I'm certainly not going to Georgia Southern's Arts Fest. Nope, I'm staying home with Gabriel Owen Fischer. Unfortunately for my lovely wife, she has to work it all day long.
Yesterday, we had a great time in Augusta, and found one of the coolest stores imaginable:
http://www.2ndandcharles.com/
There are only 6 locations (so far) in the country; if it wasn't for Julia curiously spotting one as we were on our way out of the city, we wouldn't have even gone in! It's nicer than Half Price Books - cleaner, bigger, less dumpy, but with similar prices, far more new stuff. Julia and I bought 11 books for around $45.
Today, Gabriel and I will do some spring cleaning and maybe go for a walk since it's so nice out.
The other night, we watched Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the America, David Fincher-helmed remake of the Swedish mega-phenomenon. Once you settle into the fact that the accents are not really Swedish but more British, it's a pretty good film, though I'm getting a bit tired of Fincher's perrenial penchant for unrelieved darkness; it seems innate at this point, laced into his very DNA. Adapted by Steve Zaillian, the film is brilliantly edited and scored, with a forceful, alert performance by Daniel Craig, a highly creepy one by Stellan Skarsgard, and a wise, fine one by Christopher Plummer. My only problem with the film was its overlength. The film, because it follows the book so closely, runs into the same problem its source did: that unwieldy, drawn-out, half-hour anti-climax after the death of Skarsgard's serial killer. That said, the film, well-designed and shot (the flashback scenes are nicely handled) is worth a look, especially (well, largely) because of the oddly intriguing relationship between Craig and Rooney Mara, who's wonderful here, taking a role that I couldn't imagine anyone other than the Swedish actress who was so vivid and ingrained in it, Noomi Rapace, in and making it her own, giving it a glum, quick-witted hard-charging urgency. (***)
(Note: I always rate movies on a scale of one star (*) to four (****); books I rate on a scale of * to five (*****). I don't know why, I just do.)
William Klein (#25)
Klein was born in New York in 1928, grew up in the Big Apple, passed through France as a soldier during World War II, studied at the Sorbonne after the war, and then proceeded to spend nearly the next half-century there. He is not particularly well-known here in the U.S.; in fact, some of his work (including his documentary films) is vituperatively anti-American. Klein was trained as a painter and studied under the great modernist Fernand Leger. He was renowned as one of the more important, influential independent filmmakers. As a photographer, he was distinct and wide-ranging in his influence too. His style? Blurred, out-of-focus images, high-contrast prints, severely over-exposed negatives, wide-angle, long-focus lenses. He worked for Vogue for a decade (1955-1965). In the 1980s, there was renewed interest in him; a signature of his work during this period was the close-up.
Thanks to: http://www.designboom.com/portrait/klein_bio.html
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