said: “It would be worth most novelists’ while to spend some years of study and emulation of the procedures and felicities of Parade’s End.” And he locates the felicities in Ford’s exact language, his orchestration of “a sort of scrupulous lexicography working by the exact reproduction of the tones of numerous speaking voices.”

Ford in his lifetime worked out – to a considerable extent during his discussions and collaborations with Conrad – a theory of good prose-writing, of fictive construction, which derived immediately from the idea of Henry James about the “rendering” of an “affair” and the organization of “impressions”, in English, and from the ideas of Flaubert, de Maupassant and their literary sympathizers about le mot juste, “the minutiae of words and their economical employment; the charpente, the architecture of the novel; the handling of dialogue; the rendering of impressions; the impersonality of the Author” (Ford’s essay “Techniques,” 1935). It was from Ford’s belief that the novel of Flaubert was “the immensely powerful engine of our civilization” that Ezra Pound derived his view that “No man can now really write good verse unless he knows Stendhal and Flaubert.” In “The Prose Tradition in Verse” (Poetry [Chicago], 1914), Pound praised Ford as the “one man with a vision of perfection,” “in a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism.” Pound said of Ford: “It is he who has insisted, in the face of a still Victorian press, upon the importance of good writing as opposed to the opalescent word, the rhetorical tradition. Stendhal had said, and Flaubert, de Maupassant and Turgenev had proved, that ‘prose was the higher art’– at least their prose.” Because of this English amateurism, Pound asserted, it had been left to “a prose-cragsman like Arnold Bennett to speak well of Mr. Hueffer’s prose, and a verse-craftsman like myself to speak well of his verses.”

The situation has not much changed – except that English amateurism now perhaps values the casual, underwrought style more than the precise attention to diction of a Ford, whereas the Edwardians were still in love with the Pre-Raphaelite raptures and dreams. Pound added crisply that Ford did not learn from Wordsworth, because “Wordsworth was so busied about the ordinary world that he never found time to think about le mot juste.” Students nowadays are apt to say that writers who use words “everyone doesn’t know” are elitist. Ford believed there were three English languages: “that of The Edinburgh Review which has no relation to life, that of the streets which is full of slang and daily neologisms and that third one which is fairly fluid and fairly expressive – the dialect of the drawing-room or the study, the really living language.” He could use all three, to elect, in fact, but we now need to insist again – for prose writers, for novelists – that the language “of the study,” thought about (I do not mean “made” academic language), is living, and must be kept available.

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April 2015 Viewing Diary

Posted on May 1, 2015 by sheila

About Elly (2009; d. Asghar Farhadi). At long last. Wrote it up here.

Misery Loves Comedy (2015; d. Kevin Pollak). Navel-gazing documentary about comedians and how they think about what they do. A cast of thousands. Lots of great anecdotes. Saw at Tribeca.

Jackrabbit (2015; d. Carleton Ranney). Dystopia. Some interesting ideas. But lackluster somehow. Saw at Tribeca.

Wondrous Boccaccio (2015; d. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani) I rather loved their Caesar Must Die, and this one (also playing at Tribeca) is based on The Decameron of course. Pretty pretty pictures onscreen. Some of the stories worked better than others. Some were hilarious. The opening, though, involving the plague overrunning a medieval village, was superb.

Supernatural, Season 10, Episode 17, “Inside Man” (2015; Rashaad Ernesto Green). The return of Bobby!! Very satisfying.

Sound Of My Voice (2012; d. Zal Batmanglij) Written by Brit Marling, and she also stars as the mysterious cult leader, who needs an oxygen mask to survive the dirty air of our time and place. Two documentary film-makers infiltrate a cult, wanting to do a story on them, and then they find themselves sucked in. This is a fantastic film about the power of brainwashing and group dynamics. I’m a big Brit Marling fan. She’s this beautiful young blonde, and she could go the typical route, but she is not interested in that. She’s a writer, a director, she works with her own tribe. I’m very impressed with her. Very good film.

The Celebration (1998; d. Thomas Vinterberg) It came out in Los Angeles that I had never seen this movie. My friend Larry was so appalled by this revelation that he sent me a copy to see as soon as I was able. It is superb. One of the Dogma movies. Crazy. Almost farcical in its intensity and melodrama. Phenomenal acting, grounded in utter reality, and yet also totally insane. Ugly, brutal, beautiful.

The X-Files, Season 1 Episode 18 “Miracle Man” (1994; d. Michael Lange) I never watched The X-Files so I am rectifying that now. I think it’s gorgeous. For me, the show really kicks into gear in Season 2.

The X-Files, Season 1 Episode 19 “Shapes” (1994; d. David Nutter) David Nutter directed the pilot of Supernatural and has a strong confident horror-movie style. In watching The X-Files, I can really see now the influence on Supernatural, including the same secondary character actors populating the series. Mitch Pileggi. Steven Williams. And more!

The X-Files, Season 1 Episode 20 “Darkness Falls” (1994; d. Joe Napolitano). Jason Beghe! I love you, Jason Beghe, not only for your hot-ness as Demi Moore’s boyfriend in G.I. Jane, but for your famous exit-interview from a certain cult, which really helped turn the tides. You’re a hero. This one is very gross, and involves bugs and enormous cocoons. No thanks.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997; d. William Gazecki) I’d seen it before. The whole thing is an absolute disgrace.

The X-Files, Season 1 Episode 21 “Tooms” (1994; d. David Nutter). First appearance of the marvelous Mitch Pileggi, who also plays a huge secondary role in Supernatural. What a great actor. Nice dark and moody episode.

The X-Files, Season 1 Episode 22 “Born Again” (1994; d. Jerrold Freedman). An entry in the “creepy kid” genre.

The X-Files, Season 1 Episode 23 “Roland” (1994; d. David Nutter). Guest star Željko Ivanek! When I was in high school, I saw him on Broadway with Matthew Broderick in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. What a fine actor.

