Updike: Just two months before John Updike died the British magazine Literary Review anointed him (you should pardon the phrase) with their first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award for bad sex writing, a knock against Updike’s approach to a favorite topic. Putting aside for a moment the thought that the British should be lecturing anybody on the subject of sex, this award seemed churlish at the time, and now seems really jerky. If you’re going to write about sex, you might as well try to blend bluntness (as in, this is what people do, so why not use the words that match the body parts and the actions?) with lyricism, which Updike did.
I recommend one book I didn’t see mentioned in the obituary notices I saw: Updike’s 1992 novel Memories of the Ford Administration, a gloriously-titled story about an academic recalling the wide-open 1970s; mixed in is the professor’s scholarly project on that most stupefying of U.S. presidents (well, until recently), James Buchanan. A very witty book. With a little sex in it.
Tinting: I have been watching a lot of silent films lately. I am tired of tinting. I know that a lot of silent films were tinted at the time (changing colors, to lend mood and visual variety), and that a lot of DVD companies take care to follow original notes on when and how scenes were tinted. I’m still tired of it. The process darkens the image, in general, and can really blow out entire scenes — in the early going of Kino’s otherwise admirable version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, for instance. I find myself craving good, clean black-and-white. So enough already.
Super Bowl: Don’t care, but it would be nice to see the Steelers get screwed on a last-minute bad call by the officials — payback for their bogus “win” over the Seattle Seahawks three years ago. Bitter? Not at all.
Filed under: Culture Notes | Tagged: John Updike, Silent Film, Super Bowl | 1 Comment »
Links to the reviews I wrote for the Herald this week:
The Andersonville Trial (George C. Scott, 1970). Done in the style of live TV, from Saul Levitt’s play (which Scott had starred in on Broadway ten years earlier). William Shatner and Jack Cassidy play the oppposing lawyers in the trial of Captain Henry Wirz (Richard Basehart), who commanded the dismal POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia. The idea of a moral imperative for a soldier (or a citizen) to disobey orders was freshly relevant in 1970, as ever; I first saw this as a 12-year-old, and it made a huge impression on me. Plus, Cassidy and Shat were two of my favorite TV actors. You can see the thing was directed by an actor, because everybody’s off the leash and shouting like mad. But there are good actors in there — even among the non-speaking roles, strangely enough. The sound quality of the DVD is bad. But it’s worth seeing.
Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957). Spare antiwar movie, with Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens as the British officers sent on a mission in North Africa, with issues of cowardice and jealousy much to the fore. The widescreen black-and-white photography is especially eerie in the desert night scenes, with Ray adding the kinds of touches (the look on Burton’s face when he knifes a man, for instance) that make his movies so wrought with trouble.
Some movies deserve to own their moment, to be shared by audiences and define a certain time and place, not in the way a blockbuster does but as a challenging New Thing. Like Blowup, say, or La Dolce Vita. Why didn’t Les Amants du Pont Neuf find its place? Leos Carax’s film is exhilarating, but perhaps it lacked glamour, despite the presence of Juliette Binoche in the lead. Its initial reception in France was scathing, partly because Carax had run up his budget to disastrous levels while creating a false bridge in a false Paris. And the film fumbled its chance to get to people in the U.S.: distribution woes stalled a regular American release from its showing at the New York Film Festival in 1992 until 1999. That’s no way to catch a zeitgeist.
Contraband (Michael Powell, 1940). Conrad Veidt as a Danish sea captain led into intrigue by Valerie Hobson (who played the actual title character in Bride of Frankenstein) during the London blackout. This movie’s wit and momentum should be the envy of just about any other spy story of the era — Powell, who had made The Spy in Black a year earlier, was on his game.
That’s right, didn’t see the multiplex movies this week. But I reviewed one film for the Herald, and it’s enough:
Wow, this is pretty lame even for Oscar voters. The embargo against animated films being nominated best Best Picture continues (sorry, Wall-E), and the voters are above the low-class origins of The Dark Knight but not above the archaic corn of Slumdog Millionaire. There can be only so many slots for indie offerings, so Wendy and Lucy and Sally Hawkins were out; glad about Melissa Leo, though. The audience helped Benjamin Button score big, and critics helped Slumdog. The top-drawer nods for The Reader surely had something to do with affection for the late Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, right? But even The Reader feels less obligatory than Frost/Nixon, a movie that would probably be dead by now if it had opened wide in December. Nice strategy there. At this point, I just want to see Jerry Lewis’s acceptance speech for the Humanitarian Award.
The Crop Duster 