Ignore the terrible poster. This is a very good movie. And it haunted me for a good 24 hours after I saw it. It got pretty damn close to some of my own deeply engrained … issues … and it did so without nice-ing it up in a redemption narrative. I loved it. Excellent acting.
My review of All About Nina is now up at Rogerebert.com.
My cousin Rachel and I started discussing going to Croatia at a Thanksgiving about 15 years ago. Then the economy crashed, I lost my job, moved into freelance, and there went THAT plan. (We’ve joked ever since, “We should have booked our tickets THEN.”) Anyway, we finally got ourselves together and booked a trip. We went through an amazing small tour company, because we didn’t want to do some gigantic rushed bus tour. NO. If I ever go back – WHEN I go back, I might just rent a car and drive myself – it’s all pretty similar to here, bilingual directions, etc., plus driving on the “right” side of the road – although, honestly, the coastline is so mountainous, I’m not sure I could make it along those cliff roads by myself. It was difficult enough being a passenger.
At any rate, I am so glad we went the way we did, even though it was slightly more high-maintenance in the first stages. You reach out by email to this one tour company. You get an email back from an actual person (who, turns out, is the owner of the company – and was our guide in Zagreb) – He asked, “When would you like to come?” We give a range of dates. We narrow it down. So it was really up to us when we wanted to go. It wasn’t like we had to join up with some pre-determined tour date. And instead of being crammed in a bus with 40 other people, it was just me, Rachel, and a guide. (Well, one guide for 7 of the days, another guide for the last days.) So we got to know these men very well! You’re basically just hanging out with them. Eating, driving, talking, etc. They handle everything. The price includes hotels (all extremely nice), tickets into all of these amazing sights – plus one meal a day (and this means the guide takes us to an awesome local place – more often than not, family-owned – down a dirt road, on top of a mountain, whatever, the point being: not a tourist hot spot. In fact, no tourists whatsoever were in these places except for us). It’s slightly more intimate than a regular tour (I imagine, anyway – I’ve never been on a bus tour) – but it really worked for us. We loved our guides so much, two wonderful men named Ante and Davor. I want to go back and I will definitely reach out to Davor again. They’ll be “my guys” whenever I go back, because I WILL be going back.
I flew in to Dubrovnik via Paris. Rachel would be arriving a couple hours later. Ante picked me up at the airport and we drove off to Dubrovnik, about half an hour away. It was hot! A blazing beautiful summer day. I was very jet-lagged and that would continue into the next day (where we both felt somewhat delirious). But I’ve been wanting to come here for so long, and it was a dream so long deferred (20 years?) that I didn’t want to miss a second of it.
It began on an auspicious note, with our conversation as we drove into Dubrovnik.
Ante is from Split, and Split is really the whole reason I wanted to come to Croatia in the first place, ever since I read Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 25 years ago, 30, who the hell knows, forever ago. I have done my research on Split BELIEVE YOU ME, so I was excited to be talking to a townie! I think he was slightly pleased that I actually knew some stuff about his home town.
A couple observations:
He said “Emperor Diocletian” with such familiarity it was as though the Emperor’s reign ended last week.
He said, “There have been people living in Split for over 2,000 years. No stops. People always there.”
“Just incredible!”
“Continuous for thousands of years.”
Me: “And Diocletian basically built his retirement palace there, right?”
“Yes. And it’s down by the water – not on a hill.”
I wasn’t sure how this related to my question but he went on:
“You build forts up on a hill so you can see who’s coming and kill them.” (Of course.) “but Diocletian —“ (again, like he was saying Joe Schmoe) “built it on the water and to get to it you have to go down a hill.”
I understood now. “So he was chilling OUT in Split is what you’re saying. He felt relaxed.”
“Yes! There are some parts of palace that feel like a fort but mostly ….”
“It’s a beach house.”
“Yes.”
“For a retired Roman Emperor.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe he wasn’t murdered or poisoned.”
“He was one of only 5 Roman Emperors who died of natural causes.”
Now that I HAD known and I thought to myself: Thank you Dame Rebecca.
“Did people like Diocletian or …??”
“Some people thought he was crazy. But he did a lot of good things too.” (with a tone of voice as though we were discussing the Mayor from last year.)
A bit later I said “Okay so here’s a question. I write about movies. Tell me about the movies here. Do you have a film industry?”
