October 2024 Viewing Diary

Posted on November 2, 2024 by sheila

Downfall (2005; d. Oliver Hirschbiegel)
I’ve watched a couple of times. Always good to have a reminder of the madness of those final months, where even the most hardened monstrous men were like, “… uhm, yeah, he’s a lunatic, I’m out of here.” I always forget that this film is bookended by interviews with the real Traudl Junge, whose memoirs provided the basis for the film. In the interview, she talks about how she had excused her behavior for many years with “I was young, I had no idea what was going on, I didn’t know what Hitler was doing, I was so young …” and then one day in Munich she came across a little plaque commemorating the bravery and martyrdom of the “White Rose”, a tiny group of students protesting Hitler and the war. The students – Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans – were executed. (Wrote about these heroes here). Junge realized her youth was no excuse. Sophie Scholl was the same age as she was when she chose to follow Hitler into the bunker. This is a huge thing to admit, and it’s why I admire Junge. To own your part in it. To own fully what you were propping up and supporting. Sophie Scholl saw through the lies. You bought the lie. Own it. Props to Junge for owning it.

Wizard of Lies (2017; d. Barry Levinson)
One of the reasons the Madoff thing continues to fascinate me is the level people were willing to NOT ask questions. The sheer delusion. For decades. I am also riveted by the mere FACT of “the 17th floor”. The 17th floor was right there, and … nobody asked. Nobody even seemed to wonder. De Niro’s take on this guy seems, from what I understand at least, pretty accurate. Madoff was definitely at least a partial sociopath – the LEVEL of lying that had to occur, the level of compartmentalization, of concealing just boggles the mind. How could anyone continue like this? Well, lying is a gift some people have. They lie without shame, without overwhelming anxiety. Maybe he thought it would last forever. Why wouldn’t he believe it? He got away with it for decades. He had everyone in his pocket. And yet when he was busted, he owned up to it in almost shockingly transparent ways. He didn’t even defend himself. Yup. I did it. He took the fall, once it came. He didn’t really defend himself. Although there’s always a justification for what he did, and maybe not a concept of the “little people” he hurt, the retirement funds wiped out, stealing from synagogues, stealing from a Holocaust survivor … Who cares about the billionaires? Those people have too much money anyway. Too much power. They make things suck for the rest of us. You wanted even more? You deserve what you get. Live in your car like the rest of us schmucks. But the regular people … who didn’t know how to read financial statements … and of course had no reason to question Madoff’s operation … those people didn’t deserve it. He had the support of the SEC, etc. So De Niro captures that disarming LACK of anxiety … lack of MORAL anxiety, that is … The whole thing is fascinating.

Finishing School (1934; d. George Nicholls Jr., Wanda Tuchock)
Had never seen this one and I am in love with it. Frances Dee plays Virginia, a girl sent to a finishing school for debutantes by her snobby selfish mother (Billie Burke). The school is run by the great Beulah Bondi, a terrifying martinet determined to turn these girls into happy obedient rich housewives. The classes are like “How many cards should you leave when you go visiting?” “What is the proper way to set the table?” It’s horrible. The girls in the school are all rebels, in their way, lying their way out of things, sneaking out to go to the city and meet up with men, keeping liquor in their rooms, hidden in their shoes. Ginger Rogers is the ringleader. The girls are all friendly and welcoming to Virginia, but Virginia starts to get in real trouble. The vice closes around her. Loved this film.

The Wild Robot (2024; d. Chris Sanders)
Went with my sisters and nieces and nephews. We had such a blast. Wonderful movie. My nephew Ernie sat beside me, wiping away tears at one point. Heart-crack. We loved the specificity of the animals and their personalities. The socially anxious porcupine (he can’t make friends. He hurts people without meaning to). The OCD beaver, made fun of everyone until his skills are needed (“We suddenly take an interest in the project you’ve been working on!”). So many more! My niece loves the book series, so it was extra fun for her. It was so fun to go to the movies. IN A THEATRE.

Between the Temples (2024; d. Nathan Silver)
Loved this so much! Jason Schwartzman plays a widowed rabbi, living with his two moms, who are determined to get him another woman. The rabbi can no longer sing – his trauma has removed his voice – and so this has created in him a whirlwind of crisis: what is his purpose? What is his faith? He teaches religious classes to kids. Everything is very lackluster for him. Then he meets Carla Kessler, played by the great Carol Kane, in a role she was born to play, and I am just so glad it’s happened. I have missed Carol Kane being a “player” in the older-woman-actress space. Carla is her own person, and at first their dynamic is prickly and strange. She was his music teacher when he was in elementary school. She never had a bat mitzvah (because her parents were Communists), so she starts taking his classes. Which is a very weird situation for him. Beyond this set-up, I’d rather not say more. The way it unfolds is eccentric and authentic, at times legitimately hilarious. The film is filled with character actors, real people, who look like real people (another quality I’ve missed. Everyone is so pretty now. And fake-looking with too-white teeth. Give me some fucked-up real-looking people.) There’s a dinner scene which feels like the best of Woody Allen – it was almost too much to take in at one sitting, all of the performances happening simultaneously, there was so much going on at that crazy table. As funny as the film is, its tone is more melancholy than comedic, more contemplative than extroverted. Mysteries remain intact. Not everything is explained. The whole thing rests on the chemistry between Schwartzman and Kane, which is considerable. Adored this film.

