Death, Where Is Thy....

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Read Their Moist And Pouty Lips

    Ironically, in Canada our government just apologized for a head tax....    Oh, those Republicans....

 

    And in related news.... Sounds like the perfect place for eating out, non?     

     (Oops: screwed up with the last link before. It's corrected now. Has to be the first time that this blog messed up the dirty-minded link....)

Sunday, Silly Sunday

    It's a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  The coffee is perfect, and the animals are splayed out in their favourite spots like Roman emperors.  And it's quiet.  Or, quiet except for my own tunage echoing and blasting about: as I begin writing this, Mr Morrison is rippin' through his showstopping medley of those two great anthems of adolescent lust, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' Shakin' All Over and his own Gloria.  It's a minor marathon, eleven minutes of snarl, smoulder, peal and raucous wail, sharpened by some dueling axe-work and a bit of guest-lechery by the late, great John Lee Hooker.  In a word:  Awesome.  It's as if the real world doesn't exist....

 

    Ironically, Media Player decides to follow this medley with Stevie Nicks' The Edge of Seventeen, the greatest female version of adolescent, er, "indulgence."  I'm a few years older than you, she sings; Just a little bit, I think to myself, snickering rather more than a bit.  Doc J, many moons ago, used to have a bugger of a crush on Ms Nicks, when he was much less than seventeen and she was still the svelte and twirling bella donna.  **sigh**  Now she'd surely have to sing that she's a few stone heavier than me.  Damn, there's that bloody Real World unwelcomely nosing its way back into things.  Oh well.  At least Stevie still has a voice that could strip wallpaper at a single forte. 

 

    For the past few days I have been mulling over a few different items on the agenda, including the design of a prospective syllabus for a course on lyric poetry from Ancient Greece to Jacobean England.  I love the idea of the course, but am hemming and hawing over what to include and what not, particularly in relation to the ancients.  Some are obvious inclusions: Archilochus, Sappho, Theocritus, Pindar, Catullus, Horace and so forth, but matters get more complex among the lesser figures, and I'm wary of putting too much emphasis on the ancients when there's already enough to do once one gets to England.  And, of course, there's continental Europe to factor in, especially Petrarch and Dante and Villion, all as I'd hope to insert a few examples of early Irish verse.  What, then, gets sacrificed?  Early English Christian lyrics, like The Dream of the Rood?  I'd rather not screw over Old and Middle English lyrics too egregiously, but the connective tissues between the Renaissance and the Classical periods are so strong that they in many ways seem to render those periods comparatively less relevant.  One might almost as well start with Skelton and proceed from there, but that would Oh-so-Norton.  Then again, all my ruminating on all this will probably prove moot.  I'd love, though, to be able to teach some of those poets I never get to teach---  Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Davies, Crashaw, Herbert, Herrick, Donne, Campion.  Closest I've come of late have been Milton and Marvell and, of course, Shakespeare.  (Not up on all of these lit-wits?  Feel free to flit about here.) 

 

    I'm also discovering more and more lately that books keep disappearing from my shelves, like single socks in the dryer.  They should be around somewhere.  But, among others, I've realized that several volumes seem to have vanished into thin air, including my Everyman Yeats, John Hollander's Melodious Guile and Dante's La Vita Nuova.  Forkstix....

 

    Alas, I'm procrastinating, as most of you have probably already surmised.  Perhaps time to switch from coffee to beer as Sunday turns from luxury to labour.  Time, as they say, to get hopping, damn it.  That Real World never stays away long enough, does it?  Harrumph. 

Sublime Austerities and Same Old Songs

    Wound up the other night renting a trio of flicks: Something's Gotta Give, March of the Penguins and the Coen Brothers' early masterpiece Blood Simple.  Last, of course, is brilliant, though I had not seen it in many years, and its ending remains one of the few truly unforgettable endings in modern moviedom.  (Even though the movie's more than 20 years old now, I won't spoil it for those of you that still haven't seen it; I will say, though, that it remains for me the gold standard of macabre humour.)  Plus, you've got to love a movie that lets M. Emmet Walsh do that slimy, snarly menace that he does probably better than anyone else in the business.  There's no need to qualify or to equivocate here: Walsh simply is one of the best character actors in Hollywood, and it was Blood Simple that finally made everyone take notice of him.  The movie's a minor classic, and it features most of the trademark Coen Bros elements bolted together in a movie of stunning economy. 