He said, “Well … Not really but of course when we were part of Yugoslavia, Tito created a huge movie studio.”
“Oh that’s right!! I saw a documentary about that!” (Cinema Komunisto if you must know. Highly recommended. I reviewed here!)
“And people like Yul Brenner came here and Richard Burton and they made all these war movies for Tito. But it was really just marketing.”
“Right. Propaganda for Tito.”
“Tito wanted to be a big shot movie guy.”
Then he said, just remembering, and laughing: “Do you know Croatia’s favorite movie? Our #1 favorite movie? The biggest hit ever?”
“Oh my God tell me right now.”
“Fiddler on the Roof!” He was laughing hysterically.
“Wait, what?”
“It was filmed here outside of Zagreb and there are still little old ladies who were extras in the movie and they still get interviewed about it. Croatia LOVES that movie because you can see all the places where we live. And it’s not changed all that much. There are still villages with wooden houses and roofs like in the movie.”
“You know I am going to write about all of this.”
And so I have.
One final thing: as we approached Dubrovnik – which is the most beautiful city I personally have ever seen – we came in on a cliff road so you could see the whole city below us. I had read about the destruction of Dubrovnik during the war in the 90s and it was only seeing the city geographically that made me really get how vulnerable the place was. Like Diocletian‘s palace down on the beach. If you want to protect yourself you put your city on a HILL. If you’re down at the bottom of a hill, you’re a sitting duck.
So I was thinking that as I stared down on Dubrovnik… and maybe he was too because he said, “75% of Dubrovnik was destroyed in the war.”
“My God.”
“The Serbs were up there,” he said, pointing at the surrounding mountains.
And the way he said “Serbs”…. gave me a little chill. It wouldn’t be the last time we heard the word “Serbs” in that tone so thick with associations and memories and … other things you can’t even really name … history, really – so thick it was almost impenetrable. But you could feel it.
Again with the sense that all this happened yesterday. Which makes total sense. I respect it.
Ante checked me into the hotel, a gorgeous place perched on the edge of a small cliff. (Which resulted in much hilarity and confusion when we tried to take the elevator. We never really got the hang of it. The lobby was on the FIRST floor, the rooms down below. So to leave the hotel, you had to go UP. Rachel and I, jetlagged, were like bumbling fools each and every time. The humor of this didn’t really hit us until later in the trip, mainly because we were so jetlagged those first two days, we were delirious. But later, discussing it at dinner one night, we started laughing so hard we were CRY-ING.)
As the porter took me to my room, he glanced at me and said, “You’re American?”
“Yes.”
“Sooo …. Trump?”
I said, “I know. We’re very very sorry.”
I had been afraid we would be treated with hostility because of 45, but this was honestly the only time it came up. And it was a completely benign and somewhat humorous interaction.
The view from our room made me almost cry. There it was, the Adriatic. Mountains all around. I grew up a 5 minute ride from the ocean. I know oceans. I’ve spent my whole life near an ocean. But not like this ocean. Because it’s a giant inlet, basically, protected by Italy on the other side, there’s no surf. There aren’t crashing waves. So it’s calm … except maybe in a high wind, which might whip up some waves. Other than that, it’s calm, serene, with white sails dotting the blue. The sun was blinding. It was hot, but dry. Perfect weather. We had a balcony overlooking an infinity pool on the rocks – I mean, come on – and below that was the little beach area for our hotel: all rocks, and stairs cut into the rocks, which descended into the water. People were swimming. I was so exhausted I felt transparent. I wanted to get in that water so bad my limbs ached. I had flown out of Newark at 6 p.m. which basically meant I didn’t sleep. I tried, maybe I got 2 hours, but the time change screwed me up royally.
I have wanted to see the Adriatic for so long, this storied coastline, famous back into antiquity, inhabited for millennia. Here it was.
I organized my stuff around the room. I sat out on the balcony, quiet, staring. I tried to just sink into the present. I waited for Rachel to arrive. My dear cousin! We were starting off on an adventure. Finally, there she was. We were giddy. We were thrilled with our room. Thankfully, she’s a water-baby too. We were very in sync with just how much we wanted to go swimming, how much the beaches called to us. For the majority of our trip, it was in the 80s, even higher. Suddenly, in the final days, the weather wildly swung around into fall. It got cold and windy, with torrential rain, thunder, crazy clouds, etc. I had packed for summer. So had Rachel. We were FREEZING the final two days. I said to Rachel, “In a 24-hour period, the season completely changed.” Rachel said, “In a 10-minute period, actually!” And she was right. We chose the right time to go. Swimming every day, multiple times, is the way to go.