Green Border (2024; d. Agnieszka Holland)
A very difficult watch, and a must-see. Agnieszka Holland is a master and she outdoes herself here, in the three-dimensional and multi-pronged portrayal of the refugee crisis going on – for years, and still – in the no-man’s-land forest-border between Belarus and Poland. Refugees tossed back and forth between the two countries, and the situation is completely lawless. Happening with no oversight. The treatment of these people, fleeing oppression (mild word for ISIS’ “rule”), is appalling. Holland chooses one family’s journey to be representative, but she doesn’t stop there. She looks at the situation from all sides. She follows the activists (lawyers and medics), determined to give aid to the helpless people trapped in the border, legal and medical help. This is very dangerous and illegal. Holland also gives us a portrayal of a Polish man who works as a Border Guard. He thinks it is a patriotic duty until he sees what is going on. And so Green Border is also about the moral/ethical corruption of regular people engaged in containing the crisis, and how it’s not just “pressure” to put aside your fellow human feeling – but the law). This is an important film, in the truest sense of the word, and so difficult to watch I couldn’t shake it off for days afterwards. Gorgeously shot in black and white, Green Border is one of the best films of the year. (I also loved a brief scene late in the film which demonstrates the international currency of hip-hop.)

Evil Does Not Exist (2024; d. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car was stunning and deep in its emotions, so much so that the final scene – where the subliminal dynamic between acclaimed theatre director Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki, his driver (Tōko Miura), bursts to the surface in devastating and cathartic ways. It was a gorgeous film, too, about the power of theatre, and not just theatre, but Chekhov. The organizing principle of Drive My Car is an international production of Uncle Vanya. Bah, it’s so good. The anticipation for Evil Does Not Exist was intense. It has a different mood entirely from Drive My Car, and there are more differences. Drive My Car was an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story. Evil Does Not Exist was written by Hamaguchi. It’s the story of a small community, close-knit, dealing with the infiltration of their area by a company who has bought up land to establish a high-end “glamping” site. The townspeople are assured it will bring tourism to the area. It will be good for all! The townspeople may be semi-rural and not rich, but they are not dumb, and they are very concerned about what the influx of cityfolk will do to the fragile ecosystem of their land. There are raucous town meetings, where the condescending representatives of the glamping company are met with staunch resistance. This is also a story of a father and daughter, their sweet relationship, its closeness, seems increasingly fragile as the glamping threat intensifies. Like, the glamping is GOING to continue, whether or not the town wants it. There are no protests that will “touch” these rich people’s plans. The film is a reminder, and a painful one, that the wrong people are in charge. People who just don’t give a fuck. People like that try to ruin everything, try to create a world that reflects their materialist values. It’s all they understand. With every passing day, it disgusts me more and more. Evil Does Not Exist is ambiguous, including its title. I keep thinking about it. It’s an upsetting film.

Sons of Anarchy (2008; season 1)
I’d never seen it. I love everyone involved, and I’m stressed out and looking for a binge. So I gave it a shot. It didn’t grip me to the point that I feel the need to move on to Season 2. The whole “dad was a hippie biker and the current club has betrayed his dying wish” was a little bit dumb, and didn’t give much to grasp onto, although the moral conflict of Jax is beautifully played by Charlie Hunnam, an actor I’ve loved for a while now. Please see Last Looks (my review here). I feel like people maybe didn’t see Last Looks because Mel Gibson is in it, which, of course, is a choice I understand (but don’t share). It’s hilarious, and feels like it was made in 1975. Hunnam is so good in it as the shaggy raggedy disgraced-cop P.I., riding his bike around Hollywood trying to solve the case. In Sons of Anarchy Katey Segal crushes in her performance. If I continued to watch it would be for the sheer pleasure of watching her in action as that monstrous matriarch. Monstrous but also sympathetic, shades of Edie Falco in The Sopranos, although Gemma has more power than Carmela.

Nickel Boys (2024; d. Ramell Ross)
Ramell Ross’ directorial debut, the poetic Hale County This Morning This Evening, was one of my favorite films of 2018. An astonishingly beautiful film, a tone-poem of images and feeling. Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, which – in turn – is based on the real-life horrors experienced by boys, primarily black boys, in these “juvies”, basically schools/reformatories. Boys went into them for minor offenses, or even just minor misunderstandings, and – in some cases – never came out. In the early 90s, unmarked graves were discovered behind many of them. Boys just disappeared. I feel like the story would be well-served by a docu-series, since survivors are still out there, and their stories should be heard. Nickel Boys is told in first-person POV, meaning totally from the main character’s view point (with some twists as the film progresses). This means you don’t see anything the character doesn’t see, and his voice emerges from behind the camera. It’s like Bogart in Dark Passage. But, like Dark Passage, I didn’t feel the choice worked because – no matter what you do – a camera can’t BE a person. You don’t feel more immersed in it. You just notice the “device”, and there’s a disembodied voice coming from off-screen, which never quite creates the illusion that the voice is coming from within the camera. I feel like this might be an unpopular opinion because the subject is important. I totally think it’s important, too. I just don’t think this device served the story. The film makes you think about power. It’s like the Stanford Prison Experiment, only it’s not an experiment. The film made me realize – yet again – that humans should not be put in positions of absolute authority over other humans, without serious and detached oversight, to keep a close eye on abuses of power. Humans can’t be trusted with power over other humans, end-stop.