 

    March of the Penguins (or "pengweenies," as an ex used to say, as if they were Italian pastas), I have to say, caught me entirely off-guard, despite the terrific word-of-mouth it received (and, as usual, the Not-So-Good Doctor was probably the last person in North America to see it).  Like Blood Simple, the movie depends heavily on stark imagery, though to a very different end, namely a strikingly sad affirmation of special persistence.  The film presents itself not as a documentary but as a love story (its own words), and despite whatever churlish charges of anthropomorphism that might hurled at the film for doing so, it succeeds.  It succeeds, in fact, astonishingly.  Some of its sequences are as touching as any in more typical love stories: the coupling penguins nestling each other with their beaks, their heads cast downward in a kind of sombriety, is as tender an image as you'll ever see, a quiet celebration of that basic instinct that opposes death so nobly and sometimes so vainly.  That the penguins themselves waddle as they do in their march provides a poignant counter-image:  their black backs seeming to lope so sadly through the antarctic wilderness, they look like mourners in a ceremonial death march, even if the whole point of their march is not death but life.  If this seems a sensitive reading, that's because it probably is.  The film reads its subjects with such lyrical sensitivity that it's all but impossible not to follow its lead.  There's a sublime austerity to its sadness, as plaintiveness responds against severity with a greater determination than defiance could provide.  That's where the movie's poetry lies, and I think only the most viciously cynical could fail to be moved by it, at least partially. 

    Something's Gotta Give, however, proved to be a deeply awkward experience.  I expected little from it, and only really rented it because of Jack Nicholson, whose recent films have taken to parodying his own image--- and, dare I add, flashing his sexagenarian ass, which is reason enough to contradict one's original logic for watching anything with him in it.  The real star of the movie, though, is Diane Keaton, and she's terrific.  Even at moments, and there were plenty of them, when I was groaning at the stupidities of the script, she managed still to elicit laughter despite my scoffing.  Too bad, though, that the movie otherwise sucks tightened donkey balls. 

 

    The script is wretched, an onanistic cougar fantasy in which a playwright who merely steals her dialogue verbatim from life around her is heralded as "major," and romance itself just a convenient series of cheap contrivances as convincing as  a presidential con-job.  The movie is so sickeningly self-aggrandizing that it undermines completely the charms that Nicholson and Keaton provide--- and then dares to go even further in its smug self-congratulation.  After all, we're supposed to believe that Keaton's eventual manic-depression is supposed to be a liberation, her (Gawd help me...) freedom to feel again, rather than a cloying and chuckleless excuse for Keaton to laugh and cry in clambersome successions.  If I were a woman, I'd be especially offended by this characterization that suggests that a woman's path to happiness is all about allowing herself to be as neurotic and unstable, and even vindictive, as she wants to be; after all, the cad will reform himself, creativity will just miraculously come straight out of life itself (word for word!), and romantic resolution will come as glibly and as consequence-free as one could possibly fathom. 

 