We couldn’t wait. We put on our suits, our flip-flops and got in the elevator to get to the pool. (Elevator hilarity and confusion should be assumed.)
Down at the beach, there was an outdoor bar perched on the rocks, right over the infinity pool. We picked up towels and made our way down to the “beach.” I say it like that because to me – a Rhode Islander – beaches have sands. Croatia’s is all rocky. When there’s a strip of land, it’s all rocks. Here, at the hotel, there were slabs of rocks, making a huge patio type area with beach chairs, and then stone steps to a lower area, which then had little mossy steps – or a ladder, should you so choose, going down into the water.
Once we were in the water, our trip really started. We let go of the stresses of almost 24 hours of travel.
It was cold, but not too cold. The bottom was rocky, so you had to be careful. The Adriatic is so salty that you’re buoyant. Rachel and I kept joking how you don’t even need a “noodle” to just bob in the water. The sea is salty but you can see all the way to the bottom, which is why it is such an unbelievable color, especially when the sun shines on it. Sometimes it blazes into a kind of turquoise-green, almost tropical. We swam and swam, all as the sun set. We got out and sat on deck chairs, reveling in the view. We went back in the water. We ordered glasses of wine from the nearby bar. We discussed our confusion about kuna, the local currency. (A couple days in, we got the hang of it, with the help of our calculators.) We swam again. We sat in total silence, watching the sun set. It was awe-inspiring.
Here I am, swimming in the Adriatic. As you do.
We were both still pretty out of it. We watched the sun go down in total silence. Drinking wine. It was so beautiful you couldn’t even really talk about it.
I have had many dark years. That’s no secret. But I’m still here. I have always wanted to visit Croatia. Wanting to go is so much a part of my life that it’s almost like I’m one of the three sisters dreaming of Moscow. I am very grateful, humbled, thankful, that I am still here, that I was able to take this trip and see the places I’ve long dreamt of.
Nappily Ever After, a new film on Netflix, is well worth checking out. In my review, I got to sing the praises of one of my favorite actresses working today, Sanaa Lathan.
It’s Croatia. Or … Illyria, in answer to the question in the subject line, Viola’s question at the start of Twelfth Night. I’ve wanted to come here my whole life. So here I am. Tooling up the Dalmatian Coast. Swimming every day in the famous Adriatic Sea, so turquoise-blue you can’t believe the color is even real, and so salty it’s like having a salt scrub. You’re so buoyant you just float there. You come out coated in salt. Hopping out to islands. Korčula. Hvar. Headed eventually to Split, which I’ve wanted to see – again – my whole life. I’ve done my Split research, BELIEVE YOU ME. Not been around these parts much, although I’ve been posting pics on my Instagram. I don’t watch Game of Thrones but those of you who do will recognize the stairs below. This has been an adventure I’ve wanted to take for so long it took me about a day to adjust that I was seeing the things I’ve always wanted to see – the walled city of Dubrovnik, the wall at Ston, the Adriatic itself, the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the rocky cliffs, the expanse of sea. I’ll come back to real life eventually. I wanted to go to Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia too. That’ll have to wait for next time.
This movie is fantastically fun. I highly recommend it.
My review of A Simple Favor, directed by Paul Feig, starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, in HIGH form, is now up at Rogerebert.com.
This is so sad. I saw Marin Mazzie in Ragtime and Passion, which made me a lifelong fan. She was incredibly powerful onstage, her beautiful soprano filled with so much breath and intention it almost felt like a belt. And she could belt too. An amazing actress. The LA Times has an indepth obituary. The loss to the New York theatre world is incalculable.
Watch this performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind”, sung at the concert celebrating Sondheim’s 80th birthday. I know I say this all the time, but watch where it starts … and then watch where it goes. That progression is in her hands. She has clearly worked on the song – but the performance shows the song working on her (she allows it to work on her), and the implications of the lyrics grow more and more powerful for her. She starts the song nostalgic almost, quietly remembering the man she loved, sharing how haunted she is by losing him. Her voice is gentle, her head voice fluidly mixing with the lower registers (one of her gifts). But where she ends up … the song leading her there … is howling with grief, loss, rage. By the end, she’s belting, and she allows her voice to sound not-so-pretty. Her breath heaves, she needs it, she doesn’t hide it. This is what the song requires. This is what the journey of the lyrics requires of an actress. Amazing voice, aMAZing actress. She acts the hell out of this.
