Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Haven't been keeping this up. Also Excel File on Drive. Will add these to that page someday soon.

Last week, "The Alienists" about a psychologists investigation into a serial murderer around 1920 ish.

"The Expats", by Chris Pavone.  An ex-CIA woman is married to a man who turns out to have pulled a bit of a caper. Pretty good. Set in Luxembourg.

Committed, E. Gilbert

COMMITTED by Elizabeth Gilbert  Read ca Jan. 2012  This is a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love, the huge bestseller, telling us about the strange difficulties Elizabeth and "Felipe", the man she met in the "love" part of the first book, had in getting married. These obstacles were partly because of the Immigration Department, and partly self-imposed because of the desires and preconceptions that both of them, but especially Elizabeth, had.
It's not quite as fabulous as Eat, Pray, Love, but is still very good. I just like the way she writes, even if it does go on and on about some not-so-interesting things.

IDEA OF PERFECTION, STONEHENGE

THE IDEA OF PERFECTION, Kate Grenville -- OK, but not THAT great. An engineer is sent to a tiny town in Australia to tear down an old "Bent" wooden bridge. Most of the characters in the book have some kind of strange "personality disorder" -- don't we all? One woman, who has an affair with the Chinese butcher, is obsessively into cleaning and cosmetics. Both the female love interest, a quilt-making museum curator, and the bridge engineer are very shy and have trouble with relationships. Etc.

STONEHENGE, Bernard Cornwell -- Historical novel (at least physically) about the making of Stonehenge. Lots of conjecture about the society that might've built it, and how. Obsession, brutal sacrifice, deception, survival.

The Big Lebowski

This week, A. O. Scott looks back at “The Big Lebowski,” the offbeat 1998 cult classic from Joel and Ethan Coen. In the middle of the film’s busy and hyperactive plot is the calmness of the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges. Mr. Scott sees the character as the ultimate personification of the disconnect between the world’s important matters and the tedium of ordinary life.

“For all the trumped-up mystery and drama,” Mr. Scott says, “the movie offers some tantalizing and simple clues as to what, in the end, it’s all about.”
Are you a Coen brothers follower? A “Big Lebowski” fan? Tell us your thoughts on how the movie ranks in the Coen brothers filmography

JHFiore showed me this on dvd a few years ago.

Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame

May 17, 2009
The Visit
By DAVID GATES
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TOWARDS ANOTHER SUMMER

By Janet Frame

216 pp. Counterpoint. $24
Early in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels, the inwardly articulate but outwardly brutish derelict Molloy, used to being immured in his own lurching, stinking body — a pearl of consciousness in an oyster of physicality — tells of finding himself “reduced to confabulation” with a policeman. “What are you doing there? he said. I’m used to that question, I understood it immediately. Resting, I said. Resting, he said. Resting, I said. Will you answer my question? he cried.” The encounter ends in Molloy’s being taken into custody, as a crowd gathers to watch the spectacle. “Was there one among them,” Molloy wonders, “to put himself in my place, to feel how removed I was then from him I seemed to be, and in that remove what strain, as of hawsers about to snap?”

Grace Cleave, the protagonist of Janet Frame’s 1963 novel “Towards Another Summer” — considered too personal to be published during her lifetime (she died in 2004) — isn’t quite in the Molloy zone. Though she’s also a solitary, she attends to her personal hygiene, lives in a London flat with dowdy floral-covered furniture, has enough success as a “self-styled” writer to publish stories in The New Yorker and to sit, however uncomfortably, for interviews with the BBC and with a well-meaning, not-too-bright journalist from the north of England. But her very name suggests how removed she, too, is from who she seems to be: her over-busy inner life severs her from normal human interactions, and when reduced to confabulation what little grace she has deserts her. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she tells the BBC producer. “What are my books about? How should I be able to tell? My style? What does it matter?”

Grace, stuck between Parts 2 and 3 of a new novel, gets a jaunty invitation to a weekend with the journalist and his wife (and their two young children, whom he omits to mention): “Do you know the temperature is point one-five degrees warmer in Relham than in London. Come and bask in it! Philip Thirkettle.” Such casual expeditions are “not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world. . . . In these circumstances it needed courage to go among people, even for 5 or 10 minutes.” Yet she goes, and returns to write “the story of the weekend.”

