My dreams last night were unremarkable—a snow-covered train, a boxcar of refugees; someone had severed my legs below the knee, but they came back slowly in stages, while around me fellow-travelers in fingerless gloves passed letters in cuneiform back and forth, the last they'd heard from their families—but my mother fell asleep and dreamed she was trying to get in to talk to the zombie head of Mick Jagger.
This is the best Orpheus twist I have ever heard. It makes me wish I had more than three songs by the Rolling Stones on my computer, so that I could do it justice. Can I commission a poem from someone who actually listens to the Stones?
Since we failed to catch it in theaters, last night my mother and I rented Easy Virtue (2008), adapted by Stephan Elliott from the Noël Coward play of the same name. I am aware that the script departs somewhat from the original material, although not as much as Hitchcock's 1928 silent (a Noël Coward silent? No wonder Hitchcock threw out all but two lines of dialogue; you'd spend the entire runtime reading), but I found it very much of a piece with Private Lives, initial conditions of farce out of which some very painful questions surface without diminishing the snark. Probably the greatest surprise for me was Jessica Biel, since I knew nothing about her except that she had been in some movies I wasn't interested in; but she holds her half of the screen against Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth without a sign of strain. This is critical, since the film would simply fall down if we didn't believe in her Larita, the glamorous, Proust-reading, racecar-driving American a smitten Ben Barnes brings home, to the consternation of most of his family and the delight of the staff. Instead, it turns out that she can even sing. And as beautifully photographed as the film is, full of lenses and reflections, reminders of the tricks of prejudice and perception, it also contains jazz-age covers of songs like "Sex Bomb"—as a devotee of Max Raabe und das Palast Orchester, I must approve. Basically, delightful. I just have no idea how it provoked the dreams it did.
Happy birthday, my beautiful cousin Tristen!
This is the best Orpheus twist I have ever heard. It makes me wish I had more than three songs by the Rolling Stones on my computer, so that I could do it justice. Can I commission a poem from someone who actually listens to the Stones?
Since we failed to catch it in theaters, last night my mother and I rented Easy Virtue (2008), adapted by Stephan Elliott from the Noël Coward play of the same name. I am aware that the script departs somewhat from the original material, although not as much as Hitchcock's 1928 silent (a Noël Coward silent? No wonder Hitchcock threw out all but two lines of dialogue; you'd spend the entire runtime reading), but I found it very much of a piece with Private Lives, initial conditions of farce out of which some very painful questions surface without diminishing the snark. Probably the greatest surprise for me was Jessica Biel, since I knew nothing about her except that she had been in some movies I wasn't interested in; but she holds her half of the screen against Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth without a sign of strain. This is critical, since the film would simply fall down if we didn't believe in her Larita, the glamorous, Proust-reading, racecar-driving American a smitten Ben Barnes brings home, to the consternation of most of his family and the delight of the staff. Instead, it turns out that she can even sing. And as beautifully photographed as the film is, full of lenses and reflections, reminders of the tricks of prejudice and perception, it also contains jazz-age covers of songs like "Sex Bomb"—as a devotee of Max Raabe und das Palast Orchester, I must approve. Basically, delightful. I just have no idea how it provoked the dreams it did.
Happy birthday, my beautiful cousin Tristen!
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