    Until then, though, the characters can indulge in grotesquely cynical platitudes and whinges, the latter from Keaton, the former from the wonderful Frances McDormand, who is utterly wasted, save to deliver a pompous prognostication about sexist double standards and then vanish all-but-completely.  The supporting cast really gets short-shrift here, especially Keanu Reeves, and you know things are bad when I start feeling sorry for Keanu Reeves.  Here's he stuck in what they used to call the Ralph Bellamy role, as the decent chap who's finally gonna get screwed over simply because he's not the romantic lead.  (It's now called the Bill Pullman role, and it remains as thankless as ever.)  What's most putrefying about the movie, however, is that it's finally just a public exercise in art as therapy, writer-director Nancy Meyers clearly overidentifying with her heroine to the point that self-flattery becomes personal sanctification, especially as we're supposed to realize how wonderful her heroine is for deigning to receive at last her rakish and repentant suitor, of course against the cliched backdrop of Paris in winter.  You see, we're supposed to think she's perfect because she accepts her age and life with someone her own age, a gesture of such supposed romantic munificence as to suggest its inevitability as an ending.  After all, every woman in her late 50s would choose Jack Nicholson over Keanu Reeves, even if Keanu's a strapping young doctor in the Hamptons who loves her work and thinks the sun shines out of her surprisingly still-shapely ass.  Any self-respecting feminist that doesn't recognize by this point that Meyers is just composing a cinematic paean to herself should probably just apron herself and beginning looking through Barbara Billingsley's boudoir for her bedtime wear.  Even Keaton's estimable radiance can't compensate for this vomitously invidious vanity-project: her vivaciousness isn't quite enough to counteract the movie's fundamental vacuousness and its offensively-vituperative inclinations. 

 

    Ironically, I find myself returning where I began.  Blood Simple makes brilliant use of the Four Tops' "It's The Same Old Song," but it's Something's Gotta Give that feels like the same old song, an insipid and ultimately aggravating one that's neither as observant or as amusing as it thinks it is.  Then again, "Something's Gotta Give" is a song by the McGuire Sisters, isn't it?  Hmmmm.  Think I'd rather end up like M. Emmet Walsh's detective than watch that movie again--- especially when penguins seem to offer so much more insight, and elicit so much more feeling.

But Will The Spanish Bishops Approve?

      Ladies and gents: another tale of slapping and farting.   All the world's a Beckett play....

Wild Orchid

    Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you to go fuck yourself.    

    Proof positive, alas, that necessity is the mother of invention....

The Miller's Tail

    Here's the sort of article this blog loves: a scandalous report about a literary subject with a headline lubricious enough to make even a twelve year-old titter.  Delight and glee, delight and glee....

     Hehehe.... Lubricious....  

     This blog's maturity remains, as ever, utterly beyond reproach....

     SEMI-RELEVANT UPDATE:   Davyth brings to my attention that other tales entailing tails are causing a bit of a to-do.   I'll let Graham Greene's gentle Father Quixote respond accordingly: Que le den por el saco al obispo.   Or, roughly translated: "Bugger the bishop."

Neutral Tones

    I think we have no found a new example for the OED's definition of the verb "to pander."   Perhaps this article should be read to John Mellencamp's "When Jesus Left Birmingham"?

 

    I don't know about any of you, but "Rock, Redeemer, Friend" sounds to me like Ned Flanders' version of "Rock, Paper, Scissors." 

Reelin' and Rockin'

    It's a lazy day 'round these parts, the Doc's ambition roughly that of a sloth's.  At least, however, I managed to convert a few more CDs to MP3 files so I'm not always fumbling with clutter & clobber.  In doing so, though, I wound up listening to Van Morrison's Days Like This for the first time in a very long while.  An imperfect but generally underrated album at the time of its release (1995), it's one of those easy Sunday-afternoon albums that grows with repeated listenings.  Largely a piece of mellow grooves, it's also a work of restlessness searching for rest, as many Morrison recordings are.  Differently, though, this one finds rest (after a fashion, anyway) not in contemplation or nostalgia, but in an expression of carnality with the stepping romanticism of its closing track, "In The Afternoon."  It's after that song's bridge that flight is assumed, or rather a kind of dizzied ascent, Morrison's voice alternately soaring and growling as he declares how his lover has got him "rollin' and tumblin' / and talkin' all out of [his] mind."  Okay, so the lyrics aren't John Donne, but the inflections and cadences are superb, simultaneously liberated and muted; there's something almost perfectly checked about the delivery, as if the album has somehow shifted from being shaken to being stirred right at its finale.  There's also something playfully steeling about it all--- and perfectly appropriate for a Sunday (er) afternoon.  Carpe meridianus?