If this seems like a setup for social ­disaster, comic mishap or sexual farce, I haven’t yet made clear just how inner Grace’s inner world is. Since her radical reticence prevents her from making all but the smallest missteps, nothing happens at all during the weekend, unless you count some conversations so clumsy they send her to bed early, where she weeps alone at her ineptness.

“I’m afraid I’m not taking in a word of this newspaper, she said, meaning her remark as an apology. —Sarah! Anne spoke sharply. —Come away. Don’t bother Grace, she wants to read the newspaper. When Grace had said, ‘I’m taking nothing in,’ Philip had looked at her with a small stirred expression of anxiety. . . . Grace wished that she had kept silent. —I find it hard to concentrate too, Anne said enthusiastically. —Newspapers are about all I can manage in the weekend, and then it’s a struggle, Philip said in a bolstering manner. It was almost as if, in making her remark, she had collapsed, and Philip and Anne had rushed to help her, anxious to explain that they too were in the habit of collapsing. I must be careful, Grace thought, not to make another such remark.”

In fairness to Grace, the Thirkettles aren’t the sort of people to bring out whatever latent powers she may have as a conversationalist. Their chitchat sometimes achieves the lunatic inconsequence of a play by Beckett or Pinter: “Dad walks chiefly for his bowels. —Yes he does. He’s so bashful about it isn’t he Phil. —I think he likes to walk, but he’s thinking most of the time about his bowels. —It gives him an interest though, Phil, doesn’t it? —Yes love.”

Grace’s one private moment with her hosts’ daughter ends in the girl giving her a “metallic abolishing look.” It’s apparently this immersion in family life, along with her inherently childlike position as the single houseguest of a married couple, that prompts Grace into long, unspoken reminiscences of her own childhood, which was spent, like Frame’s, in rural New Zealand. She repeatedly restrains herself from blurting out that she isn’t human, but “a migratory bird,” far from her southern home. After extricating herself from their home a day ahead of schedule, she takes an “extravagant, lonely” bath and gets her typewriter and papers ready “for the next day’s work.”

“Towards Another Summer” reflects an actual weekend Frame endured — the prototype for Philip Thirkettle is the journalist Geoffrey Moorehouse — and in suppressing it until after her death she may simply have wanted to protect her hosts, since Grace does nothing more shocking than confide to Anne Thirkettle that she once had what she exoticizes as an “affaire,” in an awkward attempt to present herself to this married woman as a fellow sexual creature. The three volumes of her autobiography published during Frame’s lifetime — Jane Campion adapted them for the 1990 film “An Angel at My Table” — told about her time in various mental hospitals and her rescue (by the publication of her first book, a collection of short s­tories) from a scheduled lobotomy. Before her death, Frame also saw the publication of 11 novels, as well as more collections of stories and poetry. Though she was reportedly on the shortlist for a Nobel Prize, her sanity became, and continues to be, the subject of tedious and condescending debate — as does the degree to which her fiction was autobiographical. Since few readers of Sylvia Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar” (published in the same year Frame wrote “Towards Another Summer”) worry any more over the similarity of Esther Greenwood to her creator, why worry over Grace Cleave?

Frame’s novel, in fact, has aged better than Plath’s: it seems dated only in one brief passage, when Grace fears she may be called a “poetess” — a word then “sprayed like a weedkiller about the person and work of a woman who writes poetry,” but now in no need of ranting against. Everywhere else, Grace’s inwardness has forestalled obsolescence: the public world of 1963 England, with the Beatles and the Profumo scandal, doesn’t exist for her. She has enough to think about just getting through minute by minute in the company of other people: a simple invitation to come with her hosts on an errand to a nearby town precipitates a panic of perplexity. “Do they mean me to say Yes or No, Grace wondered. I have no social intuition. I’m not used to dancing around invitations simply to make a pretty pattern of No’s and Yes’s. I’d like to go to Winchley. But the day’s grown colder and darker and we’ve just had a meal and ­everyone’s feeling lazy; but they’ve promised and they can’t go back on their promise and — who knows? — extraordinary pleasures may be waiting in Winchley.”