Saltburn (2023; d. Emerald Fennell)
Finally caught up with this. It’s very silly but entertaining. Joseph Losey did it better in The Servant. So many bodily fluids!!

Woman of the Hour (2024; d. Anna Kendrick)
Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut is excellent! It’s such a wild story! I loved her approach. The trailer doesn’t really capture what she pulls off. Woman of the Hour is very specific. It is its own thing. The tone required great control, which Kendrick shows. There’s the main story – which you can’t even believe is real – but then there’s the other story, the REAL story, which is the stifling atmosphere of sexism and misogyny at every level of the culture. I loved it. I admire her for donating all the money she made (and will make) from this to RAINN and the National Center for Victims of Crime.

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara (2024; d. Erin Lee Carr)
This is a well-done documentary about the … years-long stalking of the popular twin-sister lesbian singer-songwriting duo. It’s not really stalking, though. It’s worse. Someone purporting to be Tegan reached out to fans, befriending them, and of course the young vulnerable fans were thrilled to hear from their hero. But things get darker. The film is very good because it’s not just about this one incident. It’s also about fan culture and its more toxic side. Like, sometimes the GOOD fans are the WORST. The over-identification with the worshipped figure, the needing them to be exactly what you want them to be, the death threats if they don’t comply, the harassment their loved ones get – like the girlfriends – these fans are vicious. I don’t know WHAT they think they’re doing. Sticking up for their idol? This is new, make no mistake. Because now things can spread, on Tumblr, Reddit, wherever. Like, I get it, Olivia Wilde might be (is) annoying, but the misogynistic vitriol flung at her – by primarily girls and women – during her thing with Harry Styles – was disgusting. Like, what exactly are you protecting? So Tegan has a normal breakup with the woman she loved. Meanwhile, she had shared about her in shows, and so – of course – fans were (overly) invested in the relationship. When the two broke up, the fans turned on the girlfriend. It’s just appalling behavior. Get a life. Get laid. Grow up. I liked how Erin Lee Carr was basically investigating what the identity of the mischief-maker. It continues to be a mystery. Clearly this doc got to me a little bit. I liked it.

Cruella (2021; d. Craig Gillespie)
Watched this with my nieces and nephew. Wow, it’s a bit much! The costumes are – deservedly – celebrated. They’re basically the whole shebang.

Magpie (2024; d. Sam Yates)
This was really good. I reviewed for Ebert.

Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare (2024; d, Lyttanya Shannon)
I was catfished from ages 12-14. I told the story once on Twitter but I never go on there anymore. My age range means I was catfished by actual letters in envelopes with stamps. This person sought me out. I sometimes wonder who I would be if that hadn’t happened to me. It could have been so much worse but major damage was done. I looked for this person, or at least I did once the internet came along. I haven’t been able to find any trace. Catfishing is now so much easier to do – you don’t have to go to the post office and buy stamps, for one. This is one of the more extreme examples of catfishing I have seen – it’s DIABOLICAL and I truly felt for this poor woman, and I think it’s really brave for her to share her story (since in general people are scornful/judgmental about the victims of catfishing). Her getting sucked in made sense to me – it was such an elaborate con – and her desire to be married and have children, and the pressure from her community to do these things – made her vulnerable. When you find out who was doing the catfishing … mind. blown.

This Is the Zodiac Speaking (2024; d. Phil Lott, Ari Mark)
You know I devoured this one. It basically tells us what we all probably already know, or strongly suspect, but there’s all this other detail added I never knew about, the Seawater family – yes, that’s their name! – and how this man basically rampaged through their lives. All of them are interviewed. I was particularly struck by the news reporter who tracked down Arthur Leigh Allen, and interviewed him – on camera. Lots of things I’d never seen.

Jackie (2016; d. Pablo Larraín)
Larraín uses an extremely heavy hand with his styling and music and approach – and yet somehow fails to make a point. I feel like his approach leaves the actor stranded a bit, doing too much of the heavy-lifting in a context that doesn’t really support them. I am all for unconventional biopics. I have written about this so much I won’t bore you. I like films that dig into what a person MEANS, not just what they DID. This is why I can appreciate Blonde, even if I don’t agree with the “take” on Marilyn. The film was trying to do something else, and was also trying to interrogate fame itself, and death, and artifice, and isolation. It was ambitious and I wish more biopics were. So I appreciate the idea and the attempt. I just feel that it was pretty empty.

