Everyone's kind of tired today. Maybe everyone needs a good nap. Julia and I watched two movies last night, one of which, Young Adult, contained one of the best performances of last year. I'm not quite sure why this film was completely snubbed by the Academy since the group portioned out so much love to Juno, director Jason Reitman's and scribe Diablo Cody's overpraised earlier collaboration, four years ago. Everything about Young Adult is sharper, funnier, more precise and detailed, complex. Charlize Theron's work is extraordinary. Theron is different here - in body, soul - in a way that's hard to imagine. She's unsympathetic, suffering through a painful delusion - a woman who has never emotionally grown up or evolved. She's simpering and mean, hearing only what she wants to hear, sad, unable to be happy. By all accounts, she should be insufferable, but there's something about her that we can't quite turn away from. She's fragile, possibly crazy, but she's really funny too, impossible to pin down, charismatic despite her ugly, bruised behavior.
Patton Oswalt more or less matches Theron as a bullied kid who went to high school with her - and suffered a horrible beating. Their relationship - prickly, sarcastic, odd - anchors the film; they're lost souls who understand each other, both of them too in debt to the past.
There is a terrific scene in which Theron, who has been invited to a party at the home of the ex-boyfriend (Patrick Wilson, appropriately bland) she is trying to win back, has a meltdown in front of her parents and ex-classmates, Wilson and his wife (Elizabeth Reaser). It's damned hard to watch, but the nakedness of the moment is quite startling, almost gratifying.
It's not an easy, tidy film by any sense of the imagination, but it has a good, simple lesson: The truth hurts and we all need to grow up. Brilliantly written and performed, and director Jason Reitman's best film yet.
History lesson: The Bloomsbury group
This has been on my mind because of the William Boyd novel I just finished, in which the fictional character of Logan Mountstuart encounters the very real group at an artists' retreat near Oxford.
Bloomsbury itself is an area in central London. Though there were rural cottages and homes the group retreated to during the summer, the the group was known as Bloomsbury because that is where the members lived and worked and got together to discuss life, art, their works. It wasn't a group so much as an informal association of artists, many of whom knew each other from their student days at Cambridge. It was a non-political association, without formal governing rules; they were mostly leftist, and they got together to enjoy each others' company and toss ideas off each one another. Most of the Bloomsbury group weren't famous at the time of their association with the group (which went on from about 1910 to 1930); they didn't rebel against society, though a common idea amongst the group was the ridiculousness of monogamy (not to mention their pro-homosexuality stance). They were anti-war, anti-conservative, but they didn't necessarily "stand" for anything.
There was rarely, at any period, more than a dozen or so members. So who were they? Who were the most well-known of them?
- Virginia Woolf - most famous, of course, as the author of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando
- Leonard Woolf - Virginia's husband, also a novelist, editor of the International Review, and, along with Virginia, founder of the Hogarth Press, which published, among other titles, Eliot's The Waste Land, works by Freud, and translations of Russian novels
- E.M. Forster - author of such classics as A Room With a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India
- Giles Lytton Strachey - journalist, poet, book and drama critic, author of the well-regarded Eminent Victorians, a landmark short collection of four Victorians, including Florence Nightingale
- John Maynard Keynes - arguably his generation's foremost economist, whose principles and ideas are still studied
The Group was the Fleetwood Mac Rumors album of their time. The sexual relationships and partners were triangular, members often sleeping with each other; bisexuality was prominent.
Thanks to:
http://bloomsbury.denise-randle.co.uk/intro.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/10/great-dynasties-bloomsbury-group-ian-sansom
http://www.online-literature.com/periods/bloomsbury.php
Juergen Teller (#11)
The German Teller (b. 1962) began his career as a bowmaker but switched over to photography in the mid-1980s, photographing musicians (such as an unknown Kurt Cobain) and, as a fashion photographer, the culture of grunge. He's versatile - doing large ad campaigns for Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss, etc. He doesn't particularly like modern fashion photography - "Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy, which is sort of not sexy at all," he has said - and his own images of fashion are grittier and more raw than you might be expecting and never ever retouched. And he doesn't really care much for Kate Moss-type models, either. Naked or near-naked women are common sights.
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| Bjork |
Thanks to http://nymag.com/fashion/08/fall/49257/
Best Pictures
The 80s
- Ordinary People (1980) Should you watch it? No way.