And she’s overwhelmed by the metastasizing minutiae of ordinary comportment: “She had been away for the weekend only once or twice before in her life, and the last time had been an ordeal and a revelation, and Grace came home obsessed with her latest piece of knowledge about human beings — if you were a woman away for the weekend you carried a handbag with your handkerchief in it, and when you wanted to blow your nose you snipped open your bag and withdrew your handkerchief. And Grace had never known! She always tucked her handkerchief in her sleeve and she had never carried a handbag up and down inside a house; it would look as if she did not trust anyone. It was taking so long to get used to the ways of the world; Grace did not think she would ever learn.”

But while the scrim of Grace’s anxieties renders her current surroundings nearly invisible, her childhood memories come through in teeming detail. “There were spiders in the corners of the floor and roof, slaters and slugs under stones, worms in the garden, ladybirds on leaves, snails in the bushes, birds in the trees, rats and mice in the scullery, trout in the river, cattle and sheep in the paddocks, and our new cow Beauty, smaller, less wild and tossing than Betty who, my mother explained, was ‘an Ayreshire, not as trustworthy and gentle as a Jersey.’ ”

Except for “David Copperfield,” few novels have rendered a child’s viewpoint more convincingly and affectionately: “One of my favorite toys was a kerosene tin with a piece of rope tied to it, which I pulled along the lawn under the walnut tree and over to the fence for the beasties to share my pleasure in it. There was a song which I sang about my tin, but why did everyone laugh when I sang it? ‘God save our gracious tin, / God save our noble tin, / God save the tin.’ ”

“Towards Another Summer” never explicitly accounts for how this observant and apparently happy child grew into so fearful and isolated an adult. As in “Molloy,” whose narrator once lets slip that “I — I used to be intelligent and quick,” such deterioration is simply a given. But even as a girl, Grace watches and listens, yet seldom interacts with the people around her. As an adult, she feels that “if I were human and not, now, thankfully, a migratory bird, I should be one of the first programmed human machines, my cold eyes flashing their lights at stated intervals, and my mouth emitting its cardboard code.”

Someone is bound to seize on this terrifying passage in particular — and on “Towards Another Summer” in general — as further evidence that Frame was not merely a gifted novelist but a “high-functioning” autistic. Sarah Abrahamson, a rehabilitation physician at Australia’s Queen Elizabeth Center, made this “diagnosis” in a 2007 article for the New Zealand Medical Journal, based on a reading of Frame’s autobiographies. “From an early age,” Abrahamson wrote, “Janet developed a strong interest in poetry, which was to become a lifelong interest. This appears to have been sufficiently intense to be considered an autistic ‘special interest.’ ” Poets and novelists, who persist in the obsessive-compulsive pursuit of those “interests” of theirs, may seize on that terrifying passage as further evidence that shrinks want to pathologize genius. (And who is Abrahamson to “Janet” her?)

Like every writer worth remembering, Frame exploits — or creates on the page, to be absolutely puristic about it — her peculiar sensibility, her private window into the universal. Has anyone not felt the strain on those hawsers connecting the self to its various social impersonations? A writer’s neurochemistry may matter to physicians, biographers and general-­purpose gossips, but it’s not the reader’s business. Frame’s sad, slyly comic fish-out-of-water story needs neither explanation nor excuse, and Grace’s aloneness isn’t a medical condition — it’s a human one.

“Towards Another Summer” looks back to Virginia Woolf in its focus on the tortuous internal positionings beneath the surface of apparently casual conversation: “Meanwhile Grace was dividing her mind between studying Philip and Anne and their life together, and trying to arrange, ready for its appearance in speech, the truth of her relationship with ‘Ulysses.’ ” And it looks ahead to Mary Gaitskill’s sense of a vivid inner ferocity: “When Grace studied Philip’s eyes she could feel at the back of her mind the movement of sliding doors opening to let out small furry evil-smelling animals with sharp claws and teeth.” Woolf and Gaitskill both have more capacious visions: in “To the Lighthouse,” we learn what’s going on inside everyone’s head as the characters move their mouths and hide their thoughts, and in “Veronica,” the ex-model Alison castigates herself for years of self-absorption as intensely as Grace Cleave laments its two-day interruption.

