Archives for December 19, 2005

A reader writes:

You mentioned in a recent post that you were laughing at Diane Keaton in The Godfather, Part II. By any chance, was it the scene were she admits to having had an abortion?

Yes, it was that bit precisely.

Her overwrought performance in that scene is jarring; I feel as if I’m suddenly watching a John Waters film. I can better picture Divine or Mink Stole screaming, “I had an abortion! An abortion, Michael!”

Hee hee. The wonder of it is that her shrieky performance makes not the slightest dent in that absolute battleship of a great film.

But this one appealed: courtesy of Girish, the Meme of Four.

Without further ado, and very much off the top of my head:

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: antique store shopgirl, technical writer, assistant editor, managing editor. Yes, most of these are practically the same job.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Out of Sight, The Lady Eve, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Kicking and Screaming.

Four places you’ve lived: Chicago, New York City, Cambridge, Providence.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Gilmore Girls, Hockey Night in Canada (when in Detroit), Da Ali G Show, America’s Next Top Model (there, I admitted it).

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Prague, Edinburgh, Las Vegas, No. Whitefield, Maine.

Four websites you visit daily: Colby Cosh, The Gurgling Cod, Outer Life, Pandacam DC.

Four of your favorite foods: golabki, jambalaya, caesar salad, coconut cake.

Four places you’d rather be: Leelanau County, the Hall of Fame, the British Museum, and the place I’m going tomorrow, and not a moment too soon: Sterling Heights, Michigan.

Perhaps Terry will play. We can hope, but he also needs his rest. All other bloggers are not excused.

I think of you with every breath I take

And every breath becomes a sigh,

Not a sign of despair

But a sign that I care for you.

I hear your name with every breath I take,

On every breeze that wanders by,

And your name is a song

I’ll remember the long years through.

Even though I walk alone you guide me.

In the darkness you light my way,

And all the while inside me

Love seems to say, someday, someday.

And when I sleep you keep my heart awake,

But when I wake from dreams divine,

Every breath that I take

Is a prayer that I’ll make you mine.

Leo Robin, “With Every Breath I Take” (music by Ralph Rainger)

I can’t say I did much over the weekend in Smalltown, U.S.A., other than venturing out to buy groceries. My mother and I watched the excellent film version of The Trip to Bountiful on Saturday afternoon, and she gave a small birthday party for my sister-in-law last night, though I ended up being the center of attention, everybody naturally wanting to hear all about my recent medical adventures. Otherwise I read, chipped away at my accumulated e-mail, made a few phone calls, and continued to listen to music, something I’d all but stopped doing in the last few weeks of my illness.

Here, for what it’s worth and in case you’re interested, are some of the things I’ve most enjoyed hearing in recent days, listed in no particular order:

– Dave Frishberg, “Eastwood Lane”

– Couperin “The Mysterious Barricades” (played by Igor Kipnis)

– Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me”

– Marvin Gaye, “Got to Give It Up”

– Bill Charlap, “Written in the Stars”

– Pat Metheny, “Midwestern Night’s Dream”

– Gary Burton, “Gorgeous”

– Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (played by Nathan Milstein)

– Julia Dollison, “Poses”

– Aimee Mann, “Save Me”

– Grainger “Brigg Fair” (sung by Peter Pears)

– Doc Watson, “Let the Cocaine Be”

– Stan Getz, “Blood Count”

– Stan Kenton, “Young Blood”

– Stephen Sondheim, “Being Alive” (sung by Dean Jones, from the original-cast album of Company)

– Jonatha Brooke, “Because I Told You So”

– Oleta Adams, “Get Here”

– Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphoses (last movement, conducted by George Szell)

– Mabel Mercer, “The Best Is Yet to Come”

– Copland “Down a Country Lane” (played by Leo Smit)

– Luciana Souza, “Doce de Coco”

– Tournemire Choral sur le “Victimae paschali” (played by the composer)

– Diana Krall, “Black Crow”

– Miles Davis, “Blue in Green” (from Kind of Blue)

– Dave’s True Story, “Blue Nile”

Today I plan to get my hair cut, start writing my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal, take a nap, answer some more e-mail, take a walk through the neighborhood, eat three healthy meals, and watch On the Waterfront with my mother. I expect it will be a good day. As a friend of mine
likes to say, every day above ground is a good day.