The Goldman Case (2024; d. Cédric Kahn)
Fantastic film about the famous trial (or re-trial) of Pierre Goldman, charged with a couple of robberies as well as the cold-blooded murder of two pharmacists who happened to be there. All this happened in 1969, a crazy year in France, with all kinds of left-wing militant actions going on – and Goldman was a part of that, but also somewhat detached. If anything, he was more militant than the students shutting down their universities. He was convicted of the crime and wrote a book in prison: he admitted to the robberies but refused to admit to the murders. His book made him into a cause celebre, so much so that there was a second trial in 1974, I think. This film takes place entirely in the courtroom and – I imagine – was taken mostly from the actual transcripts. There’s almost no off-the-cuff dialogue, and no real scenes outside the courtroom. Witnesses are called. The atmosphere is raucous, the courtroom filled with his supporters, who have to be told repeatedly to be quiet. It’s gripping. Plays like a bat out of hell.

Shayda (2024; d. Noora Niasari)
Quickly risen to the list of my favorites for the year. We still have two months to go. Zar Amir Ebrahimi first came to my attention with the fantastic Holy Spider, about the true story of a Jack the Ripper type killing prostitutes in the holy city of Mashad. Here she plays an Iranian woman, living in Australia, hiding in a shelter for battered women. Her husband is abusing her and refuses to grant her a divorce. If they DO divorce, he will take their 7 or 8 year old daughter back with him to Iran. There is no way he will ever EVER let her take the child. She is totally trapped. Amazing film.

Dinner in America (2022; d. Adam Rehmeier)
I was so excited to see Dinner in America picking up steam, mostly via Tik Tok, in the two years since it was released, so much so it’s having a short theatrical re-release over the next couple of months. If it’s playing in your area, go see it! Support these little films. It is important. Dinner in America was on my Top 10 of 2022, and I felt very alone. I’d mention it and even film critics would be like, “What’s that?” I felt so gratified when the great John Waters – whose Top 10 list in Artforum is one of the most highly anticipated lists in all of film criticism – put Dinner in America on his Top 10 of 22!! Not that I need to be CONFIRMED in my love of something, but I was still thrilled! I just re-watched for the fun of it, and because of the announcement of the re-release. Here’s my review in Ebert. And I wasn’t done. I had to write about it more. “You need to take it down a notch.”

Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter (2024; d. Ryan White)
The hunger for true crime “content” (gross) is so intense right now the quality has fallen off in many of the docs I’ve seen, as well as mention the channels devoted to these stories. I appreciate when it’s a story I haven’t heard before AND when there’s art to the telling of it. I was incredibly moved by this terrible story, mainly because of the presence of Cathy Terkanian, the central figure, the grieving mother, but really the avenging angel. You don’t really need to add much to the story, because she is such a compelling figure. All you have to do is point the camera at her. They don’t add too many bells and whistles, a couple of harmless re-enactments … re-enactments can be a problem, but here they just add to the haunting mystery of what happened to this poor disappeared girl. Ryan White directed. I really admired his film Ask Dr. Ruth, which I reviewed for Ebert.

No Other Land (2024; d. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor)
Painful and angry. I reviewed for Ebert.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Monthly Viewing Diary, Movies, Television | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 31 Comments

Review: No Other Land (2024)

Posted on November 1, 2024 by sheila

A very tough challenging watch. But it should be watched. (In my review for Ebert I mention Green Border, directed by Polish master Agnieszka Holland, released earlier this year. See it. One if fictional – but barely – it’s really a work of reportage – the other is documentary: both are powerful acts of bearing witness.)

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

“I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not to be among the greatest.” –John Keats

Posted on October 31, 2024 by sheila

I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know. Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

Born in 1795 on this day, John Keats was orphaned at fifteen. Because his father’s finances were in a wreck, Keats always had to struggle for money. He thought of going into medicine and apprenticed himself to a surgeon. At the same time, he began to write. He was inspired by other people, he was suggestible. Example:

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 19 Comments

Orwell’s “nightmare world”

Posted on October 31, 2024 by sheila

From George Orwell’s essential essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, where he reflects on all the lies and falsifications of that essential conflict, the rehearsal for Hitler-Stalin and all the monstrousness that followed. (It is the Spanish civil war that served as the breeding ground for 1984, although evidence of the dystopian nature of totalitarianism would become mechanistic and even more monstrous in the years following the war. This essay pre-dates the writing of 1984 by a decade:)

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world: After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such an event, “It never happened”–well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.

2+2=5. I have written about this concept so much – in fact I see it all around me, even in billboards – and have done so since the birth of this here blog. 2+2=5. The essential description of fascism/propaganda/brainwashing (so complete that the brainwashed eventually brainwash themselves) and what Orwell called “thoughtcrime”. It’s all you need.