“Towards Another Summer” wouldn’t pass John Gardner’s sniff test for “moral fiction”: for Grace, no one else’s existence is important except to the extent that it makes her miserable. But it might pass that of Donald Barthelme, who once said that “my every sentence trembles with morality, in that each attempts to engage the problematic.” Grace’s very denial of her own humanity suggests a longing for human connection — as does her compulsion to get home and tell her story. They also serve who only sit and type.

David Gates’s most recent book is “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” a collection of stories.

The Good German

Very interesting black and white film with George Cloony. It uses lots of actual old film clips from 1945 Occupied Germany to tell a somewhat sordid but very believable story.

Dark Night

And it's very, very dark indeed. I think the Joker is definitely trying to get people to call him -- what we call passive suicide? Anyway, it started a bit of a crying jag. Heath is a fabulous actor, but I can see how dangerous it is to get too far into your character!

LANTANA - Australian Film, 2001

Steven Harrison showed me this film last night, and said it's one of his top 7 favorite films. It really is quite amazing!

Lantana
Lions Gate Home Ente
Released: 21 May, 2002
DVD
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Intelligent, Ingenious, Compelling.

Australian Director Ray Lawrences second movie and his first for 17 years is an articulate, intelligent and totally compelling examination of human relationships, as well as a thought provoking thriller. Award winning and critically acclaimed, this is the type of movie that Oscar should be honouring, instead of the commercial Hollywood formulaic mediocrity the Academy often seems to prefer.
Lantana opens with camera panning down through a tangle of shrubs to reveal the dead body of a woman, stockings ripped and one shoe missing. Immediately drawn to this image we are led to wonder who the dead woman is and to wonder how she died and who killed her but rather than this being merely a thriller it is also a highly intelligent and very rewarding examination of troubled marriage. The title Lantana perhaps doesnt translate well to most countries outside of Australia. It is never explained during the movie, which is a bit of a shame, because Lantana (the name of the tropical shrub which surrounds the deceased) is used as a metaphor for the web of tangled relationships portrayed throughout this film.

At the centre of the plot is Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia), a burnt-out forty something Sydney police detective. Over-weight and troubled by chest pains, he is conducting an affair with a woman by the name of Jane OMay (Rachael Blake), who is separated from her husband. Meanwhile, unbeknown to Leon, his unhappy wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) is seeing a therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey) about their troubled marriage. However, Valeries own marriage is also in crisis: Following the death of her 11-year-old daughter her husband (Geoffrey Rush) no longer engages in sexual relations and appears to deliberately avoid spending time with her, whilst often working late at the office. Leading Valerie to suspect her husband of a homosexual affair with one of her clients, Michael, who appears to be baiting her.

A third couple are also central to the plot and become embroiled in the tangled web; unemployed Nik (Vince Colosimo) and his wife (Keira Wingate) live with their kids next door to Leons mistress, Jane. Nik is friendly with Janes estranged husband, Pete (Glen Robbins) but overlooks Janes affair, on the advice of his wife, when he spots Leon leaving his mates house. Meanwhile two other relationships between gay Michael and his married lover and Leons police partner and a mystery stranger also play out in this beautifully judged, thoughtful and well-written movie, adapted by Andrew Bovell from his original stage play, Speaking in Tongues.

Not only is Lantana well-written and well-directed but it has depth. At its core are the central themes of trust, grief, fidelity, betrayal and redemption. Anthony LaPaglia (The Client, So I Married An Axe Murderer), Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey and Kerry Armstrong all give great performances, subtly conveying a broad range of emotions throughout the course of the movie. In particular, LaPaglia, an Australian perhaps best known for his TV appearances (Murder One, Frasier, Without A Trace) and whom I previously assumed was Italian-American, is superb as Leon and it is his uncompromising performance that is at the core of this excellent film.

Ray Lawrence, an Aussie TV commercials director must take enormous credit too for the pace and balance of the movie, as well as the performances, which are all pitch-perfect. Lantana is at once a psychological thriller/drama, an essay in love, and an intelligent examination of human relationships, marriage and fidelity. After making this little gem of a movie, lets just hope that Ray Lawrence doesnt wait another 17 years before making his next one.

Totally compelling, Lantana kept me hooked throughout every moment of its two-hour minute running time. If youre open minded and looking for something intelligent, this absorbing and superbly acted Australian drama that shouldnt be missed.




