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.