One of the true travesties in the annals of Oscar is this Lifetime-worthy drama beating out Raging Bull for the big award. The revelations here - mom Mary Tyler Moore can't forgive son Timothy Hutton because it wasn't he but his popular, beloved older brother who died - are puny. Moore is closed-off, unlikable; as the dad, Donald Sutherland is okay, but is too angular, wolfishly-postured to replicate an Everyman; Hutton's sensitive but overrated; only Judd Hirsch, as Hutton's shrink, cuts snappishly through all the b.s. Robert Redford's direction is flat, almost impersonal. Not terrible, but not special in any regards. (*1/2)
- I haven't seen 1981's winner Chariots of Fire
- Gandhi (1982) Should you watch it? I think so.
I need to watch this movie again, being that I've only seen in once (in high school) and hardly remember a thing about it, other than feelings of general awe and astonishment at Ben Kingsley's towering work. It's long - about seventy-two hours. (***)
- Terms of Endearment (1983) Should you watch it? Sure.
A common go-to tearjerker, James L. Brooks' cryfest has a sterling cast (Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Daniels, John Lithgow) all in the grooves we associate as their most familiar and best - MacLaine brassy and headstrong; Nicholson louche, with his devil's grin, etc. It has an earthy, sitcom appeal, full of sentiment and heart. (***)
- Amadeus (1984) Should you watch it? Maybe.
I don't think this movie holds up as well as it used to, but it's still a good film, directed with a loose, unrestrained flair (in spite of the costumes and period trappings) by Milos Forman, with a truly striking turn by F. Murray Abraham - with his cold eyes and frozen, caught-off-guard grin. Tom Hulce is memorable too as the giggling Mozart, and Jeffrey Jones is top-tier as the dilettante, smirking Emperor Joseph II. The film tries to be as anti-costumey (read: boring) as it possibly can - I mean, there are fart jokes, for chrissakes! - and I suspect that's the reason for its goodwill from audiences. (***)
- Out of Africa (1985) Should you watch it? No.
Best Pictures, by their very nature, tend to be any of the following: set in the past in a foreign country; overlong; full of sweep and bombast; heavily scored, with airs of prestige. Sydney Pollack's film of Isak Dinesen's classic meets all the criteria. That said, John Barry's score is good, but the film evaporates from memory fairly quickly, considering the scope, Meryl Streep's forceful work, and the folly of Robert Redford's miscasting as a Brit. (**1/2)
- Platoon (1986) Should you watch it? If you're a guy, sure.
A good movie, probably the best thing Oliver Stone has done - personal, gritty, hard-charging, hard-feeling, violent. The less said about Charlie Sheen the better, but Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe as, respectively, the bad mentor and the good mentor, are certainly vivid. There are some over-scored, over-the-top iconography and images, but the film is gripping and holds one's attention. (***)
- The Last Emperor (1987) Should you watch it? Yes.
Bernardo Bertolucci's epic (that terrible word: epic) of Pu Yi has a porcelain beauty, and we're aware of the research, dedication, and respect gone into every scene. That Bertolucci was able to shoot in the Forbidden City was remarkable. The film is slow, careful, inspiring - maybe too slow, even closed-off, but it's a stunning achievement in almost every regard. (***1/2)
- Rain Man (1988) Should you watch it? Yes.
I love Rain Man. There, I said it. Maybe it's seen as camp today - Tom Cruise with his mullet, the "K-Mart sucks" and all that. But I still get stirred up by Hans Zimmer's score and the turns in the story, particularly when Ray and Charlie go to Vegas and, later, part at the end at the train station. Dustin Hoffman's performance (I know, I know, playing mentally handicapped but "not going full retard" will net you an Oscar) is still valiant and moving, obviously based on lots of research, but Cruise is every bit as good as a man who is able to change emotionally, unlike Hoffman's Ray; Cruise essays his character's evolution from slick detachment to genuine love and fraternity with grace. (***1/2)
- Driving Miss Daisy (1989) Should you watch it? Yes.
The same sentiments about this one. Okay, I know it's kind of campy and ripe for easy potshots ("Yes, Miss Daisy"), but there has never quite been a relationship like the one between Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. Neither gives an inch. Neither lets their veneer down. But by the end, they are true soulmates, the dearest of companions. Tandy is perfection, and so is Freeman. (***1/2)
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