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Lantana > Customer Review #2:
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A Great Character-Driven Piece of Filmmaking

As Lantana begins, we see through a long camera shot a dead body in the midst of thick shrubbery. We dont know who this person is or how the death happened. But we will learn this and much, much more.
Australian policeman Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is a man stumbling through life. He is in poor health, he is cheating on his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), and can no longer relate to his sons and their problems. Sonja, having her own problems, seeks the help of a psychiatrist named Valerie (Barbara Hershey). Valerie has just written a book that chronicles the death of her young daughter. Valeries husband John (Geoffrey Rush) is distant, but hiding an inner anger. At one point in the film, Valerie confronts him, telling him that hes not dealing with their daughters death at all. He tells her that he is, he just doesnt have to write a book about it.

Zats lover Jane (Racheal Blake) is a strange woman who is separated from her husband. She wants nothing to do with him. Living next door to Jane is the only happily married couple in the film, Nik and Paula. Or are they really happily married?

The characters and the situation Ive described sounds like a bad soap opera. Far from it. Director Ray Lawrence takes all of these seemingly unrelated characters and shows us not only what they have in common, but how our lives can turn out if were not careful.

It is surprising how easy the plot is to follow with all these characters. Youre never sitting there watching the film thinking, "Now, who is this man?" Concentrate instead on what the characters are thinking and feeling. By doing this, you can tap into the depth of the characters and their sad and sometimes tragic lives. Lantana is, if nothing else, a powerful look into the potential darkness that hides in each of us. But the film is much more.

Lantana is not as interested in solving the mystery of who was killed and why as it is in bringing the audience to understand whats going on in the heads of these amazingly lifelike characters. Lantana is an amazing film. Its not a flashy film, but youll think about it long after the final scene, which by the way is a microcosm of the entire film. Amazing stuff.

Running time 2 hours 1 minute




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Lantana > Customer Review #3:
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Emotional upheaval, passion and murder. Great film!

This 2001 Australian film is about relationships and intersecting lives. Lantana is a plant with delicate leaves and sharp brambles which was transported into Australia and has now run wild. The screenwriting is making the same point as the passions and frustrations of the characters take over their personas.
A detective, played by Anthony LaPaglia, is having an affair. His wife is going to a psychiatrist, played by Barbara Hershey. This psychiatrist has suffered her own emotional upheaval. Two years before her 11-year-old daughter was murdered and now her husband, played by Geoffrey Rush, is emotionally distant. In spite of her training, shes judgmental about extramarital affairs and the subject of trust. Add to this mix a happily married couple with three small children who live next door to the woman the detective has romanced, a female cop who is full of good advice, and several other characters who are looking for emotional connection and we have an interesting plot about how paths cross and how were all connected.

And then one of the women disappears and murder is suspected. Everything quickens up as the murder investigation touches on each one of these peoples lives. Theres emotional upheaval throughout and the conclusion is logical and satisfying. I was swept into the story as well as the emotions. At times it felt so real that it became painful. The acting was outstanding and so was the directing. And by the end of the film I felt I personally knew all of the characters with all their strengths and weaknesses. Excellent drama and definitely recommended.

Best Film Book

Have You Seen . . . ?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films
by David Thomson