“Catherine sometimes started at the boldness of her own surmises, and sometimes hoped or feared that she had gone too far; but they were supported by such appearances as made their dismissal impossible.”

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

A friend and I made plans to go to the movies Friday night, and he more or less handed me the reins when it came to picking the movie. Ah, carte blanche. No wrangling, wheeling, dealing, or tradeoffs of the sort that, in ensuring neither party is bitterly opposed to the chosen fare, ensure as well that neither party is delighted with it. Christmas had come early.

On the strength of this review, I chose The Family Stone, a decision in which I was only galvanized by a different critic’s snide, pun-infested look far down upon it from up high. When a critic spends a paragraph dictating what “a better movie”–i.e., a different movie–would have done, rather than reviewing the movie at hand, you know it must have confounded her. And any movie that confounded Manohla Dargis is a movie I’m game for. (Another strange reaction came from David Edelstein: he likes the movie but thinks the insular, judgmental Stones are the ideal family. They’re not even the protagonists. What a less interesting movie he saw than the one I did.)

Good thing, too. My friend and I both were taken with The Family Stone, for many of the reasons that Armond White’s typically provocative review corrals. The other possibility had been Pride and Prejudice, which I think would have been his own choice. So as the movie began I was a little nervous about having steered us in this other direction, not knowing whether it would pan out. But as the early plot–a comedy of manners that cuts far closer to the bone than many of its kind–played out, I thought that the spirit of Jane Austen was within shouting distance even here. Not the Austen of Pride and Prejudice, but the author of Northanger Abbey, a novel in which the gothic terror feared and dreaded by the heroine is all in her head, but the social terror attending her scrutiny by the family she wishes to marry into is very real.

Although it begins as a straightforward, funny-unsettling examination of such terror, the movie broadens its focus to the search for love and acceptance more generally, and gets much more complicated. It tries to do a lot, and for the most part succeeds even as it veers from the cool, surgical dissection of social mores–with a central scene in this vein that forgoes the anesthesia but is as electrifying to watch as it is painful–to slapstick physical comedy to romantic farce to frank sentiment (I’m trying to steer away from naming it sentimentality, but White calls the movie “intelligently sentimental,” which is another viable solution). There are a lot of balls in the air by the end. Everything is under the control of the director, but just. I watched the whole thing with my heart in my throat.

Diane Keaton, whom I was laughing at just last week while rewatching The Godfather, Part II on DVD, is very subtle here, and Sarah Jessica Parker is like some whole new actress you’ve never seen before. As White points out, there are superficial similarities between this character and Carrie Bradshaw, but by Parker’s second scene any fugitive thoughts of Sex and the City are left in the dust. Her vulnerability here has nothing to do with the faux vulnerability–curable by the right shoes–of her television role. She’s fantastic.

Here’s a little bit of the White review that proved so decisive for me:

Despite awkward shifts of tone in Bezucha’s emotional balancing act, he makes up for his flaws whenever he looks into Meredith’s and the Stones’ crooked hearts. In one such sequence Susannah, the film’s quietest character, sits alone at night to watch Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. (“This is my favorite part.”) Images of Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” are juxtaposed with a montage of each character isolated with their dashed or unexpected hopes. Garland’s plaintive, beseeching voice underscores Bezucha’s vision.

Understand: This is a great moment because it’s not ironic. It’s felt. The same way Vincente Minnelli felt it and meant it 61 years ago only, now, in modern terms–challenging the antipathy and unease that fills the Stone household. The pixilated TV distortion of Garland’s cartoon-vivid face looms ghost-like, an unreachable idealization of what family life should be, poignantly played against Stone hard reality.

Oh, and it’s a laugh riot, too. Go go go.