The X-Files, Season 1 Episode 24 “The Erlenmeyer Flask” (1994; d. David Nutter). A major episode. Deep Throat was killed. There is evidence of a vast government conspiracy. (I am not a conspiracy theorist. Three people in one room can’t keep a secret amongst themselves, let alone entire bureaucracies. But no matter.) While I was certainly aware of the phenomenon of The X-Files as it was airing, I was not at all interested in it and did not follow it at all. That was easier to do back then because there was no Internet. Things were much more easily ignored. Now I basically have to stay off Twitter on days after a Mad Men episode so I can wait until I get to see it. But back then? I was living in Chicago, I didn’t watch much television except for late-night classic movies and monster movies at 3 a.m. with the guy I was dating. Regular TV-watching just wasn’t a part of my life and I’m not saying that to be sanctimonious. I love culture in all its forms. I love reality TV and I love episodic TV and I love late night talk shows. But in 1994, I just wasn’t into it. So it’s fun to go back in time and discover what everyone was FLIPPING OUT ABOUT in 1994.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 1 “Little Green Men” (1994; d. David Nutter). Season 2 premiere! So far I am deeply in love with Season 2. Reasons: The X-Files have been disbanded, and so for the first couple of episodes, Scully and Mulder are separated. They have to sneakily meet up in parking garages. And so the situation starts to feel … damn near romantic. There’s a yearning in both of them to be together. The show is so delicate and subverted with its romantic/sexual tension, and I find it, frankly, to die for.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 2 “The Host” (1994; d. Daniel Sackheim). So so disgusting!!

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 3 “Blood” (1994; d. David Nutter). I love the Lone Gunmen. I found “Blood” to be a bit of a bore, however.

A Separation (2011; d. Asghar Farhadi). A masterpiece. My review from when I saw it at The New York Film Festival. I’ve seen it 4 times now. Never disappoints. Shahab Hosseini is my new crush.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 4 “Sleepless” (1994; d. Rob Bowman). I’ve been having sleep problems recently – so connected to my illness and sleep problems bring forth all kinds of other emotional problems – and so this episode, with its focus on insomnia, hit a bit close to home.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 5 “Duane Barry” (1994; d. Chris Carter). Big important alien abduction storyline, which will (apparently) be very important to the larger series-wide arcs. I am trying to avoid spoilers.

El Cinco (2015; d. Adrián Biniez). Saw at Tribeca and fell in love with it.

Monty Python: The Meaning of Live (2014; d. Roger Graef) Documentary about the creation of Monty Python’s gigantic live show in London, July of 2014. Marvelous. Not to be missed. Wrote about the Monty Python QA I attended here and here

Mary J. Blige The London Sessions (2015; d. Sam Wrench). Huge disappointment. Saw at Tribeca. It’s basically a promotional video for her latest album. She’s such a fascinating and compelling figure, and the documentary is so shallow. The fact that she came to London, to record in these smaller studios with hungry British artists that she loved … a big change-up for her … but the documentary really doesn’t delve into WHAT exactly is the difference, and WHY this was such a risk for her. She’s so amazing. She deserves better.

Among the Believers (2015; d. Hemal Trivedi and Mohammed Ali Naqvi). A documentary about the militant jihad-training ground of the Red Mosque in Pakistan. Saw at Tribeca, reviewed here.

In Transit (2015; d. Albert Maysles). Unforgettable. Albert Maysles’ final film. My favorite at this year’s Tribeca. My review here.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010; d. Andrei Ujică). Amazing. My review here.

The Jinx (2015; d. Andrew Jarecki). Had watched the first two episodes while I was out in Los Angeles. I don’t have HBO but was able to catch the final four episodes at a friend’s house. The whole thing creeped me out.

The Motel Life (2013; d. Alan and Gabe Polsky). I reviewed for Rogerebert.com, and re-watched in preparation for Ebertfest, where I interviewed co-director Alan Polsky onstage following the screening.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 6 “Ascension” (1994; d. Michael Lange). Wow, is all I have to say.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 8 “One Breath” (1994; d. R.W. Goodwin). I seem to have skipped an episode. But another “Wow” is an order.

Goodbye to Language (2014; d. Jean-luc Godard) The more I think about it, the more I love it. It was the first film shown at Ebertfest.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014, d. Roy Andersson). It was the second film shown at Ebertfest. Nothing like it. I don’t believe it has been released yet, so keep your eyes peeled for this fascinating director and his unique vision. It’s hilarious and then … it’s not. Loved it.

Moving Midway (2007; d. Godfrey Cheshire). Godfrey Cheshire is a well-known film critic, who is now a regular Rogerebert.com contributor. His 2007 documentary about moving his family plantation (Midway) off of a crowded road was one of the highlights of this year’s Ebertfest. What an amazing film. More thoughts here.

The End of the Tour (2015; d. James Ponsoldt) Another film that hasn’t been released yet. This is the story of David Lipsky’s weekend-long interview of David Foster Wallace. More thoughts here. Both James Ponsoldt and Jason Segel were in attendance at Ebertfest.

Girlhood (2015; d. Céline Sciamma). What a fantastic film. I moderated the panel discussion following the screening at Ebertfest. It was a great conversation.

The Son of the Sheik (1926; d. George Fitzmaurice). Silent film, accompanied by live music composed/played by the Alloy Orchestra. I wrote about the Alloy Orchestra’s accompaniment at last year’s He Who Got Slapped (an unforgettable experience. Rogerebert.com contributor Glenn Kenny wrote a wonderful piece about this year’s screening of The Son of the Sheik.

A Bronx Tale (1993; d. Robert De Niro) It’s a great film and it was wonderful to re-discover it and watch it in that glorious setting. Chazz Palmenteri and producer John Killik were in attendance. More thoughts here.

Ida (2014; d. Pawel Pawlikowski). My favorite film of 2014, thoughts here. Participated in the panel discussion afterwards, with Matt Zoller Seitz, Todd Rendelman, moderated by the wonderful Nell Minow.

The Motel Life (2013; d. Alan and Gable Polsky). Great audience discussion following the film at Ebertfest.

99 Homes (2015; d. Ramin Bahrani) An Ebertfest favorite, and a filmmaker beloved by Roger Ebert. Ebert paid very close attention to whatever Bahrani was up to. You can see it in all of the Ebert reviews of Bahrani’s films. Bahrani was in attendance for his latest film (which hasn’t opened yet). Mum and I had particularly good conversations about this one, because of her long experience with real estate. It was great. I highly recommend attending a film festival with your parent: it’s a great bonding experience.

Supernatural, Season 2, Episode 16, “Roadkill” (2007; d. Charles Beeson) For my next re-cap, whenever I’m feeling well enough to put it together and post it. I’m sick these days and overworked. I love the episode so much.