Toward the Last Spike

    Earlier this morning I was writing to a friend now overseas that the weather in my neck of the woods had been relatively (and uncharacteristically) temperate.  So much for that: as of this writing, it's 31C sans humidex, which means it's probably around 36 or 37C.  In short, as many people are saying so pithily today, it's fucking hot.  Thankfully I've got a few beers chilling to make the swelter slightly more tolerable, but they likely won't last long.  They'll die nobly.  Be they ever so vile, these Laker Lagers, this day shall gentle their conditions.  Heinekens shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

 

    In other news (?), I've noticed a peculiar spike in the numbers of people alighting on this humble excuse for a blog in the past few days.  SiteMeter tells me that per day visits here have inexplicably trebled to quadrupled, Google seeming to provide more than 80% of these referrals, up from what used to be (maybe) 20% before Thursday.  So why the sudden vault in traffic?  Damned if I know, though I suspect it's the result of something Google has done.  This is especially ironic because I'm increasingly unsure as to who is reading this risible page anymore, the onetime regulars here having found better things to do or simply going quiet.  And yet, I also seem to have cultivated some regular and semi-regular readers from some rather surprising parts of the world, given how provincial even I acknowledge this blog to be.  (No delusions of grandeur here, just rampant silliness and general incredulity.)  So, I guess I'm wondering--- for the first time, really--- who's reading (er, qualify that: bothering to read) this page anymore.  Don't get me wrong--- all are welcome, very much so, in all manners and means.  One does wonder, though, about one's audience.  There's a reason, after all, that the most famous play in the English language begins with "who's there," beyond that it's the most engorged knock-knock joke in literary history.  Colour me befuddled with that question for now. 

 

    Ah, mystification.... Let it gentle my condition, such as it is, sweaty and tired.  Those Heinekens should be accursed they are not here....

Finnegan Begin Again

     Alas, one supposes it was just a matter of time, but the CBC has decided to cease airing Mr. Dressup.  Sure, the show had been in reruns for more than a decade, but there was something innocently iconic about it that losing it entirely should be cause for some wistfulness. Those of you not familiar with the show (i.e., non- Canadians) might find this helpful.

 

     Aside:  I remember where I was when I learnt of Ernie Coombs' passing in 2001: I was in a now-defunct bar, working on a pint, when the news flashed on the TV in the background.  Everyone in the bar looked sorrowfully to the screen before all of their, our, faces fell slightly.  We all then raised our glasses in a silent toast.  Ironically, I was by far the youngest person there at the time, and probably the only one who had actually "grown up" (that issue remains very much in doubt) with the show.  Says something, methinks, of the esteem in which parents and grown-up kids held him.

On Bruce's Void and Forehead

    Rather half-watching Sin City again last night, I was struck by some of the latent literary connections within it.  Not knowing anything about Frank Miller's work, I have to assume they're intentional.  Most obvious, and perhaps most cheeky in its inclusion, is the scar on Hartigan's (Bruce Willis') forehead, which has to be a variation on the "lividly whitish" scar on Ahab's head from Moby-Dick.  (Not, however, the mark of Cain, which lurks behind Melville's construction of Ahab.)  More than the typical hard-boiled detective, he's a man who has been struck by lightning, a clear spirit of fire breathing it back, a self-described "old man" with a vengeful mission.  In Melville, of course, it's the whale, but in the film's story the whale has two forms, the Roark family the synoptic one, the Yellow Bastard the particular one.  The particular one in both cases is crotch-centred, Hartigan careful to take away the Bastard's weapons ("both of them") with the "cannon" he can barely lift, and Ahab's weapon the harpoon launched from the whaleboat's "conspicuous crotch" (see Chapter 63 for the nautical explanation).  Melville's chapter "The Candles"-- from which that last quote was taken, and which itself owes much to King Lear and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner-- strikes me as one of the main presences behind the film's story, though appropriately modified into a context of macho mock-stoicism.  Sure, Ahab's often hiding in the arras behind American versions of the (anti-)hero, but in Sin City his mark is plain and played, with surprisingly knowing results.  There are other connections, too, of course; see, for example, Marv's (Mickey Rourke's) insistence on sending Goldie's killer to a Hell that will seem like Heaven after what he's done to him, which recalls Satan's deeps and lower deeps in Book IV of Paradise Lost (c.f., esp., ll. 73-78), though the phrasing has largely passed into clichéed parlance since.  I'm thinking, though, that a myth critic could have a field day with Sin City.  Any ambitious takers out there?  Me, I'm more inclined just to try to find the time to read Moby-Dick again.

