RasoirJ's Book Notes: Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009) (Rating = 5 = I loved it)

Elizabeth Strout’s marvelous story collection/novel makes a quiet, unpretentious splash. It’s a book of 13 short stories, some intertwined and many featuring Olive Kitteridge as the protagonist. What I like best:

• The very credible portraits of real people in a real place, a small town on the Maine coast.

• Strout’s ability to limn the complex, ambivalent emotions of aging among longtime married couples. The stories are filled with longing, loss, accommodation – and the power of deeply sublimated feelings.

• Strout’s facility as a prose stylist, the way she repeatedly comes up with the memorable phrase salted into the right spot.

• The character of Olive – a big woman, physically and emotionally. She’s angry, tough, blunt, stoic, donut-eating, and while not always very self-aware, always a fully rounded human. Whether or not you can appreciate Olive is a good gauge of whether I’ll be able to be a good friend of yours.

QUOTES:

On a young woman in “Incoming Tide; “…she was lovely, the way a sapling might be as the afternoon sun moved over it.”

Olive in “A Little Burst” on why her grown son doesn’t have many friends: “He is like her in that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah.”

Olive at her son’s wedding: “They probably think they’re through with loneliness too.”

RasoirJ's Movie Notes: The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer (2010) director: Roman Polanski (Rating = 4 = I liked it a lot)

Polanski is a great filmmaker, and he’s in top form here. He knows how to keep the suspense churning and your brain working as his everyman (Ewan McGregor as the intrepidly clever ghost writer) unravels a chain of conspiracy that begins with his assignment to ghost the autobiography of an ex-Prime Minister, a Tony Blair-like charmer played by Pierce Brosnan. Delicious acting turns by Brosnan, Olivia Williams as his livid, neglected wife and counselor, Tom Wilkinson as a shady Harvard professor with great connections, and 94-year-old Eli Wallach as a Martha’s Vinyard hermit with a vital bit of information. This is a movie about atmospherics, and Polanski turns it into the grayest, rainiest movie I’ve ever seen. The isolated Vinyard beach house setting in winter (really a North Sea beach house) nicely mirrors the mood of foul doings in high places.

Kaze's Movie Notes: Archive 17

Rope (1948) ***
The murder victim is stuffed into a chest in the parlor just before the party guests arrive. Jimmy Stewart’s job is to rattle the murderers; gets a little rattled himself. Lesser Hitchcock.

Detective Story (1951) *****
Kirk Douglas is nothing short of volcanic as the tormented cop who can’t show anyone a little mercy--including himself. A cast full of pros helps him out, and he makes one of the all-time great movie exits.

Pickup on South Street (1953) ***
Richard Widmark cold-cocks Jean Peters, then wakes her by pouring a beer on her face. It’s tough-guy noir all the way. Historical interest.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007) **
Cyber-terrorists crash the country’s electronic infrastructure, not realizing that it's bad to mess with John McClane. Willis still cool but CGI now allows for stunts too implausible to thrill you.

Crimson Tide (1995) ***
Serious silliness onboard as Hackman and Denzel keep taking and retaking control of a nuclear sub readying launch, with the clock, as usual, ticking like mad. Suspense, holes galore.

Kaze's Movie Notes: Archive 16

Brothers (2005) ***
Psychologically rich but terribly sad tale of an honorable man who, in wartime and under duress, commits an act for which he cannot forgive himself. When he returns home, nothing’s the same.

Island in the Sky (1953) ***
Guy stuff. John Wayne and crew of four go down at 70-below. A host of well-liked Warner Brothers supporting actors fly repeated missions to find them. Courage, gentlemen.

Romance and Cigarettes (2005) **
Ten minutes in, James Gandolfini fights with his wife Susan Sarandon, goes out into the street and breaks into “Lonely Is a Man Without Love.” All the neighborhood guys join in. From there, it’s all downhill.

Sunshine (2007) **
First half: intriguing space mission to reignite the sun. Second half: psycho killer onboard. Too bad. Visually spectacular throughout, and the tone is mostly serious, but the plot lets us down.

Eastern Promises (2007) *****
A great thriller. Possibly too brutal, but the Russian mob brutality raises the stakes for everyone--morally and mortally. All you can do is hang on tight and hope things turn out okay. See it.