The Wicker Man (1973; d. Robin Hardy). What an insane movie. Women dancing naked through the fields. It’s ANARCHY.

Supernatural, Season 10, Episode 18, “Book of the Damned” (2015; d. P.J. Pesce). The snoozefest that is the search for Castiel’s grace is offset by the presence of Charlie.

Superstar (2009; d. Tahmineh Milani). I had seen this Iranian film before, but watched it again due to my brand-new crush on Shahab Hosseini. It’s not an arthouse film and therefore it would not make it to our shores and there are no “external reviews” listed on IMDB. This was a hit in Iran, and it has the slick polished surface of a formulaic quirky comedy. It tells the story of a pampered Iranian film star (Hosseini), who lives a shallow egotistical life, snorting cocaine, keeping various women stringing along, fuck buddies and older ladies who parade him around like a prize, and hiding his mother away because he’s ashamed of his humble origins. He’s a jerk. Suddenly a teenage girl comes into his life. At first he thinks she’s an autograph-seeker, and he invites her to come home with him. She’s 15, and you know what’s on his mind, and it makes him creepy and perverted. Then she blurts out that she is his illegitimate daughter, fathered when he was 16 years old. He had thought that his girlfriend at the time aborted the baby. That was what he understood. Apparently not. This young girl wants to know her father, and basically infiltrates herself into his life. She is mischievous and outspoken. She looks around his penthouse and is ashamed of him (he has pictures of himself all over his own walls. She takes them all down: “I don’t want my friends to think I have a selfish father.”) A relationship develops. He starts to feel protective of her, he starts to make decisions based on the fact that he is a father. It changes him. The film swerves in tone in the last 20 minutes, becoming melodramatic, sentimental, and almost spiritual. The tone-swerve does not quite work, but I love the film nonetheless. Check it out! Hosseini starred in About Elly as a liberal Iranian ex-pat, and he also starred, unforgettably, in A Separation, as the furious husband of the nurse. The lower-class traditional guy, emasculated and enraged. There’s one scene in A Separation when his cringing wife confesses something to him, in their cramped kitchen, and he is so angry that he starts hitting himself in the head. Phenomenal acting. In Superstar he plays an asshole. There are no similarities between these three characters and he is totally convincing in each role.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976; d. Chantal Akerman). It doesn’t even seem real that Akerman was only 24 years old when she made this masterpiece. How … how … Well, some people are geniuses, that’s how.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 9 “Firewalker” (1994; d. David Nutter). Bradley Whitford as a crazy Mr. Kurtz-type!

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 10 “Red Museum” (1994; d. Win Phelps). I am interested in anything that has to do with cults.

Fastball (2015; d. Jonathan Hock). Documentary seen at Tribeca, my review here. Loved it.

Meadowland (2015; d. Reed Morano). Feature film seen at Tribeca, my review here. Luke Wilson and Olivia Wilde are excellent. I found out later that it was produced by Matt Tauber, whom I actually know. He directed me in a production of Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe in Ithaca, New York in 1994 (which explains why I wasn’t a huge TV-watcher back then – just too busy.) That show was a great experience and I made lifelong friends, including Michael, whom regular readers will recognize. Wrote a whole essay about that experience, and Michael, in particular.) So it was after I saw the film and was looking at the credits on IMDB that I was like, “Matt Tauber, holy mackerel!!” Happy to see he is doing great stuff, still!

A Courtship (2015; d. Amy Kohn). Documentary seen at Tribeca. It’s an interesting topic, Christian Courtship, especially the really radical version of it which gives fathers the right to manage their daughters’ courtship, interviewing prospects, etc. This documentary, though, shows a woman in her 30s, alone and upset, basically moving in with a family so that this guy – unrelated to her – can manage her courtship. The whole courtship thing is supposed to lessen heartache, to lessen the risk involved. The documentary shows what a lie that really is. The documentary is interesting but it was extremely one-sided. I could have used some outside perspective on the whole thing. By sticking with this one woman’s very strange experience (the man isn’t even her father) … we get a warped view of the larger movement. I don’t know, I’m conflicted about it. I definitely want that young woman to go out on her own. This is not a healthy situation at all.

GoodFellas (1990; d. Martin Scorsese). There was a big GoodFellas reunion at Tribeca as well (which I did not attend), but in honor of it, I re-watched the film. It’s as good now as it was the first time I watched it. I remember watching it with the aforementioned Michael, and he explained to me shot construction and editorial choices. It took us 6 hours to get through the movie.

Being 14 (2015; d. Helene Zimmer) What a snoozefest. Saw at Tribeca. You have to actually have stuff HAPPEN onscreen to warrant pointing a camera at it. I was tremendously bored by this film. Zimmer does not know how to put together a scene, to make it stick together. There’s one scene at a party where the girls all jump around dancing. It goes on FOREVER, and needlessly so. I couldn’t help but compare it to a similar scene in Girlhood, when the four girls dress up and dance around to Rihanna’s “Diamonds”. The scene in Girlhood lasts for the entirety of the song. And not once does the scene lose its energy, its glue. What we are watching is an event, a moment, carefully set up and spontaneously (seemingly so) executed by the actresses. It’s not enough to just point your camera at a bunch of people dancing for 5 minutes. That’s lazy. What’s supposed to be HAPPENING? And the young actresses are not good enough to fill in those blanks.

Supernatural Season 10, Episode 19 “The Werther Project” (2015; d. Stefan Pleszczynski). I’m always happy when the Men of Letters return, but of course – since this is Supernatural and all magical entities (like angels and Heaven and Hell, etc.) end up being bureaucratic to the nth degree – they all seem like a bunch of “Mad Men” sitting around a table with sticks up their asses. A bit disappointing. Come on, Supernatural, let your characters be eccentric. Also, Goethe? I need to think more about the obvious Goethe connection.