 

    P.S.  If you're curious about the source of this entry's title, just surf this way to a truly great poem.

Tossing and Turning

    Just a few random notes on life in general:

• Spent a good part of yesterday going through Things Old and Tattered with the notion of divesting myself of some of those items I no longer need-- or have not needed for some time but have not gotten around to chucking.  So now there's a small junkheap ready to be dispensed with, including a small tonne of clothes, all of which would probably still fit if I cared enough to check.  I hate doing this sort of thing, though.  Too many items bring back memories and sensations best left firmly in the past.  Yet, there remain some items I don't discard even if I probably should, objects languishing in the same hedgerow.  Hedgerow?  Would things were ever so ordered.  Witness the chaos, after all.  Or a small section of it, anyway.
• For some reason, I keep meaning to watch Walk The Line, but at every opportunity I shrink from it and put another disc in the DVD player.  Why do I want to watch it and then not want to?  Go figure.  Perhaps it has something to do with Joaquin Pheonix annoying the bloody hell out of me.
• Apparently I have a (self-proclaimed) groupie again.  Go figure. 
• For reasons entirely within my ken, I've been listening a lot lately to the ZimmerMan, especially "Tangled Up In Blue," "Jokerman," "Silvio," and the like.  (Not, however, "Mr. Tambourine Man," which I could gladly go the rest of my excuse for a life without hearing ever again.)  I'm considering adopting "Dignity" as a personal theme-song.  I'm also coming to the conclusion that I can no longer abide Neil Young even for a few seconds.  Some of us have known the twaddle and the damage done.
• Have been contemplating revamping this blog, and especially moving over to Blogger's comment thingamajig but keep wondering if it'll be worth the bother.  I'm so apathetic about starting on any significant changes because they're always more trouble than they're ever worth.  Any thoughts?
• All but had my nightcaps comped last night at one of my locals because I gave the bartender a few volumes of short stories (Mavis Gallant's Selected, Ethel Wilson's Mrs Golightly and Alistair McLeod's As Birds Bring Forth The Sun).  Mighty kind of her, but it of course had me wishing I could barter books for beer and so establish myself as a kind of millionaire in residence.  Would certainly give new meaning to the term "alcohol by volume."  Oh, to be lather-bound....

Alas, 'tis a slow day, and I without a thought to think.  The animals somehow manage to pass such days luxuriously, their worlds either perches or divans.  Cats somehow seem to be immune to restlessness.  Oh, what that must be like.... 

Juicy Tales

    You don't have to be an aficionado of James Joyce to appreciate the (warning: Joycean pun ahead) juicy tales currently surrounding the management of his estate as they are recounted in this fascinating piece from The New Yorker.  The situation is a complex one, and I confess to having sympathy for both Stephen Joyce, the manager of his grandfather's estate, and the Joycean community at large.  The issues that seems to me to remain undiscussed, though, are those involving academic intentions and responsibilities.  After all, the academic community in recent decades has demonstrated a stunning capacity for indulging in speculation that borders on, and often ventures completely into, slander and character assassination.  That it often does so under the guise of constructing literary history makes the situation even more querulous, particularly as theories are posited (key word: posited) and that are closer to rumours rather than theories.  See, for example, the molestation or rape theory that came to underpin Shloss' research, which should call into question the motives for her research.  That's not to suggest that it's not warranted, but merely that the possibility of insidious intent demands examination.  We have witnessed in scholarship of late a tendency towards preening judgments of character and ideology that should make any executor of an author's estate wary.  Think of the ways in which "anti-Semitism" and "misogyny" are hurled freely about as terms of characterization.  I think it's crucial, though, then that academics reconsider, sincerely and methodically, their intentions and responsibilities in a fashion that adequately examines the capacities for research to be a pretentious, and licensed, avenue toward self-advancement. 