RasoirJ's Movie Notes: The Blue Angel

The Blue Angel (1930) director: Josef von Sternberg (Rating = 4 = I liked it a lot)

A wonderfully entertaining film that stands up better than anything else I’ve seen from the early talkie era. Germans with their hierarchical educational institutions, rigid social class distinctions, and capacity for angst can really nail a humiliation story. In the decline and fall of Professer Rath under the spell of the cabaret singer Lola Lola, director Josef von Sternberg has created on one level a brilliant farce, maybe the first screwball comedy on screen. We see Herr Professor first as the lord of all he surveys in his classroom and the keeper of social order – the supreme superego. When he enters the Blue Angel, he encounters a cluttered, confusing, yet deeply seductive backstage world where all that the classroom represses is loosed. I found myself chuckling again and again at how Von Sternberg crams the dressing rooms with silent clowns, props, cops, floozies, students, and assorted low-lifes in constant bustle.

Emil Jannings as the professor dazzled by Lola Lola puts on an acting workshop in his disintegration from august deity of the gymnasium to cuckolded clown who crows for a living onstage. And it’s a grand pleasure to be there at the birth of the Marlene Dietrich legend. As the good-hearted realist Lola Lola, Dietrich seems to spend most of her camera time changing her extraordinary skirts backstage, but there are also plenty of those iconic shots of Marlene onstage in lingerie and top hat stretching out those legs as she sings “Falling in Love Again.” Pure movie bliss.

RasoirJ's Movie Notes: Bright Star

Bright Star (2009) Director: Jane Campion (Rating = 3 - I liked it.)

Jane Campion and her two stars, Ben Whishaw as the poet Keats and Abbie Cornish as his great love Fanny Brawne, manage the remarkable feat of making this sad, tortured yet enduring love story both credible and moving. I feared the costume-drama prettiness and attitudinizing that often mars historical biographies of the British type, but Whishaw and Cornish are compelling as the young lovers fate frowns upon. It helps that both actors are fresh faces. Whishaw nicely embodies Keats’s diffidence and dedication as well as his quiet genius. Cornish, with her severe hairdo and extreme self-possession, is a little jarrring at first, but soon wins us over with her capacity for devotion. There’s nothing of the giddy girl about her.

This is a tough story to make interesting – a poet dies young of TB while everybody looks on, able to do nothing – and it lags some in the second half, but Campion makes up in authenticity what she lacks in dramatic action. Warning: Much poetry gets recited on screen, so this film is recommended for those who appreciate Keats and the English Romantic poets.

RasoirJ's Movie Notes: Pandora's Box

Pandora’s Box (1929) – Director: F.W. Pabst (Rating = 3 = I liked it)

Has there ever been a greater life force on screen than Louise Brooks as the large-hearted vamp Lulu? Now I see what Howard Hawks meant with his famous remark: “The camera loves some people.” The camera loves her eyes, her black bob hairdo, her every gesture. Men are helpless before her charm, but the sheer power of her cheerfully non-discriminating need to capture every man who strolls across her path destroys them one by one. The source material - Frank Wedekind's plays - infuses the film with a withering irony that seems quite comntemporary. This is the first silent film I’ve seen with credible psychological realism, though of course Lulu, as incarnated in Louise, is larger than life. A star is born. Too bad Louise Brooks did not have as big a career as Marilyn Monroe.

RasoirJ's Movie Notes: Up in the Air

Up in the Air (2009) - Director: Jason Reitman (Rating = 4 = I liked it a lot)

It takes the charm of a Cary Grant or a George Clooney to pull off the role of a corporate downsizer who travels the country to fire people and is perfectly adapted to his ecological niche. Like a shark, he has to keep moving to stay alive. Also, there are very fine women’s turns by Vera Formiga as Clooney’s female equivalent and girlfriend (when their travel schedules match up) and Anna Kendrick as the fresh-out-of-Cornell kid who tries to learn the firing game from old master Clooney. The script provides much smart, ironic humor here threaded with big serious themes. We get to see a lot of firings up close, and the array of responses from actors who look like real people is a fine index of how much we invest in our jobs.