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More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly Have You Seen . . . ?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films
by David Thomson
The Reel Thing
A Review by Benjamin Schwarz
Post a comment about this review on the Powells.com blog
Now we have the long-called-for companion to David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975 and throughout its various editions the most seductive, infuriating, and influential reference book ever written on the movies. Thomson, an Englishman living in San Francisco, is the author of more than 20 books, including several on movie personalities such as Warren Beatty, Orson Welles, Nicole Kidman, and David O. Selznick, and others on such disparate subjects as Scott's Antarctic expedition, Laurence Sterne, and Las Vegas. "Have You Seen...?" -- a by turns astringent and gushy appraisal of 1,000 movies made from 1895 to 2007 -- is, for better and worse, something of a muddle. Whereas the lyrical and bullying, ardent and Olympian, minutely detailed and defiantly impressionistic Dictionary, with its closely packed, tightly printed, double-columned pages, aims toward the comprehensive, this work discriminates in what it includes and what it doesn'tâ??but does so using several different and somewhat contradictory criteria.
With its god-awful title, the book ostensibly responds to the question most frequently asked of Thomson: "What movies should I watch?" To be sure, he has included his favorites among the single-page entries. (The format, along with many other features, makes this a much less idiosyncratic work than the eccentric and audacious Dictionary, whose entries varied from three sentences on Wes Anderson to several thousand words on Graham Greene.) But he also writes about many pictures he can't stand, including the 1959 Ben-Hur ("Has anyone made a voluntary decision to see [it] in recent years?"), Kramer vs. Kramer (a work of "inane studied gentility"), and Rain Man ("the smug movie of a culture charging down a dead-end street"). All of these films won the Oscar for Best Picture, so the reader might assume that Thomson has gathered both movies he esteems and ones he judges influential commercially, culturally, or otherwise.
Not exactly: he omits Mrs. Miniver, Gentleman's Agreement, and Crash -- all Best Picture winners, all social or political bellwethers, and all movies he (justifiably) doesn't like. He also ignores the Hope-Crosby "Road" movies, even though -- as he notes in his typically penetrating and off-kilter history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation (the title is from The Last Tycoon) -- those "silly...stay-at-home 'Road' films" exercised a profound "healing effect" on America, and their stars were "the top box office attraction in America throughout the 1940s." Oh -- and he does include four entries on TV series (The Singing Detective; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Sopranos; and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky), products of a medium whose constraints and possibilities differ significantly from those of the cinema. Thomson can't resist forays into television: his entry on Johnny Carson is among the lengthiest and most perceptive in the Dictionary.
This jumble reveals a highly cultivated critical mind as it develops and refines judgments on minor issues, major themes, and first-order principles concerning the most vital art form of the 20th century and our social and emotional engagement with it. Throughout, Thomson points out the films Oscar has honored and shunnedâ??verdicts he deems "misleading and unhelpful in the intelligent regard for movies in America" -- to support his contention that assessments of movie quality have been consistently "ludicrous." Embarrassingly stupid pronouncements aren't limited to the movies, of course, but the cinema has been particularly susceptible to them. The apparently obvious reason is that the sordid commercial standards for judging a huge industry's product have squashed the standards for judging creative endeavor. But that's hardly adequate. After all, stately, self-important, and socially worthy pictures, not mindless blockbusters, crowd the list of Oscar winners over the years. And if many of the industry's judgments have been self-regarding and boneheaded, those of the academics and art-house critics have been faddish. How many critics in 1973 would have assayed The Godfather superior to one of their then favorites, Bergman's ponderous The Seventh Seal?
Still, Thomson insists that judgments be made, and that they be based on a deep comprehension of the medium. This wasn't so uncommon when movies were truly a mass entertainment -- when they were what Thomson calls "the bloodstream of a great nation" and something like half or three-quarters of the population went to the pictures each week; even up through the early 1970s, a smaller audience had grown up in a movie-saturated culture. ("In the darkness at the movies," as Pauline Kael romanticized the situation, "where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses.")
But today less than 10 percent of the population goes to the movies weekly, and the older pictures that account for most of the entries in this book are unknown to nearly every young movie-watcher. The availability of sparklingly restored prints of classics on DVD and on cable stations like TCM hasn't come close to compensating for the fact that old movies -- good, bad, or indifferent, in all their creaky splendorâ??are no longer shown ad infinitum on local TV, where they weren't enshrined by cineastes but were just part of the movie-watcher's mental landscape. Today that landscape is awfully barren. The college seniors in a UCLA seminar I recently taught fancy themselves sophisticated filmgoers, but haven't seen Grand Illusion, Chinatown, or a single John Ford, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. Urbane newspaper readers, as Thomson bemoans, deem Cinema Paradiso the best foreign-language movie ever made -- because they've seen it, and don't know its betters ("if you haven't read much else, then Ian Fleming's Goldfinger may be the best book you've ever read").