Rest in peace. Huge loss. She was only 57 years old.
His movie star body-head angle. Supermodels use their angles this way. Joan Crawford used her angles this way.
Burt is fun to study because star charisma is difficult to describe and yet it’s really fun to try.
Obsessive side note: Jensen Ackles uses his body-neck-head angles like this too – which I’ve written about in my Supernatural recaps. Just one example:
There’s an almost feminine quality to using your angles like this. It’s not preening, it’s an awareness of your affect, a dramatic presentation of self and intention which is more accepted in women than in men. Burt Reynolds up-ended that in his movie star persona. (Think of that Cosmo nude photo. The cheesecake pose with the big hairy body.)
Reynolds’ awareness of his shape/silhouette/angles/body placement was all probably pretty unconscious for him, or partly unconscious. The unconscious quality of this is why he was a star. Imagine if he did it consciously. It would come off as preening.
Reynolds understood his body in space, how it reads, how to communicate with it, and also how to make US go “My God, LOOK at him.” Maybe being an athlete gives you that awareness, you’re IN your body and you’re aware of its energy and shape, the space it takes up. Your body obeys you, you’re not cut off from it and waiting to do your “real” work in the closeup.
This is one of the reasons why, at his best, Burt Reynolds was so fun to watch. Because you feel like, “Oh. He’s got this. All I need to do is sit back and enjoy myself.”
The type of elongated angle in that screengrab from Deliverance can be suuuuper over the top in less skilled actors. Like: oh my God who are you kidding, pal …
But when it works, it works. It has to be FULL. And it’s FULL with Burt Reynolds. He knows how good he looks, he knows how to use it, and he knows how to fill it with tension but also a kind of grandiose self-confidence which is a character choice here, not actor vanity.
Amateurs need not apply.
1. Julianne Moore as “Amber Waves”, sitting across from her husband, with a lawyer and a judge present, fighting for visitation/partial custody of her son in Boogie Nights.
2. Gena Rowlands as “Sarah Lawson”, sitting across from her husband, with a lawyer and a judge present, fighting for visitation rights/partial custody of her daughter in Love Streams.
Methinks Paul Thomas Anderson knows his Love Streams.
Clearly, the half-blue wall behind almost identical scenes only reads as a “nod” to those who have seen Love Streams, and that’s a pretty small number, but that’s the best kind of nod.
— I’m going on a vacation next week. My first big vacation in 10 years. Well, I went to Memphis a couple of times. But this one’s out of the country and – for a change – I am NOT going to Ireland. It’s kind of an awkward time because 1. it’s the week of the press screenings for the New York Film Festival and 2. I’m job hunting. I have no job. And I’m taking this gigantic trip. But oh well, it’s been booked for a year, so off I go. Why do I find going on a vacation stressful? I’m annoyed by this tendency. I think it’s part of the freelance-life vibe. It is very very challenging to step out of the stream/river of work/potential work and unplug. It’s not like you get any set vacation time that you can count on. You have to decide to do it. At any rate, I’m headed to a place I’ve always wanted to go to … for decades. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I’ll post all about it once it’s over.
— It’s been beastly hot and the city has been RANK with humidity and the stench of garbage. Today it’s grey, rainy and cool. My kind of weather.
— Yesterday I got together with Wade (I wrote about him here). I have not seen him in … we were trying to figure it out … 10 years? He reached out, randomly, last month and it’s taken us this long to finally see each other. He was one of my best friends in grad school. He kept me sane in grad school. I have missed him. We met up and talked for hours, sometimes roaring with laughter, sometimes deep discussions, and then we had a long conversation about Burt Reynolds. Everything. It was so so good to see him. I love “reclaiming” people. We didn’t have a falling out. We just kind of lost touch. He’s not on Facebook. I love him. I’ve missed him.
