In addition to my regular drama columns, I published three other pieces in The Wall Street Journal during my recent semi-hiatus from this blog.
The first one, which ran on December 12, was a “Sightings” column about what happens when creative artists of importance draw up lists of works of art that they like:
A film buff recently posted on Twitter the 10 films listed by Whit Stillman, the writer and director of “The Last Days of Disco” and “Love & Friendship,” when he was asked to participate in the 2012 poll in which Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, invited 358 prominent directors to name the 10 greatest movies of all time. Since Mr. Stillman’s mind is as full of surprises as his films, it stands to reason that he should have come up with his fair share of unexpected picks…
Ask any artist of stature to draw up a similar list of preferences and you’ll almost certainly learn something just as valuable about him or her. Why? Because the making of lists, in Dr. Johnson’s oft-quoted phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully. In 1955, Langston Hughes published a volume called “The First Book of Jazz” in which he included a list called “100 of My Favorite Recordings of Jazz, Blues, Folk Songs, and Jazz-Influenced Performances.” To be sure, it contains a fair number of the records that turn up on most such lists, among them Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” and Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul.” But Hughes, like Mr. Stillman, did his own thinking, and his list also includes politically incorrect picks…
To read the complete piece, go here.
The second one, which ran on December 20, was a “Saturday essay” called “How the Movies Invented Christmas”:
It is a well-attested historical fact that the publication of “A Christmas Carol,” the best-loved book by the best-selling English-language novelist of the 19th century, had the unintended consequence of reintroducing Christmas to countless Britons and Americans who had stopped observing the holiday. And its influence continues to be felt: Dickens’s 1843 novella has been adapted more than three dozen times for film and television since 1901 (Bennett Miller is currently working on a new screen version with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard). Moreover, the vast majority of America’s most popular Christmas films contain plot twists that are derived, at one or more removes, from “A Christmas Carol.”
What explains its enduring appeal to filmmakers? It is, first and foremost, a rattling good story. But it is also a secular story, one that offers skeptics a nonreligious route to spiritual renewal….
To read the complete piece, go here.
Finally, I published another “Sightings” column last Thursday, this one about Green Book and the reasons, good and bad, for its mixed critical reception.
It happens that I saw Don Shirley, one of the film’s real-life subjects, play a concert in my once-segregated Missouri home town in 1969, an experience that gave me a special slant on the film:
The sharks of Hollywood are gnawing on “Green Book,” Peter Farrelly’s biopic about Don Shirley, a black pianist who hired Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a white nightclub bouncer, to be his chauffeur-bodyguard on a 1962 tour of the Deep South, through which blacks traveled by car at their own risk. (The title refers to the Negro Motorist Green-Book published between 1936 and 1966 that told black travelers where they could eat and sleep without fear of “embarrassment.”) Once it would have been a cinch at the Oscars, but times have changed, and “Green Book” is instead drawing heavy critical fire. Many contend that its characterizations and storytelling are quaintly sentimental, factually suspect and—worst of all—unenlightened….
“Green Book” has been compared to “Driving Miss Daisy,” but it’s really “In the Heat of the Night” played for laughs. Norman Jewison’s 1967 film, in which a black detective from Philadelphia (famously played by Sidney Poitier) gets caught up in a Mississippi murder case and befriends the racist local police chief, was once thought daring, but now it feels dated. “Green Book” has a similarly old-fashioned air that will strike many millennials as alien, though it will more likely fill you with nostalgia for the way movies used to be if you’re 50 or older. Either way, it’s a solidly traditional piece of storytelling, and Mr. Farrelly’s portrait of the ugly realities of segregation will surely seem believable—as well it should—to viewers of all ages.
The catch is that Hollywood’s time-honored by-the-book formulas don’t mesh well with today’s heightened racial sensitivities….
To read the complete piece, go here.