I read 1984 before I understood all of these issues, although I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War and knew in my bones the horror/intimidation of this faceless enemy, and the threat of annihilation hovering over everything. It was very real. I wrote about this period – and the proliferation of nuclear winter movies at the time – on my Substack. So maybe a part of me grokked it from that. I was 16 when I read 1984 and it got under my skin. I barely need to re-read it now because it is IN me. I am grateful. It has helped me stay the course as I maneuvered through propaganda as well as peer pressure, those who want me to say that 2+2=5. And it’s not just one side of the political fence demanding it. I credit Orwell for keeping my senses sharp, or as sharp as they can be. I think the books you read when you are young, before you understand context or history, sometimes enter you in a deeper and more permanent way than books you read when you’ve grown up a bit and are supposedly wiser to the ways of the world.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in writers | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath

Posted on October 27, 2024 by sheila

It’s her birthday today. She always hated her birthdays, “looked forward” to them with grim white-knuckling determination.

I have “had a relationship” with her my whole life. I discovered her at 15, like a lot of girls do, and took to her right away. I devoured every single thing I could get my hands on. I continued to revisit her work over the years, and as I changed, so, too, did the work. It’s wild. It looks one way to a 15 year old, and one way to a 35 year old, and etc. I am just happy that I lived long enough for her two-volume full correspondence to be published – a GOLDMINE. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940-1956, and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963. For such a major figure of American letters, it is a DISGRACE that there hasn’t been more “out there” in the public realm, letters and journals (don’t even get me STARTED on the debacle with those). Now let’s not get it twisted: I’m not talking about her reputation. She is one of the most famous American poets who has ever lived, and anyone who claims she is somehow underrated has an axe to grind and is not to be trusted. She’s basically the James Dean of American letters, and more ink has been spilled over every single word she ever wrote than most other poets attract in a lifetime. What I AM saying – in terms of there not being much “out there” – is that the Plath estate – run by Ted Hughes (but mostly run by Ted’s sister Olwyn – who always hated Sylvia) – was so draconian, so imperious, that nobody was ever allowed to publish anything or quote anything, without going through them first. The estate put the kibosh on ANY inquiry that may have “hurt the children” or whatever. It had a completely chilling effect on Plath scholarship: there hasn’t really been ANY proper biographies of her, either. She died in 1963, for God’s sake. She’s a MAJOR poet. Janet Malcolm wrote a whole BOOK about the challenges of writing about Sylvia Plath considering the state of the estate. This stasis all changed with the death of Ted and Olwyn – and then Ted and Sylvia’s daughter Frieda took over the estate, and we are seeing the results of that thaw. So now, for the first time, we could read Plath’s correspondence – to someone OTHER than her mother – and see what she was like with multiple people, not just the people-pleasing A-student she always had to be with her mother.

That correspondence was an absolute eye-opener for this lifelong fan. I honestly thought I had a grip on her. Turns out I was wrong. As I read the letters from December 1962 into January 1963, where she describes Ted helping her find an apartment in London, letters to her friend Marcia who was planning a trip to visit in March, all of these letters to editors and radio producers and all the rest … I found myself for the very first time NOT taking her suicide as a foregone conclusion. I actually thought at one point, “I think she’s gonna pull through this.” And then I remembered.

The correspondence is that powerful and that revelatory.

One of the many revelations in those volumes was what a massive movie fan Plath was. I never knew!! Why has this information been KEPT from us. Aurelia Plath edited out ALL of Plath’s comments on the movies she was seeing, 3, 4 a week sometimes. Why Aurelia would do that is anyone’s guess. Since for 40 years we have ONLY had the heavily-edited correspondence with her mother – where Sylvia often put a bright spin on things (understandable) – AND because Aurelia saw fit to leave so much out … well, you can’t know what you don’t know. Reading Sylvia’s letters, gushing about this or that movie, gave me a whole new perspective. She got a babysitter so she could go see Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.

Anyway, I won’t go on and on because I wrote about this newfound knowledge of Plath’s cinephilia in my column at Film Comment. As far as I know I am still the only person to have dug into Sylvia’s cinephilia. (This is the first time I’ve ever been able to say that about any topic I’ve written about. Someone ALWAYS got there before you … but here, since for whatever reason, Sylvia’s mother edited OUT all the references to movies in the letters Sylvia wrote – none of us had any idea how big a movie buff she was.)

I rarely think “I was BORN to write this piece” but in this case, I did. I’d been preparing for this one since I was in high school.

Sylvia Plath Goes to the Movies.
 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Books, Music, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

“When the words do come, I pick them so thoroughly of their live associations that only the death in the word remains.” — poet Dylan Thomas

Posted on October 27, 2024 by sheila

“[My] poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.” – Dylan Thomas, 1952

Dylan Thomas was born on this day.

I got a chance to write about him when I reviewed Last Call, a truly gruesome “experimental” film about his last day. No thank you. But at least I got to write about him, because he – and his trajectory – the heights, the depths – are really interesting. He was SO influential on his generation that he ruined many up and coming poets who just tried to write like him – and it took some people years to shuffle off his influence. His influence was not entirely a good thing. He was a brilliant PERFORMER of his verse … and many people thought they saw through this at the sham underneath. That Thomas created a mood through his voice that then people assigned as “Genius”. Thomas felt uneasy about this himself. Anyway, you can hear a lot of this in the collection of quotes at the bottom of this post. Thomas’ star has fallen – a bit, anyway – but for the generation coming up around him and after him, he was the cat’s pajamas and EVERYONE had to grapple with him.