Bugsy (1991; d. Barry Levinson). I have a great fondness for this movie. I love the love story. Bening is great.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 11 “Excelsis Dei” (1994; d. Stephen Surjik). A nurse is raped by an elderly ghost. Hijinx follow.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 12 “Aubrey” (1995; d. Stephen Surjik). You cannot escape your genetic predisposition, apparently.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 13 “Irresistible” (1995; d. David Nutter). So far, in Season 2, I am loving the dynamic between Mulder and Scully. They’re getting closer. Also, Season 2 puts Scully in peril repeatedly, which I find satisfying in a really retro way, and I am not ashamed of it. It’s entertainment. It works. Here, she gets extremely freaked out by the case they are working. It’s almost too much for her. Somehow this manages to be okay and not compromise her very strong character. They’re both moving deeper into the maze.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975; d. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones). 40th anniversary screening at the Beacon Theatre, with the 5 living Pythons present. An unforgettable night.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 14 “Die Hand Die Verletzt” (1995; d. Kim Manners). First Kim Manners-directed X-Files episode! He went on to direct over 50 episodes, before moving on to produce/direct Supernatural, helping set the tone and mood of the series. Very creepy episode, with an absolutely phenomenal breakdown-monologue by a guest star, a young teenage girl (Heather McComb). She does an incredible job.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 15 “Fresh Bones” (1995; d. Rob Bowman). Dealing with a Haitian refugee camp and voodoo curses. Yet another episode where Scully is imperiled. These situations add depth and shadings to the relationship with Mulder, professional, friendly, and yet growing in tenderness, since it really is the two of them against the world. I’m getting into the groove with the series now.

Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007; d. Andrey Nekrasov). Documentary streaming on Netflix about Putin’s Russia. An intimate look at the fate of Litvinenko, as well as the various journalists/politicians who dare to speak out against the State. They end up dead. This documentary is not for beginners. There are no title-cards, for example, helpfully filling in information about who is who, and what is what. You have to keep up. I knew a lot of the names, including the journalist murdered in her stairwell after criticizing the government (she is just one of many) – but many were new to me. I did a lot of Googling. Nekrasov has personal involvement in the story, and he is in the documentary as a character.

The Thin Blue Line (1988; d. Errol Morris). Saw this film when it first came out. It creates such a lasting impression.

The World’s Most Dangerous Drug (2006; National Geographic Explorer series). Correspondent Lisa Ling investigates the “world’s most dangerous drug,” crystal meth. Terrifying.

I Escaped a Cult (2012; National Geographic documentary). Three ex-cult members talk about their experiences. It’s harrowing. The documentary is online in its entirety.

Macao (1952; d. Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray). Producer Howard Hughes fired von Sternberg mid-filming and hired Nicholas Ray to finish it. Great Robert Mitchum/Jane Russell vehicle. Their chemistry is so phenomenal. They’re so much fun to watch together, since both of them are tough, hard-boiled, not prone to sentimentality. And the final line. STEAMY.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 16 “Colony” (1995; d. Nick Marck). Things getting serious now! Mulder’s sister returns! There are clones running about! Great stuff!

Vagabond (1985; d. Agnès Varda). What a brutal film. Watched the Criterion version, and the special features are amazing. Conversations with lead actress Sandrine Bonnaire (she was told, about her character, “She’s dirty, and she never says ‘Thank you.’), Varda, the composer … There’s a great small feature on the 12 right-to-left dolly tracks that punctuate the film. Chapter-markers. Each one connected to the next. Because of how the film starts, the entire story has this feeling of dread overshadowing it. Phenomenal performance from Bonnaire. Brilliant film.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 17 “End Game” (1995; d. Rob Bowman). Steven Williams! (aka “Rufus” in Supernatural. Supernatural is basically an X-Files reunion.) A part 2 to “Colony,” which leads us up to the point of Mulder freezing in the Arctic Ice. All in a day’s work.

The X-Files, Season 2 Episode 18 “Fearful Symmetry” (1995; d. James Whitmore, Jr.) I was absolutely devastated by this episode. I had a hard time falling asleep. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Jayne Atkinson is superb (I also love her on Criminal Minds). When she falls by the side of the gorilla, sobbing, “No No No”, I thought to myself, “Shit. It’s 8:30 p.m. and I am far too upset to go to sleep right now.” Guest stars on episodic television are the heavy-lifters. The stars have it easy. They have to have a breakdown maybe once, twice, usually at the end of the season. But guest stars have to do it every single episode, and they MUST deliver. EVERYTHING depends on it. Jayne Atkinson was just phenomenal. I’ve never been a zoo person. I love animals and always think I want to go see them in the zoo, and think I will be able to handle it. I love tigers and polar bears. I wish I could look upon an elephant daily. But zoos bum me out. I have not been to a zoo in 25 years. Can’t handle it. “Fearful Symmetry” tapped into all of those feelings about animals in captivity. I couldn’t handle it.

The Black Narcissus (1947; d. Michael Powell and Emetic Pressberger). A favorite. STUNNING. Never ever get sick of the beauty of this film, its hallucinatory aspects, its use of color, Gothic elements. It is nearly impossible to believe that this was filmed on a backlot in England. I still can’t believe it. The illusion is so complete.

Welcome to Me (2015; d. Shira Piven). This doesn’t open until next week. I had such high hopes for it, based on the trailer, that I was almost afraid. Would it … “go there” as relentlessly as the trailer suggested? Would it have the courage to actually go the distance? I’ll write more about it but yes, Welcome to Me goes the distance. It has the courage of its convictions. It’s super dark, extremely bleak, and also hilarious. Very funny performances from Wes Bentley, James Marsden, Joan Cusack. But it’s a pointed critique of narcissism and it does not let up. Kristen Wiig is brilliant.

Supernatural, Season 10, Episode 20, “Angel Heart” (2015; d. Steve Boyum). Very entertaining: oil drill wall dividers, mini golf, and Willie Nelson. Plus an amazing fight sequence and gorgeous sunrise light in the final scene.

Rooster Cogburn (1975; d. Stuart Millar). I see just a picture of John Wayne and I relax. I know he’s got this. No worries. The movie is sheer star-power entertainment. Hepburn and Wayne batting it out. Of course it’s ridiculous but who the hell cares. These two are giants, and they get such great stuff out of each other. And John Wayne’s line reading: “Being with you ….. pleases me.” Nobody could do it like him. NOBODY.

I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story (2015; d. Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker). Saw a screener-link of the documentary about the man who has played Big Bird for 40 years. Am reviewing for Rogerebert.com.

The X-Files, Season 2, Episode 19, “Død Kalm” (1995; d. Rob Bowman). Worm-holes. The Manhattan Project. The 65th parallel. John Savage! Very touching scene between Mulder and Scully in the hull of the ship as they wait to die.