Give Him A Head With Hair, Long, Pitiful Hair

    ~~ .... This is the dawning of the Age of Nefarious, the Age of Nefarious.... ~~

 

    Key quote, that mixes metaphors in the best Yogi Berra tradition:  "Like everything in life, sometimes you have to turn the page and open up a new door."  It breaks one's heart, one's ach--- no, no, no, this blog won't go there....

Winky and the Brain (Brain, Brain, Brain...)

    So now we understand what it means to have a "splitting headache...." 

The Kid Stays Out Of The Picture

    As many of you know, I am generally not disposed to post pictures of my gangly and dissheveled self here or anywhere.  Hell, most people know better than even to try to snap a shot in my general direction for fear of me going Sean Penn on their asses.  Okay, not really-- they're more likely to end up with brown-haired blurs with a single hand where a head should be, but that's usually because I don't have something blunt and heavy to hurl at the offending photographer.  Even at family gatherings, I've pretty much mastered the "vanish-into-the-woodwork" manoeuvre so I don't even get guilted into pictures; I avoid cameras like my cats avoid the vacuum cleaner, emerging only whem I'm bloody-sure the coast is clear.  I think I've managed to keep the number of pictures taken of me in the past several years to less than a dozen, which is still too many by half.  Maybe one day I'll even be able to pull off Keyser Soze's greatest trick, of convincing the world that I didn't exist.  Now that'd be sweet....

 

    All that said, going through some old stuff the other day, I discovered a picture that will probably elicit a few titters and giggles.  (Probably? Who am I kidding? Surely.)   Taken what now seems a hundred-million years ago, I kinda like it if only because, presciently, I seem in it to be merging into the background.  It's also probably one of the last shots of me in which I am NOT rolling my eyes or issuing a smirk that says, in no uncertain terms, "Okay, just get the fucking thing over with."   So, do you want to see the Not-So-Good Doctor in an innocent and decidedly uncyncial form?  Brace yourselves--- and be forewarned that comments including the word "Awwwww" will be grounds for an appropriate pummelling--- before  clicking on this itty-bitty link Right Here.  And remember: You Have Been Warned.  Now go and get your laughter on.     

Sibylla Ti Theleis?

     It's early Saturday morning and, strangely, I seem ahead of the game.  This week's NYT Sunday crossword, which arrives in my local daily on Saturday morning, is already done, finished in less than 45 minutes; so too is my correspondence, which seems increasingly a waste of time, as does this blog.  Also watched both Hitchhiker's Guide and Kingdom of Heaven in the wee hours, and was modestly impressed.  The first was about what I expected, but the latter caught me off-guard, as I expected another trite Hollywood history lesson but got something rather more sophisticated.  Sure, it takes the typical liberties-- and of course inserts all the typical freedom-pap-- but at least the writing and the direction weren't as wretched as I had anticipated.  It's certainly an improvement for director Ridley Scott on his abysmal Gladiator.  (I still want that time back, damn it.)  Best part, though: the DVD's excellent-- and quite thorough-- bonus-track of historical information, about half of which I knew and half I didn't, and which lays bare the Hollywood manipulations in a disarmingly candid fashion.  Frankly, my main reason for even renting the thing was that the stunning Eva Green was in it, but whose role as Sibylla of Jerusalem is rather limited and repackaged for the purposes of forcing an unnecessary romance.  For her, however, I'd not only endure a movie with Orlando Bloom in it, I'd gladly take up a career in the Sibyl service.  (QED:  Bertolucci's The Dreamers.)  Hell, I'd even take an internship. 

 

     Oh, what to do today.... Probably finish rereading King John.  *shrug* 

 

     By the way, Ms Green's Sibylla is not only the Queen of Jerusalem, but also of Acre.  (Wait for it....)  Okay, all together now:  Greeeeeeeeen's Acre is the place to be, / Warm livin' is the life for me....