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

On This Day: October 27, 2004

Posted on October 27, 2024 by sheila

Foulke-Mientkiewicz

And nothing was the same ever again.

Here is a beautiful essay by my brother Brendan about the family tradition of the Red Sox, as embodied by my crazy godfather, Uncle Jimmy.

My stomach still clenches in anxiety when I watch Foulke toss that ball to first. He tosses it to Mientkiewicz in an overly gentle – almost gingerly – fashion, not wanting to over-throw, every muscle of his body screaming in taut tension, “Do not screw this up, do not screw this up….” It was a little gentle bloop of a throw. And then all hell broke loose. Almost a century of multi-generational disappointment vanished. People lost their ever-loving minds. I called my mother at one point during the final inning because I could not bear to be apart from my family and she hung up on me. My mother has probably never hung up on anyone in her whole life, let alone one of her children. But that’s how anxious and obsessed she was: Splitting focus was too nervewracking. And I thought, not, “Jeez my feelings are hurt” but “Wow, that was stupid of me to call right now.”

I was watching in a Red Sox bar in Hoboken, deep in enemy territory. I had been going there for a straight week-and-a-half, to watch those long … long … LONG games … and thought: “I can’t keep this up much longer. I’ve been drunk for 6 days and getting 4 hours of sleep a night because these games are ending at 1 in the morning.” This was my first post the next day. Let’s not forget too that there was a lunar eclipse on October 27. The bar where I watched the game had a skylight in the center of the roof. So as the game progressed, we would glance up through the skylight and watch the eclipse. If you put this in a screenplay, it would be rejected as too obvious.

Joe Castiglione’s call of that play on WWI in Boston:

Swing and a ground ball stabbed by Foulke! He has it, he underhands to first – and the Boston Red Sox are the World Champions! For the first time in 86 years, the Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship! Can you believe it?

I wish my Uncle Jimmy lived to see that day.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in On This Day, Personal | Tagged , | 19 Comments

Review: Magpie (2024)

Posted on October 25, 2024 by sheila

There’s a lot that’s fun here, particularly the subtleties of psychology on display. You might miss the subtleties because of the style of the film and the twisty-clever plot – but for me the emotional insights were the real point of this. At any rate, it’s fun. I reviewed for Ebert.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Happy Birthday, Jacqueline McKenzie

Posted on October 24, 2024 by sheila

I first saw this phenomenal Australian actress in Romper Stomper in 1992, and she was so intense, so unpredictable, she was on another level. I couldn’t get her out of my head. She made more of an impression on me than Russell Crowe did (and he made a HUGE impression. And this was before L.A. Confidential!). Who WAS this girl?

A couple years later I saw Angel Baby, starring Jacqueline McKenzie and the great John Lynch (I just wrote about him!), during its brief run at the Angelika here in New York. I went with my friend Rebecca and we got swept away in it, carried away by the love story, and then when the mood shifted … we both started sinking down in our chairs. We glanced at each other at one point. We were both in tears. It’s a devastating film.

I have been a fan of McKenzie’s work ever since, and I was so happy to pay tribute to Angel Baby in my column for Film Comment. When editor-in-chief Nic Rapold first proposed the column to me – basically giving me carte-blanche sky’s-the-limit in terms of subject matter – I wrote down a list of ideas. That first list – about 10 pieces – I am so proud that I eventually wrote all of them for my column. And one of the pieces on that initial pitch list was Angel Baby. And somehow – someone must have forwarded the piece to Jacqueline McKenzie, and she Tweeted about it, saying something like “I am so glad these two beautiful characters are remembered.” Sob. This is why I do this.

Angel Baby is very hard to see. It’s not “out there”, it’s not streaming, it’s not even on people’s radar. This is ridiculous. Director Michael Rymer has gone on to be a very big deal, through Battlestar Galactica. But this intimate story of a couple navigating the world as they battle bipolar/schizophrenia (it’s a wonderful and compassionate and ACCURATE film on mental illness) – a film Rymer researched and felt passionate about – this film is just not available. It’s such a shame. You can see a clip of it here.

It got amazing reviews at the time. It was released. It was in theatres. Like … it should be available to be seen. I think you can order the DVD? But maybe not. It’s a lost film. Early-to-mid 1990s cinema was right before DVDs came into play – so many great films didn’t make the transfer. What Happened Was… was another one. It’s so sad because the early-mid 1990s was such a great era of film – a robust era of independent cinema was born – and it’s basically lost history right now.

Here’s the piece I wrote on Angel Baby.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , | 4 Comments

“My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.” — Katherine Dunn

Posted on October 24, 2024 by sheila

gl_kdunn3_large

“I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.”
-Katherine Dunn

It’s her birthday today.