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Supernatural, Season 10, Episode Whatevs, Open Thread

Posted on April 30, 2015 by sheila

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Just not up to speed on Supernatural these days. Too busy and also dealing with health problems. Good times. I’ll catch up eventually. In the meantime, open thread!

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The Books: Passions of the Mind, ‘George Eliot: A Celebration,’ by A.S. Byatt

Posted on April 28, 2015 by sheila

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On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind, a collection of essays by A.S. Byatt.

A.S. Byatt is one of my favorite writers writing today. This collection of essays, in topics ranging from George Eliot to Toni Morrison, came out in the early 90s, in the wake of the Possession brouhaha. At least that’s how I remember it. Possession was such a huge deal, that suddenly her earlier novels were re-issued with similar covers to Possession, and other non-fiction works re-appeared as well. I bought them all. The cover of Passions of the Mind is Henri Matisse’s Jupiter and Leda. (Byatt is so obsessed with Matisse that she came out with an entire short story collection called The Matisse Stories. Love those stories.)

I read these essays back when the collection first came out, and found many of them tough-going. I hadn’t read a lot of the people she writes about, and she’s extremely into Freud and quotes him at length and I found that pretty arduous. But, like I said, favorite author … so I sweated it out. She is one of those people who makes me realize and really feel the gaps in my education. You know, I’m reasonably well-read, but then I read this and think: “I am basically illiterate.” Byatt taught and came up in a serious academic environment (much of which she lampoons – or at least presents – in Possession). All of the post-modern structuralist French stuff really matters to her – because she experienced it all first-hand. (Whereas to me, an outsider, I think: “These people write turgid prose, dry and prissy, more like sociologists than anything else, I cannot understand what the hell they are talking about. Therefore, I will not pay attention to them at all.” I could afford to do so, since I wasn’t buried in an academic English program. Byatt was on the front-lines of all of it.)

While Byatt and Camille Paglia don’t, on the face of it, have too much in common, there is a rigorous appreciation of the despised “canon” in both of them, and much of Paglia’s work is an act of redress against academia that chooses to celebrate second-rate work merely because it was written by a member of an oppressed group. Byatt’s interests are wide-ranging. She goes where her beloved authors lead her. Iris Murdoch (she has written a couple of books on Murdoch), Robert Browning, George Eliot … these are Byatt’s gods. (I wish I could find the quote – but in some review of A.S. Byatt’s fiction, the reviewer said, “Byatt writes as though James Joyce had never existed,” and I absolutely LOVE that!! She really is a 19th-century type of writer, and you can see the influence of George Eliot – which we’ll get to in this essay and the next one – as well as the influence of her post-modern academic career – it gives an interesting blend. In Possession, at least, we get two modern-day English scholars, working away in their overly-compartmentalized fields, divorced from the flow of continuity in the dreaded “canon” … suddenly becoming allies, when they realize that the 19th century poets they have devoted their lives to studying had had a secret love affair. It’s a brilliant book. Despite the rigors of the academic life, what it eventually shows is that literature – good personal literature – belongs to all of us, and we are in danger of cutting ourselves off from the wellspring of life when we compartmentalize literature out, when we cut it up so severely that we can’t even see it anymore. Byatt struggles to see it all as one big messy glorious WHOLE.

I still find some of these essays pretty tough-going. The references to works I have not only never read but never even heard of (to quote my father: we’d say, “Hey, have you read …???” and he’d say flatly, “Nevah heard of it.”) makes me feel stupid. There are long passages in French, for example. Translations to follow. But Byatt is a scholar, not just a writer, and her learning is vast and voracious. Even with its academic rigor, you can feel her passion. One of her struggles as a novelist was to find her own way into the field of fiction, and she is frank over how she found it daunting. She had spent her childhood and young adulthood surrounded by the greats of the past. It takes courage to plant your flag in that landscape, to lay claim to the title “writer”, when you have spent the majority of your life studying George Eliot or all the rest.

Here, she discusses George Eliot. One of the things that is so unique about Eliot, that is still striking today, is how much of her books are about the process of thought itself. Dickens isn’t like that. The two writers are often compared, but it’s apples/oranges. Eliot is interested in how people think, and how people’s thought processes actually operate. It’s a nice coincidence that I would come to this book in my ongoing book-excerpt project right now, because I am currently re-reading Silas Marner, a book I adore. It makes me cry.

Byatt discusses her discovery of George Eliot. She had read some of Eliot’s books as a child and really really disliked them. She hated the ending of Mill on the Floss. She was angry about it. Then later, in college, she re-read Eliot, and discovered Eliot’s essays (Byatt eventually wrote the introduction to a collection of those essays), and had a total change of heart.

Excerpt from Passions of the Mind: ‘George Eliot: A Celebration’, by A.S. Byatt

So I came to George Eliot late, in the days when I was teaching the modern English novel in evening classes and trying to find out how to write a good novel myself. Meeting any great writer is like being made aware of freedoms and capabilities one had no idea were possible. Reading Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda I learned several primitive yet crucial lessons about writing novels – and these lessons were also moral lessons about life. It is possible, I learned, to invent a world peopled by a large number of inter-related people, almost all of whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can most scrupulously be made available to readers, can work with and against each other, can lead to failure, or partial failure, or triumphant growth.

I suppose I was in my late twenties when I began teaching Middlemarch, and I taught it with passion because I perceived it was about the growth, use and inevitable failure and frustration of all human energy – a lesson one is not interested in at eleven or eighteen, but at twenty-six, with two small children, it seems crucial. George Eliot’s people were appallingly ambitious and greedy – not always for political or even, exclusively, sexual power, as in most of the other English novels I read. They were ambitious to use their minds to the full, to discover something, to live on a scale where their life felt valuable from moment to moment. In Middlemarch Dorothea, the untutored woman who wishes to contribute to science, even Casaubon, the failed scholar, had hopes which meant something to me, as Madame Bovary’s cramped, Romantic, confused sexual lunges towards more life did not. In Daniel Deronda the hero has humane and intellectual ambitions: Gwendolyn Harleth is a sympathetic portrait on the grand scale of a deficient being whose conceptions of the use of energy never extended beyond power (sexual and social) and money (not for its own sake, but for social pride). Perhaps the most vital discovery I made about George Eliot at that time was that her people think: they worry an idea, they are, within their limits, responsive to politics and art and philosophy and history.

