Valentine's Day was great - pizza and The Town and the night before dinner at Ruby Tuesday's. I'm getting back into my novel and script and Julia is beyond busy with teaching work and dissertation work. Less than five months until we leave for the land o' peaches.
So what's new? Well, not too much. Work is work (suspicious sellers, human comedy - read: managers thinking their layout decisions came to them via afflatus) and the winter is coming to an end. Julia and I loved Ben Affleck's The Town, a roaring, tense, beautifully staged action drama with Affleck and Oscar-nominated Jeremy Renner as two of a bank-robbing quartet trying to pull off a heist at Fenway Park. The Boston locale is vividly essayed, the script first-rate (by Affleck, Aaron Stockard, and Peter Craig, the former two the scribes behind Affleck's auspicious helming debut, also set in Boston, Gone Baby Gone). The characters are compelling, the pacing and staging taut, the acting first-rate: Affleck, commanding; Renner, effortlessly lived-in and authentic; Blake Lively (as Affleck's drugged-out ex), grungily revelatory; Jon Hamm, compactly, tightly funny as the Fed on the gang's tail; the late Pete Poslethwaite and Chris Cooper are good in small parts too. And are there actresses out there as good as Rebecca Hall right now, actresses whose feelings bleed right through their skin, so appealingly life-sized? How is this film not nominated for Best Picture instead of the laborious, woodenly drawn-out Inception, one of the worst 'big' movies I've ever seen?
You Again is a lot of fun too. You can't go wrong with Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis and when you see Betty White in a movie, you know you're in for some off-color one-liners. It's good to see Kristen Bell having some genuine success, for her post-Veronica Mars career has been littered with duds, save for Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Today's artist: Thomas Hart Benton. Born in Missouri in 1889, named for his senator uncle, he was a larger-than-life, brawling, contentious figure who, after studying in France, attempted to make a name for himself in New York. Benton hated the New York art world, but mentored Pollock and all his contemporaries. He is largely associated with Missouri, drawing a lot of a controversy for his huge murals, including the one he was commissioned for at the state capitol building. His autobiography, An Artist in America, is a highly acclaimed, forthcoming look at the life of a working artist, maybe the work he'll best be remembered by. Essentially a regionalist painter, he spent the final quarter of his life or so traveling around the south and west, painting the places and people he saw. The above painting is titled A Social History of Missouri, from 1937.
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