In 2009, a news story emerged from the Pacific Northwest that author Katherine Dunn, known mainly for her 1989 novel Geek Love, had fought off a mugging attempt by slapping the thief in the face, and kicking the thief in the shins. Katherine Dunn was 64 at the time, and the mugger was mid-20s. The image was so pleasing. Any time I heard news of “Katherine Dunn”, I felt a surge of adrenaline and excitement, and this story made me think: “Of course. Of course she would make the news for something like that.”

The fact that she fought back was not a surprise, since Katherine Dunn spent the majority of her life covering boxing as a sports journalist. She also trained as a boxer. She had been a bartender, a waitress, a stripper, and she spent most of her time around boxers and tough guys. So, you know, she was not going to just let some asshole take her purse without a fight.

In 2010, Dunn gave an interview to the Paris Review. A couple of comments I love:

Twenty years is a long time for something to gel, what has happened?

I don’t want to be glib here, but twenty years worth of life and work happened. Some might say I’m right on schedule by my lights.

Is being a woman advantageous or disadvantageous for ringside reporting?

Thirty years ago it was an advantage because at most fights the lines to the women’s restroom were short.

When I got the news, in 2016, that Dunn died at the age of 70, I sat staring at the computer screen trying to think of what to say. Katherine Dunn is so meaningful to me, and Geek Love was so important that any words I say will just sound melodramatic or empty. I have written about Geek Love over the years, as it turns out, here on my site, but most of it is inarticulate, and most of it just describes my reaction after I came to the last sentence. (I burst into sobs.) Because of this reaction, Geek Love is my #1 most MEMORABLE reading experience. The book removed my blinders: I saw my life and its falsities, its wrongness. My reaction was the loss of Illusion and the belief in said Illusions. I could not put any of this into words at the time.

The public mourning over her death – among her fans – was as intense as the passing of Prince. It’s not as huge a population, but it’s as devoted. My friend Mitchell said, “I see Olympia everywhere.” I do too. People who have read it say they are “haunted” by it. You never see the world in quite the same way again. Because Dunn didn’t write many novels, and the novels she did write came 20 years apart, there’s a mystique around her. Geek Love exploded like a bomb into the year 1989. And then … silence. Of course she WASN’T silent. She traveled around covering boxing matches. This is not the “norm” for someone who writes a book like Geek Love. Her choices made it all even better: Geek Love was not a book like other books, and so it was perfect that the author would not be like other authors. The original edition of Geek Love included no author photo. You couldn’t “attach” anything to her, or stare at her face. All you had was her voice and the characters. It was perfect having no idea what she looked like. And because the characters in Geek Love are “freaks” and “geeks” on the sideshow circuit, and because it’s a first-person narration, it made you wonder … We all talked about who we imagined her to be all the time.

12-katherine-dunn.w529.h529

Geek Love started the process of me “waking up” to the realization I was living the wrong life. I was young, too. 22, 23? I was following a path not MINE. The path I was on looked like the path of everyone around me and so I couldn’t say what was wrong with it, and I felt I was being ungrateful or weird in feeling SUCH a strong REJECTION of the expected path. I suppose you could say: “Well, Sheila, you were just dating the wrong person. Maybe it would have felt right with another man.” I think the life I’ve lived since then shows that as a lie, the comforting lie the “normals” tell the “weirdos” and “geeks”. Blah blah, we are all special, everyone is different, even people in white-picket-fence houses have problems. Sure. But there’s “different” and then there’s DIFFERENT. The mainstream is so powerful the culture absorbs it by osmosis. Only those outside the mainstream recognize it as The Truman Show. The norm is not the “norm” for all of us. What is freeing to you is a prison to me. This is a difficult truth, an unwelcome truth to some (very strange: why does me “opting out” of what you have accepted make YOU feel defensive?), and terrifying if you’re 22 years old and you don’t know what’s on the other side of the wall blocking in your fake world. What will life look like if you don’t have job/spouse/kids? All I know is is I was young (21, 22), and my relationship was a torment (especially because I couldn’t verbalize what was wrong). In actuality, I was holding the brass ring of the culture, especially for young women. A nice responsible boyfriend, a cute apartment, marching towards marriage, yay! I had it! And I hated it. (When I saw and reviewed The Lobster, which lampoons/indicts all these assumptions – I felt a grim sort of vindication.)

Geek Love was a wake-up call. All along I thought something was wrong with ME, like why did I so vehemently not want the supposed awesomeness of what I HAD, which was: a relationship with a nice handsome responsible boyfriend, vacations and camping trips, long-term plans, even a sweet marriage proposal (which I said “No” to … I still don’t know where I found the balls to refuse. AND we were on a “romantic” vacation when I refused. AND we kept “going out” after that? Weird.) Geek Love said: “Not only CAN you say No to this version of life, you HAVE to say No to it.” (These thoughts weren’t even in my head at the time, but the extreme reaction I had to the novel was eloquent: in retrospect it is so obvious what was going on.)

From Geek Love:

Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.