The next discovery was that the author thought. One of the technical things I had discovered during the early teaching of Middlemarch was George Eliot’s authorial intervention, which were then very unfashionable, thought to be pompous Victorian moralizing and nasty lumps in the flow of “the story.” I worked out that on the contrary, the authorial “voice” added all sorts of freedom a good writer could do with. Sometimes it could work with firm irony to undercut the sympathetic “inner” portrayal of a character. Consider this early description of Dorothea:

Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own role of conduct there; she was enamored of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.

There is so much in there, in the style. The magisterial authority of a Greek Chorus, or God, who knows Dorothea’s fate before her drama has really begun. Sympathy, in the author, towards the character’s ambitions, and a certain wry sense that, unfocused as they are, they are doomed. And then, in that last sentence, which is biting social comedy, the choice of the crucial adjective – “merely canine affection” – to disparage the kind of “love” thought adequate by most planners of marriages, not only in the nineteenth century.

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Monty Python Live

Posted on April 27, 2015 by sheila

More on the Monty Python QA and 40th anniversary screening of Holy Grail over at Rogerebert.com.

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Tribeca 2015: 40th Anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, plus Monty Python QA with Host John Oliver

Posted on April 25, 2015 by sheila

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There is a new documentary coming out called Monty Python – The Meaning of Live, about the development of the live show they did last year at the O2 in London. (The last live show they did as a group was in 1980 at the Hollywood Bowl.) The documentary is fascinating! Monty Python – The Meaning of Live is playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, and this entire weekend is given up to a celebration of all things Python, with screenings of the documentary, Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life and, last night, at the gorgeous and enormous Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side, a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The five living Pythons (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones) were all in attendance. Robert De Niro was there, introducing the event and welcoming everyone. John Oliver ran a raucous and chaotic Q and A after the screening with all five of them. A more in-depth piece will be going up on Rogerebert.com about last night, but here are some photos (all photos taken by me) and choice quotes.

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Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, John Oliver. That seating arrangement would not last long.

John Oliver: Why do you think Monty Python has lasted so long? Is it because silliness is basically timeless?
John Cleese: We thought we were being serious.

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John Oliver: You’ve just done this gigantic live show at the O2 in England. How did it feel doing comedy in a space that vast?
Eric Idle: It’s kind of the same. You know, you’re just talking to each other. Once the lights are on – I don’t know how many people are here – they’re in the dark – and you are just up there with these guys.
Terry Jones: The audience was so warm and welcoming.
Michael Palin: People listened. They were waiting for the lines. I thought we would be hearing the lines back before we said them. You get 15,000 people listening and laughing at about the same time – it was surprising really.

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Monty Python madness on the red carpet beforehand

Eric Idle: [to John Cleese] Tell them what Eddie Izzard said to you.
John Cleese: Oh, that’s right. Dear Eddie Izzard! He came to see the show 6 or 7 times and on the 2nd night, I saw him there and I apologized to him, I said, “I’m sorry I messed that sketch up” because I got a line wrong in Michelangelo. And he said, “No, you don’t understand. The audience has all seen you do these sketches right many times. It’s much more fun when you fuck it up.”

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John Oliver: One of the things I love best in the documentary – there’s this great moment where they will not let you play the vagina song during the televised program.
Eric Idle: We have the “watershed” in England. That’s where you can say “vagina” 5 minutes past 9, but not at 5 minutes to 9, for public safety and moral reasons. So I wrote something very quickly and Michael got straight into drag, and filled in for the television viewers what filth they were missing.
John Oliver: Right, so in response, you dress up like an old lady and give a pseudo-apology that used the word “cunt.”

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Michael Palin: The BBC didn’t censor us at all for the first two series. Once we started getting popular, they did introduce some censorship and there was a sketch, the “Summarize Proust Competition” – and people who came on [as contestants] were asked what their hobbies were. One man said, “Strangling animals, golf, and masturbating.” [We had already filmed it] and they called us in on it and said, “You can’t use the word ‘masturbating’ on television.” We all went up to the office to see the head of comedy, and we had this great discussion – well, it wasn’t really a discussion. Terry Gilliam was shouting, “I masturbate. You masturbate. We ALL masturbate!” … The funniest thing, though, was that “Strangling animals” was fine.

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John Cleese: I do a lot of … I don’t know if they’re really racist jokes … but jokes like: Why do the French have so many civil wars? Answer: Because they love to win one now and again.
John Oliver: That’s not racist. That’s a historical fact.

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John Cleese: When you’re onstage and about 6 people in the audience go, [tepid, unenthusiastic] “Ha ha ha”, you really want to kill yourself. But when there’s complete silence, it’s hilarious.
John Oliver: It’s an out of body experience, thinking: the only reason I’m onstage is to entertain people. I’m failing to do that. And I’m dressed in drag. And I’m an adult. What am I doing with my life. It’s inherently ridiculous.
Michael Palin: That’s what makes it fun.

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At one point, a woman in the front row made some sort of loud sound in response to something – I couldn’t figure out what it was, but John Cleese turned to her, pointing his finger at her, to Shush her.
John Oliver: There is immense authority in the British accent. Still! If you had done that in 1776, all this would still be ours.

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Terry Gilliam: [on filming “Holy Grail”] We had chosen all the castles in Wales and Scotland, and then we were told after we started to shoot that the National Trust was banning us from the castles because we wouldn’t respect the dignity of the fabric of the building. [These were places where] tortures, disembowellings, guttings … had gone on! So we didn’t have castles to work with and that’s why you see painted cut-out castles, and we made jokes about it. That last castle, we didn’t have the keys to the castle, and the son of the owner had to fly up from Kent to deliver the keys … so we could get in there and then dump shit on Terry and Graham.