 

     There's nothing quite like damning oneself to hell before noon even hits.

Worms, Worms, Worms

     Deciding late last night to occupy my noggin with some ostensibly intelligent flicks, I rented a triplet of movies:  Kingdom of Heaven, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Luther.  Have still to watch the first two, but the last was a pretty profound disappointment.  After hearing some glowing assessments of it, I had expected something much better.  The script, though not horrible, left much to be desired, and I think I am now officially sick of seeing Joseph Fiennes in every picture set in the sixteenth-century.  The real problem with the movie is its clumsy, in fact bloody awful, direction, which seems like it was done by an undergraduate with a keg party to go to.  Each scene feels like it's just filmed dialogue, and the narrative a crudely spliced-together summary of events.  (It was directed by a chap named Eric Till whose previous film was Red Green's Duct Tape Forever, which suggests something about Luther's editorial process.)  I'm not sure whether the movie feels more like a miniseries that had two hours hacked from it or a Coles Notes version of Luther's life, reduced to abbreviated bullet-points that are trundled out dutifully and dully.  Till doesn't seem at all interested in any of his characters, Luther included, with some of them presented as little more than guest-star cameos, like Alfred Molina's Johann Tetzel and Marco Hofschneider's Ulrich, their parts in the story picked up and dropped like potatoes off of a barbecue.  Everything about the movie seems cursory, and its ending has to be one of the most unsatisfactory endings I've seen in a very long time, so much so that it reminded me more than a little of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which at least had the virtue of being funny.  Sadly, this was Peter Ustinov's final film, and he's okay as Frederick the Wise, but Till's ramshackle manner runs rough-shod over possibilities for giving the Prince-- or Luther, for that matter-- any dramatic gravitas.  Till, put simply, just doesn't seem to be even nominally interested in his characters or his story, and the result is a laboured and cliched precis of Luther's life, as riveting as a Wikipedia entry and just as inspired. 

 

     This reminds me, though, of Sir Peter's famous answer when he was asked what he would like to have on his tombstone.  It was a typical Sir Peter pearl:  "KEEP OFF THE GRASS."  Mine, I think, will read "Hey, you're standing on my fucking testicles!"

Losing It At The Movies

      Coincidentally, a number of rather good pieces on film and film criticism have cropped up. They include Anthony Lane's devastating review of The Da Vinci Code for The New Yorker, Clive James' cheeky review of the new volume American Movie Critics, and a lengthy but amusing entry on the sorry state of reviewing over at 2Blowhards.   This occasioned me to track down an old favourite, Roger Ebert's "Glossary of Movie Terms," a piece that may need some updating but still holds its own.   Ebert, after all, hadn't yet identified that the essential premise of a Tom Cruise movie must necessarily be the redemption of a callow-but-decent ne'er-do-well, a fact that surely warrants a term unto itself.   (A friend recently noted that he had never seen a Cruise craptacular; one wonders not only how this could be, but also if seeing one would complete him.)   There's, naturally, a bit of irony to all this, because later today I have to submit applications for some courses to teach, and there are two film courses for which I'm considering tossing in my name.   (To bother or not to bother, that is the question.)   Odd in all this is that Clive James in his review ends up sounding a lot like Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. Something tells me that would horrify Mr James as much as it would Mr Bloom.

      BTW, a totally unrelated search on Google led me to this link, which just goes to prove that on the internet, as with greeting cards, there's something for everything. I'm sure some pseudo-scholar could patch together an article of some supposed academic import based on this data....

Torn From Insipid Summer

Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You? You are Wallace Stevens. You love everything, especially the sound of things. Too bad you are so obscure that at times even you don't understand what the hell you have written. Take this quiz!

How bloody predictable but completely wrong.... As for loving everything,--- well, I'll just let each of you do the eye-rolling for me. For the record, this blog would like to note these words from the letters of Emily Dickinson: "I find ecstasy in living--the mere sense of living is joy enough."    Oh, that Emily....