I read Geek Love years ago when I was living in Philadelphia and quietly having a nervous breakdown (which didn’t show to the outside world). I was sitting on my front porch when I finished it. We lived in Mt. Airy, surrounded by forest preserves and mountain bike trails, a lushness of green only twenty minutes outside the city proper. Trees hung over the porch, trees pressed up against our house on all sides, the street was misty and quiet. A big mug of cold coffee sat next to me. The coffee was hot when I came out onto the porch but I was near the end of the book and so I sat there reading, struck dumb by the ending, not taking one sip from the cup next to me. At the last sentence of the book, I burst into tears. This has only happened to me a couple of times at the end of a book. Sometimes I’ll mist up … or be moved in an intellectual way … but bursting into sobs? Geek Love pierced through the armor of denial erected to shield me from how depressed I was, how sad, how lonely, and it wasn’t just about me, and what I was going through … it was about Olympia and Arturo and the unforgettable cast of characters. Geek Love is a book about love (obviously), but it’s also about flaws, and freaks (literal and emotional), and emotional blackmail twisting a soul already hardened by the world’s rejection. Our outer surface so rarely reflects our inner worlds. Inside we may be pure. Inside we keen with love, love burning so hot it is indistinguishable from pain.

My boyfriend came back from his run and found me pacing, tears streaming down my face.

I have not read it again. Every time think “I should re-read Geek Love” something in me cringes back from the experience I know I will have.

Those of us who have read the book are a strange little club. It’s a litmus test. If someone says, “I loved Geek Love” … it’s a secret password. It says something – maybe even everything – about who you are. One of the falling-in-love moments I had with the the guy who at this point I can say was my great lost love – was during an early “what books do you love” conversation. I said, casually, “I don’t think I’ve ever cried harder when a book ended than when I finished Geek Love.” He looked at me as though I struck him. He seriously did a double-take. He didn’t say anything for a while. He wasn’t a big “let me share with you every thought that goes through my head” type of guy. The conversation went on. A couple of people came over and joined us, interrupting our tete a tete, and he said to me, privately, underneath the chatter of the others, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who has read that book.”

It meant something to him. It meant something about who I was.

Now, outside all of this personal stuff:

Geek Love‘s truths are not easy to swallow. There is a price to pay for being a “geek.” For the characters in the book, there is no other way. They are a circus sideshow family. They all have physical deformities. It would be impossible to make into a film (although Mitchell said, after he read it back in the day, that he could see it done as an animated film, which I think is a brilliant idea). If you can make it past the grisly and gruesome opening chapter, you will be rewarded beyond compare. It is redemptive, but devastating. It is about withstanding loss. White-knuckling it. It is about memories so terrible they shatter life, leaving only pieces, fragments. Nothing can be put back together. The lie – and it is a lie, a very sinister lie – is that scattered pieces CAN be put back together. This lie (and it’s everywhere) is what makes people feel like “freaks”, or “geeks.” This lie is part of what drives people to suicide, addiction, anti-social behavior: there is pressure to conform, and pressure to “put yourself together,” there is an assumption that putting yourself together is possible. Maybe its possible for SOME people but it is NOT possible for others. There will always be those on the “inside,” and those on the “outside.” Katherine Dunn’s book acknowledges this. While such a harrowing experience as Geek Love could not really be called a “celebration,” it is, in the end, a celebration. There is a price to be paid. Nothing is free.

Katherine Dunn de-stabilizes the entire concept of “mainstream.”

Geek Love had a powerful impact – not just on me personally, but on a generation of writers. It was a “sui generis” book and Katherine Dunn was a sui generis writer, especially when you consider the weirdness of how she did not move into the literary mainstream in any way whatsoever afterwards. She didn’t play the game like other authors played it. She didn’t follow up with another novel, and then another, doing writing conferences, and short story collections, and a memoir (God, I wish she wrote a memoir).

The conventional, the expected, wasn’t her. She wrote Geek Love and then vanished from the mainstream literary scene.

There are a couple of collections of her boxing writing: One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing, and, in collaboration with photographer Jim Lommasson, Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms, which won the 2004 Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize. There were other novels too: Attic, Truck. Plus the fascinating Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook.

In a conformist society, Katherine Dunn was an outlaw and renegade. You don’t realize how out of the ordinary it is until someone comes along and actually does it. There is no “set” path to being a writer. However, in today’s world of MFA writing programs and writers’ workshops churning out young writers who all sound alike, having Dunn emerge from (seemingly) out of nowhere, with a book unlike anything else, putting every other book around it to shame … is a moment of triumph for our culture. Sometimes things work out. Sometimes something is SO good, and SO itself
1. it cannot be compared to anything else and
2. its impact cannot be denied or explained away or ignored. Geek Love felt inevitable once it arrived, but nothing is inevitable. Katherine Dunn had to dream it up. She had to sit down and write it.

I look at the picture of her above and think: “She had Geek Love in her? WHERE did it come from?”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, although the stories of why she wrote it are fascinating (and important for writers to try to absorb). Where do ideas come from? is the question. What really matters is Geek Love is here now, and it is ours. It will impact anyone who discovers it for generations to come. Once you’ve read it, life is unimaginable without it. I can count such books on one hand.

db31e0764413be18980f6a70670077be


 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , | 8 Comments