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There was much mayhem. John Cleese left the stage multiple times. He wandered around backstage, poking his hand out between the flats and wiggling his fingers at us. At one point, Terry Gilliam left the stage too and then he and John returned, Gilliam crouched down, hiding under Cleese’s blazer coat-tails. And they hid behind Terry Jones’ chair and made loud fart noises. John Oliver crawled (literally, there were no steps) off the stage and came out into the audience to take questions. John Cleese commented at one point, “These questions are rather bad.” One guy stood up and asked, “Could you do the four Yorkshiremen?” and John Oliver exclaimed, “It’s not a fucking jukebox up there!” It was a rough-house environment, sharp-edged and full of insults, and I felt like the air was pure oxygen. It was wonderful. Wonderful to see them all in the flesh. Wonderful to watch “Holy Grail” in that gigantic 3,000 seat theatre. The excitement was so thick you feel like you could reach out and touch it. I have always loved John Oliver. Watching him handle that group interview, with 5 master comedians and improvisers, who were constantly careening the event out of control, was inspirational. It was a beautiful night of tribute to these super-star guys who have done so much to help create the culture in which we live.

I’ll post the link to the round-up on Rogerebert.com when it goes live. There was much more to the discussion, including a couple of references to Graham Chapman, and a long and interesting conversation about political correctness and comedy. It was a great night and I felt very lucky to be there.

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Review: Tribeca 2015: Meadowland

Posted on April 24, 2015 by sheila

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Meadowland, starring Luke Wilson and Olivia Wilde whose son vanishes from a gas station restroom (in the first 5 minutes of the film, so it’s not really a spoiler), is an effective and moving film about the aftermath of a horrible event. The fragmentation of reality as they know it. And the isolation that grief creates. It’s a first feature for the director, and he’s done a wonderful job. The acting is great. It’s screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, and hopefully it will hit theaters at some point.

My review of Meadowland is now up at Rogerebert.com.

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Ebertfest 2015 Final Day: Ida, The Motel Life, 99 Homes

Posted on April 24, 2015 by sheila

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On Friday I moderated the Girlhood panel. On Saturday, I participated in the panel for Paweł Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Ida, and then right after that, I moderated the QA for the next film, The Motel Life. The funniest thing was that I have no experience with doing things like this, but I was just tossed into all of it, and so of course I over-prepared, and made sure I knew my plan of attack for each one, and also asked questions of more experienced people who were there. It looks so easy when other people do it! Of course the key is to over-prepare, and then just let it go and have a nice conversation up there. Make the guest feel comfortable. Choose some good questions. And roll with the punches.

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Ida was on my Top 10 last year, and I’d put it at the top of that list. (I wrote about it here.) I think seeing it at Ebertfest was my 4th time seeing it. It really should be seen on a screen as gigantic as that one. The images are so startling, the compositions so unique, and they just register differently, seeming even more beautiful when seen on a large screen.

I had participated in a panel about Ida up at Columbia last year, so it was really fun to re-visit it. Nell Minow, a Rogerebert.com contributor (among many other things – she’s such a fascinating person), led the panel. It was me, Matt Seitz, and Todd Rendelman, whom I did not know before this Ebertfest. He was lovely, I had many good conversations with him. He has written a book about Roger Ebert. He was great. Nell was our fearless leader, asking each of us questions about the film, and they were great questions. She asked Matt to discuss the aspect ratio (the film was done in the old Academy ratio, so that the image is square, as opposed to long thin and rectangular), asked me to discuss the acting … and there was that structure there to our conversation, but then we all would chime in on a certain question, or we would riff on what someone else said. I told Nell later that it all felt so relaxed it was like we were sitting around talking in someone’s living room. The questions from the audience were fantastic. The film is just so engaging, even with its darkness and with its haunted quality. There is so much to discuss, politics, acting, death, grief, guilt … So many people came up to me afterwards (and Nell said the same thing), thanking us for the panel. It definitely is the kind of film that you feel you MUST “talk about” afterwards, so I am glad our panel helped launch that conversation.

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Following Ida was The Motel Life, co-directed by brothers Alan and Gabe Polsky (a very successful producing team, The Motel Life is their first feature as directors), and starring Stephen Dorff and Emile Hirsch. Secondary roles played by Dakota Fanning and Kris Kristofferson. I had been assigned to review it for Rogerebert.com and was totally captivated by its mood of melancholy and sweetness, its tender heart, its tragedy, not to mention the magnificent performance from Stephen Dorff.

Based on the novel of the same name, by musician Willy Vlautin (an excellent book), The Motel Life tells the story of the unlucky Flannigan brothers, who live in Reno in a series of increasingly depressing and desperate motels, with not even 5 bucks between them. The older brother, Jerry Lee (Dorff) is compromised in some unnamed mental way, and he also lost his leg when he was a teenager, trying to jump a moving train. He likes to draw. Frank, the younger brother (Hirsch), tells what amounts to bedtime stories to Frank, where the brothers star as pirates, or fighter pilots, or … basically anything other than who they are. These stories appear as very funny animation sequences in the film version of The Motel Life. Anyway, I love the film. It’s a meandering character study. It feels like it could have been made in the 1970s. How exciting that they had chosen to show it at Ebertfest! Stephen Dorff was all set to attend but had to cancel last-minute (he had to do some sound stuff for another film). He sent his regrets. But Alan Polsky was able to attend. We met backstage beforehand, and he told me that my review was his favorite of all the reviews of the movie. “I put it on my Facebook page. I really liked it.” That was nice to hear, and it was nice to be able to tell him in person how much I loved the film. And so the conversation we had onstage (and Rogerebert.com contributor Sam Fragoso joined us), kind of went from there. The audience seemed to really dig the movie, and the questions were terrific, showing the level of emotional engagement with the material. One guy stood up in the balcony and his question was, “Where’s Stephen?” Ha! I was proud and pleased to help present this film to the Ebertfest audience. It barely got a release when it came out. There were many critics there who had never even heard of the damn thing. So it was a lot of fun. It was also thrilling for me, personally, because it was the last “thing” I had to do at Ebertfest. Check it off the list!