Thomson tries to set things right. He deflates undeserved reputations: The Graduate, "said to be one of everybody's favorites!," is "cold, heartless entertainment, never more ruthless than when dumping charm on us"; Lawrence of Arabia "is spectacular enough to pass for a thinking man's epic (without the thought)." And he champions the overlooked (John Huston's Fat City, Ida Lupino in The Hard Way). In his characteristically discursive manner, he builds his arguments over several entries. Jeff Bridges, thanks to his control and wounded grace (in Fat City, Heaven's Gate, Cutter and Bone, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Big Lebowski ), emerges convincingly as "the essential ... actor of modern American cinema"; Michael Curtiz's "blithe lack of self-regard" in his direction of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Yankee Doodle Dandy makes him "not merely lightly likeable [take that, Andrew Sarris] but a genius." Thomson recognizes "the wit, the precision, the timing, the class" of What's Up, Doc? And he isn't taken in, not for a second, by that other attempt to modernize the romantic comedy, the jejune When Harry Met Sally.
Alas, when it comes to the movies he loves most, Thomson pretty much throws up his hands, having written and talked about them for decades: Trouble in Paradise, TheRules of the Game ("the greatest film by the greatest director"), Les Enfants du Paradis ("the warmth and kindness of the film is not easily separated from the fluency of its style"), Swing Time (he knows enough to give Arlene Croce the last word on this picture), all the films of Preston Sturges ("the man you must come to love if this book will mean anything to you"), Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday ("we are talking about a picture that received not a single Academy nomination, and we are talking about one of the glories of American film"), To Be or Not to Be, Meet Me in St. Louis (a movie set in 1903 that captures perfectly the achiness of the Second World War home front), Double Indemnity ("Fred MacMurray simply looks a better and better actor as the years pass"â??yes!), Red River ("my favorite picture"), Celine and Julie Go Boating ("I don't think there has ever been a portrait so fond, so oblique, so touching, or so funny of what happens to us at the movies"), The Godfather, Chinatown.
Thomson is most penetrating when he develops and enlarges his ideas and arguments over multiple entries, and when he's neither praising nor slamming but simultaneously giving and taking away: see his ambivalent analyses of Do the Right Thing; Tinker, Tailor; the often magnificent Heaven's Gate, the photography of which is exactly "heartbreaking"; and The Sopranos -- expertly done, but "The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you."
It's impossible to read this book from cover to cover without being convinced that Hollywood's greatest achievements are not the monotonously important dramas that so often sucker in Academy voters but the stylish, highly polished entertainments, largely comedies, that endure even though they weren't made to be lasting. Above all, Thomson prizes wit, charm, and good-natured ease. He's reached an age, he notes in his appraisal of North by Northwest, when he'd "rather have a great screwball comedy than a profound tragedy. After all, tragedy is all around us and screwball is something only the movies can do."
Thomson has never been backward-looking -- he's remarkably open and generous to contemporary talent, and has been particularly astute if exasperatingly partisan in his assessments of our current actors (witness his mad crush on Nicole Kidman). But this is an elegiac work. Even while his fine eye picks up the subtle, brilliant costuming in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and even while he neatly dissects the rigor and wit of The Queen (2006) and praises mightily Magnolia (a 1999 film that has grown even more in his estimation since the most recent edition of the Dictionary) and You the Living (2007), the evidence is in the reader's hands:
If you were to make a graph of when the films in this book were made, there is a great hump that stands for the thirties, the forties, the fifties. I can try to moderate it, but I do not apologize for it.
He understands that the critical task is essentially comparative, and he acknowledges that Have You Seen...?" in effect "weighs the old against the new." The result, he fears, is that "this book may come off as helplessly nostalgic."
Of course it does. It's nostalgic for a time when the movies were "everyone's sport," and their largest audience -- and those who determined what picture to see -- were women, not teenage boys. "I would suggest," Thomson wrote in The Whole Equation, "that any potential reawakening of American film as a mainstream current may turn on how far the country can ever admit its feminine side." It's nostalgic for a time when the West had something close to a mass art form, albeit one defined by a mixture of aspiration, failed effort, and compromise. It's nostalgic, that is, for a time far, far away, a time before Star Wars -- "the line in the sand, the disastrous event," as Thomson rightly says, unconsciously echoing Kael -- turned American cinema into an adjunct to the video-game industry. (The annual turnover for video games dwarfs domestic theatrical-box-office and DVD revenue.) This is the complex story of a far-reaching commercial and cultural change, one Thomson has already chronicled in The Whole Equation. So why bother to ask, as he does here, "Is it possible that the movies are going to end up as museum pieces?" They already have.
Benjamin Schwarz is The Atlantic's literary editor and national editor.
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