RasoirJ's Movie Notes; The Holy Mountain

The Holy Mountain (1925) Director: Arnold Fanck (rating = 2 = I tolerated it)

One of the very popular German genre in the 1920s of “mountain films,” in which the mountains stand for a kind of noble purity that elevates those who climb the highest peaks as beings beyond common humanity. Very German – the love of nature, the fascistic-religious exaltation of nature. The young Leni Riefenstahl, no slim chick, adds sex to the mix as she plays a dancer who hooks two mountain men in a classic love triangle. One guy winds up dangling by a rope over an abyss on a dark, stormy night on the north face while his buddy and rival for Leni locks into holding that rope. A remarkably lengthy and well shot cross-country ski race is a highlight. We cannot judge silent films of this era by the standards of realism that we bring to contemporary films. This move is a precursor of today’s action films, with the ski race as a chase and those craggy shots of men on mountain peaks standing in for derring-do. Hokey, yes, but also something more. The indelible money shot is the face of the senior mountain guy holding that rope on the ledge all night long as his eyebrows freeze in place and he turns into a kind of god. If nothing else, Fanck understood what visual story telling is all about.

RasoirJ's Book Notes: My Losing Season

My Losing Season, a memoir by Pat Conroy (Rating = 4 = I liked it a lot)

Conroy is a florid writer for my taste. He seems to love every metaphor that occurs to him, is not at all troubled by clichés, and has a streak of sentimentality astonishing in a military college grad. But still. The stories he has to tell of his senior year as point guard on the The Citadel basketball team are marvelous. He’s got the deadpan locker-room humor of athletes cutting on each other down beautifully. Of course, this book is about much more than basketball, though it’s one of the top five inside-sports books I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a lot). It’s also about a writer finding his vocation and voice. And no one has have ever had to cope with a tougher, meaner SOB of a father than Conroy. On top it all, the portrait of the driven, egomaniacal Citadel coach Mel Thompson is a classic of the type.

Quotes:
 “Athletics are mercilessly fair.”

“Coaching at a military college is the hardest coaching job in America.”

“America is a good enough country to die for, even when she is wrong.”

RasoirJ's Book Notes: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a novel by Muriel Barbery  (Rating =1 = I hated it)
I’ve seldom disliked a book as much as this one, and would never have finished it if not for it being a book club selection. Told mostly from the point of view of a lowly yet intellectually sterling concierge, the novel is pretentious in the extreme – full of pseudo-profound arty and philosophical bushwa as well as constant scorn for the French bourgeoisie and the intellectual classes who live in the apartment building. The concierge narrator’s superior stance and her stream of invective make her a tough character to live with for a whole book. Just as bad and even less plausible – the alternate narrator is a preciously precocious 12-year-old kid who lives in the same building and has the same attitudes as the concierge. No wonder they turn into sentimental soul-mates by the conclusion. What unadulterated claptrap.

Quotes:
“The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.”

“Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them.”

“I take the measure of how the ridiculous, superfluous cats who wander through our lives with all the placidity and indifference of an imbecile are in fact guardians of life’s good and joyful moments.”

RasoirJ's Book Notes: The Bookshop

The Bookshop, a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald (Rating = 3 = I liked it)
Fitzgerald is a quirky writer who constantly surprises in this story of a middle-aged woman who opens a book shop in a bleak Sussex town aptly called Hardborough. The atmosphere and the landscape of a seaside village in the 1950s are convincing. There’s no sentimentality in Fitzgerald – a surprise and a strength. You have to like a book in which a crucial incident is whether to sell and display Lolita.

Quotes: “It’s a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age.”

“Men and women aren’t quite the right people for each other.”

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.”

Kaze's Movie Notes: Archive 15

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) *****
We see most of this movie out of the one working eye of a paralyzed man. A tough watch but a richly rewarding one. Worth it as well for Max von Sydow’s stirring presence as his aged father.

Bend of the River (1952) ***
James Stewart hauls winter supplies to peaceful settlers, overcomes tough terrain and treacheries galore, singlehandedly taking on all the bad guys and winning the girl.  A fine western of the big-outdoors variety.

The Golden Compass (2007) **
Fantasy adventure featuring a spunky little kid, computer-generated talking animals, witches, armored warrior polar bears, a little of this, a little of that. Being 12 would add to the experience.

Under Siege II: Dark Territory (1995) ***
Steven Seagal may never play “A Man for All Seasons,” but he can single-handedly kill about 50 highly-trained commandos who’ve hijacked a train and plan to blow up the world. Good enough.

There Will Be Blood (2007) **
Bravura acting by Daniel Day-Lewis, but his irredeemably cruel character, the oilman Daniel Plainview, is no one to spend 25 years with, which is what this feels like. Missable despite him.