February 6, 2004
Bay of Angels
The opening shot of Bay of Angels, a gorgeous, high-speed reverse tracking shot away from Jeanne Moreau and down the boardwalk of Nice, set expectations the rest couldn't match. The script -- the story of a young bank clerk, played by Claude Mann, and his wild gambling jag with a broke and desperate Jeanne Moreau while on a vacation in Nice -- asks the viewer to swallow an awful lot. The look on the faces of the two actors is wonderful, as it encompasses the sheer boredom of gambling, and particularly of roulette, a game that has all the appeal for me of wagering my paycheck on a lumberjack contest on ESPN2. There are long moments of bored stillness once the chips are down, punctuated only by Moreau's fingers twitching slightly as she kills another cigarette. But real life doesn't have the timing of a script, and the down-to-the-last-dollar wins the pair keep racking up are just predictable and tiresome, even granting that it's just a movie. The end seems to be missing about five minutes of footage, and whether it's meant to be a happy ending or a cheerfully ironic "happy ending", it has all the subtlety of cinder block dropped from height. The film is aware of its own artifice -- Mann compares Moreau to a novel, her lifestyle to an American movie. The actors are excellent and have real chemistry (although, as V. notes, nobody beats up a woman quite as ineffectually as a Frenchman in a New Wave film); Moreau's performance is particularly good. She has a sort of breathtaking squirreliness, sexy and doomed and dangerous to herself and others; the part reminded me of a number of other self-destructive archetypes (I kept thinking of Sid and Nancy, actually, for very little reason that I could see on the screen). But I was expecting more than this from the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; everything felt too much like Demy was purposefully making a Hollywood-style movie, too pat. The opening shot, a high-speed reverse tracking shot down Nice's boardwalk, is wonderful, and for the first half of the movie I thought I was going to get an honest paean to the real pleasures of being young, reckless, and stupid. If Mann had had his wild fling, lost his money, and never seen Moreau again, he could have treasured the memory and the film might have lived up to that amazing opening.
January 6, 2004
The Book of Leviathan
The Book of Leviathan seems to be a collection of Sunday newspaper strips from England's The Independent. The author, Peter Blegvad, has a website, is a New Yorker, and has performed with the Golden Palominos. I know these things from the back cover of The Book of Leviathan, and that's pretty much all I know about the strip or its creator, but now I need to find out more. This is really, really good -- the best way I can describe it is Zippy the Pinhead if Zippy the Pinhead were actually funny instead of just odd. Blegvad the same willingness to stretch for a groan-out-loud pun (he makes a "bear arms/arm bears" joke, for instance), but where I think that the Doggie Diner is the best part of Zippy, I find this stuff both sweet and funny. The stories are about little Levi, a faceless baby made of aboout a dozen lines. His cat talks to him, the voice of tolerant adult cynicism. There's a family, Mama and Papa and sister Becky, who show up in some of the strips. (The book opens brilliantly, with the cat serving as Levi's guide to the hunting lodge of the dead to bring Mama and Papa back to him, Orpheus-style; I wasn't at all sure where it was going, what sort of thing to expect. It was a brilliant choice on the editor's part; the strips are generally funnier and less narratively cohesive in the rest of the book, but I was hooked.) Blegvad is an artistic mimic; I caught references to Little Nemo, Pogo, and what seemed to be Gorey and Addams riffs. The strips wobble between Duchampian surrealism and a Krazy Kat air of English gone wonky. In one strip the Godlike hand of the author, straight from a Daffy Duck cartoon, compares Levi to Henry announces that Leviathan is "the FRUIT of an UNHOLY UNION between [Dick Tracy's] "NOTHING YONSON" and J.W. Anglund's larval minx." A number of the strips are available on Blegvad's site; check them out. If this is the sort of thing you like, I guarantee you'll like this.
October 6, 2003
My Name is Red
I've been purposefully avoiding reading any reviews or discussion of My Name is Red, because reading cold was such a fascinating experience. The book, by Turkish author Orham Pamuk, is set in sixteenth century Istanbul, a time and place I know very little about; its main focus is the art of Turkish miniature illustration, about which I know even less. My Name is Red is a murder mystery of sorts, but the actual facts of the mystery totally fall to the wayside while Pamuk explores his theme, that of the end of the Turkish tradition of illustration painting (in which perspective was not used and human figures were iconic, not mimetic) for a more Western-influenced style. The question of "style" haunts the characters, in fact; for the miniaturists, the more skillful a painter you were, the less individuality your work had and the more it represented the work of past masters. The arrival of Western art is creating a crisis of confidence on the part of the master miniaturists commissioned to do a book of miniatures for the Sultan; in the mounting stress, increased by the deep-seated religious distrust of representational art, one has killed another. A former miniaturist's apprentice, Black, is assigned the duty of finding out who it was before all are tortured; meanwhile, Black woos his childhood sweetheart, the daughter of the man creating the book. The narrator changes from chapter to chapter (and includes some of the illustrations; "I Am a Gold Coin" and "I, Satan" were particularly memorable). While the range gives Pamuk an amazing amount to play with to work his themes of identity, signature, and style, it also prevents most of the characters from developing a distinct voice. (Part of this fault may rest with the translator; the language each character uses was similarly florid and mannered.) My Name is Red rests somewhere in the Invisible Cities continuum of books -- the slow spinning out of multiple variations on a single theme. I enjoyed it and I learned a bit about Turkish art. But it never really gelled as a novel (and certainly not as a mystery; the revelation of the murder's identity is completely haphazard). Invisible City dodges this neatly: Marco Polo and Kubla Khan are mere adjuncts to the real character, that of the city universal. My Name is Red doesn't quite manage the same dodge (at least to someone unfamiliar with the material) and thus reads as a nice piece of armchair philosophising, but just a so-so novel.
May 10, 2003
Bob le Flambeur
Bob le Flambeur (that's "High-Roller Bob", the Jean-Pierre Melville film that was recently remade as The Good Thief) defied my expectations, and I'm not entirely sure that that was a good thing. With its set-up (semi-retired hood decides to go for one last score, which I hope was less tired in 1955), Melville's clear feel for noir as demonstrated in Le Samourai (one of the most purely iconic crime films I've ever seen), and a screenwriter fresh from writing the great French caper film Rififi, this could have been a great crime movie, if that was what it wanted to be.
(more...)April 30, 2003
Zingerman's cream cheese
For the second year in a row, V. has given me the gift of cheese. This year, I received Zingerman's spread of fresh cheeses, and holy cow, was the cream cheese good. You could make out the family resemblance to Philadelphia, but the texture seemed much more delicate and the taste was had a big whallop of dairy flavor. It made it clear why the stuff is called cream cheese, although it was much more tangy than cream (or fresh butter or unflavored ice cream). We had it on toast with strawberry jam and as a condiment on matzoh brei, and it was simply delectable.
(Also, just for Judith: unheimlich. That's the last one, I swear.)