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If you have not seen a film by Ramin Bahrani, I highly recommend checking him out. There is Man Push Cart, there is Chop Shop (it was Roger Ebert’s review that made me seek out the film), and there is Goodbye Solo, which screened at last year’s Ebertfest. Ebert had championed Bahrani’s work. Hard. The way he championed Scorsese’s work, or Werner Herzog’s work. He mentioned him so often that it got your attention, and piqued my curiosity. Bahrani is now a regular feature at Ebertfest, and the final film on Saturday was his latest, 99 Homes (which has not even been released yet, an Ebertfest first.) It represents a lot of changes for Bahrani, most noticeably being the present of some pretty big stars in it (Michael Shannon, Andrew Garfield, Laura Dern). Bahrani usually works with non-professional actors or non-actors. 99 Homes tells the story of a hustler/sleazy/real-estate developer/house-flipper who has benefited hugely from the housing and economic collapse. A shark. A con-man. A sociopath. As people’s lives collapse, his star rises. Andrew Garfield, a single parent, who lives in a small home with his mother (Laura Dern), has fallen behind on house payments. Eviction looms. The opening scene of 99 Homes is killer (and represents a huge shift in Bahrani’s style: it’s practically a thriller type of opening): a family is evicted, violently, from their home. The sheriff’s department is there. The people don’t want to leave. Michael Shannon (the hustler) is dead-eyed and implacable. These people are now trespassing. The house belongs to the bank now. Gather up a couple of things and get the hell out. (The opening scene is done all in one. No coverage. One continuous take, through the house, through the yard, down the driveway. It’s a stunner.) 99 Homes is all about real estate, development, the eviction process, the banking process … it’s incredibly elaborate (Bahrani did a ton of research) and – side note – it was really fun because my mother was in real estate for years, so her perspective on this whole thing was fascinating. I might have been slightly confused at points. Mum never was. Shannon is crazy-good, and Garfield is heartbreaking and terrific. Bahrani paints with some pretty broad strokes, and his theme is stated a bit too clearly for my taste making it feel didactic, but I like his style a lot, and I like his concerns. The QA onstage afterwards was a lot of fun because Bahrani was there and he had brought one of the actors with him, a little kid, maybe 12 years old, who plays Andrew Garfield’s son. His name is Noah Lomax. He was awesome in the film, heartbreaking. Scott Foundas and Brian Tallerico ran the QA and I loved Brian’s first question to Noah: “So, how cool was it to have Spiderman play your Dad?” Ha! And Noah was like, “It was really really really cool to have Spiderman play my Dad.” Brian asked him if it was weird at first, but Noah said that no, it wasn’t weird, Andrew treated him normal, and they would “hang out”… “He took me to the zoo and stuff,” said Noah. (The image of Andrew Garfield taking Noah to the zoo and “hanging out” like that? Heartcrack.)

99 Homes is dedicated to Roger Ebert.

After the QA, we all headed over to the after-party. I had a wonderful time, talking with people I knew, meeting new people, and what a wonderful group of people. Had a lovely conversation with Johan Carlssen (producer of the Pigeon movie). Finally got to meet Scott Foundas from Variety, and we ended up talking about Brian Wilson and American Sniper. You know, because those two things go together. I was so excited to meet the Argentinian actress Julieta Zylberberg, because I had just seen her in El Cinco at Tribeca and ADORED IT. I basically raced over to her to talk with her about it. I had a wonderful conversation with Dan Aronson, the founder/CEO of Fandor. It was lovely. The whole thing was lovely. I have a hard time at parties sometimes. I get shy. I didn’t feel shy once. I felt pleased and honored to be there, and everyone I talked to was fascinating.

Saturday was a long day and we were flying out of Champaign on Sunday morning. Of course many of us, writers, critics, and special guests, were all on the same flight back to Chicago. So it was a truly international group gathered at the small airport on Sunday morning. There was Héloïse Godet (the star of Godard’s Goodbye to Language) from France, Johan Carlsson from Sweden, a group of us from the East Coast, another group flying to Los Angeles, others in from Argentina … It was kind of cool, to tune in to all of the conversations going on on that short flight (only 29 minutes). Everyone there was an Ebertfest person.

Mum and I had a couple of hours to kill, so we sat and had some lunch at O’Hare and talked. During the screening of Ida (which Mum had already seen), I became aware of the scratching of her pencil beside me in the dark. She was taking notes. I love this woman. So I asked her to tell me what she had been writing, and she shared some of her observations, things she noticed on the second time around that she hadn’t noticed on the first. My favorite observation from her was: In the section when Ida goes back to the convent after spending time with her aunt, there’s a scene in the dining room where the nuns have lunch and it’s dead-quiet. Ida can’t help but start laughing to herself at one point. But that wasn’t Mum’s observation. What she noticed was: during the prayer before dinner, all the other novitiates placed their palms together in prayer. Ida held her hands down against the table. “That was HUGE,” Mum said. Yes. It was. I had missed that detail! I guess I’ll have to see it again. It’s one for the ages.

To the town of Champaign-Urbana: thank you for your welcoming atmosphere, your kindness. To all of the volunteers at Ebertfest: you are awesome. We love you all. Our stay there was beautiful and we had a wonderful time. Looking forward to next year already!

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Gaspar Noé in 3D

Posted on April 24, 2015 by sheila

A couple reasons why I love Gaspar Noé:

1. Because of the opening credits of Enter the Void. I would like to make out with those opening credits. The whole film is brilliant and hallucinatory and unlike anything else I have ever seen, but those opening credits!

2. Because of the way he is promoting his new movie Love (a love story in 3-D), which will be shown at Cannes in a midnight screening. One quote from him about the film: “With my next film I hope guys will have erections and girls will get wet.”

You know, I’m sure many film-makers feel that way, but who comes out and says it? Gaspar Noé does, that’s who. I can’t wait to see it.

3. Have you read Kim Morgan on Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone? Among other things, she writes about people walking out of Noé films. His stuff is definitely not for the faint-hearted. I found Irreversible nearly unwatchable, and yet … I stuck it out. Terrified. His stuff is extremely confrontational. Morgan writes:

As my friend, writer Kent Adamson said, “The audience is as significant as Noé… The walkouts are part of the drama, and the lesson in humanity.” Indeed. It’s always more interesting to watch Noé on the big screen, with an audience. I’ve seen all of his pictures in the theater and find the reactions fascinating; multi-layered. I wonder about the walk-outs because they can’t all be for the same reason. As in, people can’t all simply be offended. Something else is going on. When I first saw Irreversible I was frightened I wouldn’t be able to handle the swirling camera and low level police siren spiked soundtrack. Would it induce a panic attack? It was more upsetting to me than the famous moment with Ms. Bellucci and I was clinging to a xanax. And then, I just lost myself in it. And then I wondered if that was healthy. And then I wondered about wondering — what does “healthy” even mean? And on it went. That experience, as with all of his films, was disturbing, enlightening and mysterious. Just more of the many reasons I love Noé… Anxiety can be good. You feel those nerve endings, your blood pumping. You feel alive.

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