— My great friend Alex is making her Broadway debut this month in the Manhattan Theatre Club production of The Nap. Words can’t express how exciting it is, how proud I am of her. I went to a preview last night. Packed house. GREAT show, hilarious, terrific cast (Johanna Day! Heather Lind!). Alex plays a character named Waxy Bush. Because that’s the kind of script it is. Waxy Bush is the linchpin to the entire plot. A trans gangster diva, with one artificial hand (you better believe Alex got so much mileage out of that fake hand) and a tendency to speak in malapropisms. She KILLED it. It was so fun hearing that huge audience experience Alex’s funniness for the first time, to hear those rolling waves of laughter through the theatre. We had a rapturous reunion backstage. I haven’t seen her in a while, a year and a half maybe 2 years? Too long. So yesterday I hung out with Wade for the day, and then went and saw Alex on Broadway at night. Not too shabby.
— It’s been a tough year for my family. But we’re coming through it.
— I have to work ahead to file all the pieces due before I leave on my trip. So this coming week is going to be insane, with viewing and with writing.
— Despite all the stress of this year, I have had a good year for reading. I’ve read a ton of books. Including the entirety of Finnegans Wake for that piece I wrote for Film Comment. I had a long enough lead time to get through the book, which took me three months. It was such a soothing experience, almost like a morning meditation, reading a bit every day. So I’m proud of that. And grateful for it. But I’ve been reading widely and well, lots of fiction, lots of re-reads (Shirley Jackson, James M. Cain), a Tom Wolfe binge, a Christopher Marlowe binge. And I’ve barely bought a thing. This is all from my capacious library.
— Hope’s lip swelled up alarmingly. It looked like a big black balloon. Everything else seemed fine. She was sleeping, eating, following me around. I took her to the vet and she was so stressed out by the experience it took her 2 days to get back to some semblance of normal. My vet is so amazing. He looks like a cross between ZZ Top, Rasputin and an Old Testament prophet. He is the gentlest vet imaginable. He’s so popular it’s hard to get an appointment with him. I lucked out. He lets her sniff the stethoscope, or any of his other instruments, before he does whatever he’s going to do. He respects her. He respects that she needs to smell things just to be like, “Oh. Okay. Here’s this thing.” I so appreciated that. She hissed and howled when he gave her a shot, and the whole thing was incredibly traumatic. He gave me some meds I had to give her and her lip is now back to normal. She’s such a good girl.
— Been making my way through all of Richard Linklater’s films. I’ve seen them all but I’m re-visiting them all. I’ve seen a couple of them many many many times (School of Rock, Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy) but some I’ve only seen once – like Tape. I saw that one in the movie theatre. He didn’t write it, but it’s such a good script, even though you can tell it was a play. But it’s fascinating and the way he filmed it was intriguing and kind of ahead of its time. It’s not “found footage” but sometimes it feels that way, the invasive camera, the “caught” moments, the feeling that some event is unfolding in real time right before your eyes. And honestly, Robert Sean Leonard has never been better. Uma is amazing too. It’s been a fun “escape” project in the middle of a really really busy month.
— Wade and I, it was like no time had passed. No wonder we became fast friends almost instantly. His Texas no-bullshit and my New England crankiness. There was this exchange from yesterday.
“Yeah, I went on a couple dates with him.” (someone we both know who had just come up in conversation)
“You went on a couple dates with [man we both know]”
“Yeah. And you know me. I’m pretty fast. Like, let’s get to it. And he was all, ‘Oh, I think you’re so interesting, Sheila, I find you so damn intriguing –‘
“Oh gimme a break.”
“Right? Like, you don’t need to romance me, just stop. But here’s the hilarious part. You know [famous feminist writer]?”
“Wait, who is that? Oh wait, yeah I know her.”
“A couple years ago she came out with a book about how she couldn’t have orgasms anymore because apparently the world going down in flames hasn’t engaged her feminism but her orgasm history does. But anyway, she wrote about a guy who helped her get her groove back, who gave her orgasms all day long and you’re never gonna guess who that guy was.”
“NO.”
“YES.”
“You know why? Because she loved the ‘Oh you’re interesting and intriguing’ thing.”
“That’s gotta be it, right? I read a thing in the NY Times about the book, saw his name and was like ‘You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.’ What are the odds? Now I feel like I missed out on his amazing prowess since he was so busy finding me fascinating.”
“His loss.”
“They met at an Occupy Wall Street rally.”
“Oh fuck them both.”
Like I said. Like no time has passed.
