Notes from a Determined Hermit

Lawrence of Arabia

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:24:07 GMT

Hedwig and I spent an evening watching the restored version of David Lean's film, Lawrence of Arabia. It's available on DVD. But, as Roger Ebert points out in his essay on Lawrence of Arabia in his book The Great Movies, the viewer spends a lot of time looking at great sweeps of desert landscapes, sometimes trying to see if there's a little dot on the horizon -- a person far in the distance. Details of that kind can be lost on the small screen. Ebert recommends, wisely, finding a way to see a 70mm version projected in a theater. That is indeed the ideal way to view it. To solve the DVD-viewing problem, we didn't bother with a tv screen of any size, small or large. We watched the movie using my basement projection system -- one large white wall becomes the screen. I use a projector of the type used to show bullet-point slides or other visuals from a computer at conventions and meetings. Back the projector far enough to fill the wall with the image, play the DVD on the computer, and turn on the speakers. Lawrence of Arabia, we learned when we looked it up on the IMDB, was shot in a 2:20 to 1 ratio. The image we saw was 4 feet high; that means it was also 8.8 feet wide -- almost three yards. We were sitting closer than one might in a movie theater -- possibly 10 feet back. The image was high up, starting right under the ceiling. We could see everything there was to see. What a magnificent visual delight of a movie! colors, shapes, movement, music -- and of course unforgettable characters and events. Read Roger Ebert's essay on it in his book The Great Movies, whether you've seen it or not. And then find a way to see it again, now that the restored version is available. What an amazing four-hour trip it is!

Wimbledon

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 21:38:22 GMT

I just saw Wimbledon, starring Paul Bettany as Peter Colt, a tennis player in his thirties who is trying to come to terms with being near the end of his career, having been ranked eleventh some years before, but now ranked 119th. It's a fine British romantic comedy with a deft light touch, involving two championship tennis players. It's a fine British sports movie about two tennis players who meet at Wimbledon and fall in love, complicating their tennis play. Take your pick -- but it's both, and (for once) both types of movie blend together very well, with neither being shorted. This is a movie that is much finer than its trailers. I love the romantic comedy story, with the movie's careful attention to not letting it get soppy or sentimentally overdone, taking care to undercut such incipient tendencies before they can run away with the film, yet leaving us with both the romance and the comedy. The script is excellent; we are at once drawn in and want to see what will happen, on the court and off. Most important: Paul Bettany, a fine dramatic actor, is unexpectedly delightful as a romantic comedy lead, and you really, really want to know what will happen next! A single game lost at Wimbledon is a total defeat: a loss eliminates a competitor from further play. With life imitating art in odd ways in the film, the stakes are nicely high, the plot is not predictable, and the leading man is capable and modest, funny and self deprecating -- in short, perfect. As a movie about championship tennis players at Wimbledon, the the film succeeds in pleasing both those who don't follow or know much about tennis -- I'm one of those -- and those who do, including some top world-class tennis players. John McEnroe and Chris Evert play two television commentators on the matches we see, and other tennis stars have cameos as interviewers or appear as the opponents in the segments showing actual tennis play. And expert tennis eyes have scrutinized the tennis scenes to make sure they show us neither more nor less than they should. Excellent job all around. Kirsten Dunst is convincing as a brash young American player, and Sam Neil is her American father, American not only in his accent but his body language. The magnificent Bernard Hill and an ensemble of superb actors play Peter Colt's family. Watch this film, please. You'll be glad you did.

Sharpe's Challenge

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 21:22:17 GMT

Fans of the Sharpe Chronicles will be glad to see Sean Bean return for the first time in 8 years as Richard Sharpe. In 1817, Wellington sends Sharpe, a veteran who has already seen action in India in 1803, back to India to unravel an intrigue. Darragh O'Malley returns as Harper, and the adventure, loosely based on several of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels set in India, is back with lots of action and intrigue. The acting and production are excellent; this one was filmed on location in India. Well worth seeing. If you haven't seen the other 14 filmed adventures, you'll enjoy them too, adapted from Cornwell's twenty novels about Sharpe.

The Interpreter

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:38:52 GMT

By all means find and watch The Interpreter, with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. In this movie, both actors have apparently grown into both their looks and their acting styles in the roles they have here -- or are allowed to do so by the film itself -- and their roles are intelligent, complex, and fulfilled by the actor both physically and as one creating a role and 'selling' the lines -- convincing us not only that they are that character, and that it is inevitable that that character would say that, in just that way, at that time, but that what they are saying is important enough for us to be listening to and watching, even if the words being used seem trivial at the moment and the situation seems slight at first glance. The story and the situation are top notch. It's a thriller that's not treated as a thriller, in the sense of lots of killing and bloodshed -- it's like the Inside Man in that respect. Director Sydney Pollack, in his commentary, likens the structure of the film to that of an opera, in which occasionally the lead characters sing arias about their feelings or situations. In this film, both Kidman and Penn have acting 'arias,' in which they have several pages of dialogue or even of monologue, as part of the ongoing thriller action, not as asides or commentaries to the viewer... and they bring them off! There is a depth of emotion conveyed by Sean Penn that I have almost never seen on the screen -- and yet he does it without overdoing or overreaching or becoming corny in any way. He's got great material to work with, and a superb actor in Kidman to play off (and many other very fine actors in the film) -- but he still has to do it for us, and he does... astounding. I've always admired Sydney Pollack's work, and this is a film (from an original film script someone gave to him) that has been worked on by Pollack and the writers so that the original 'spine' of the story is in place, and the film has been presented and acted to a fare-thee-well. There isn't a dull, slow, or wasted moment, plenty of suspense, and yet there is little of the traditional thriller about it. The characters played by Kidman and Penn are very different people in every way, yet each is intelligent and recognizes the intelligence of the other, even though at first they don't really like or trust each other (why should they?). Penn's character, from the Secret Service, is one who is used to being in charge, and he finds himself baffled in unusual ways (obviously not those of physical force) by Kidman's UN interpreter, who is not American, does not have the reactions he expects, and is smarter (and in particular, way more articulate) than the average suspect... He has been worn down by having people all around him over the years who are not as smart as he is, or possibly not as quick, even if they get there after a while and function quite competently. He gets his blunted edges honed sharply when he meets Kidman's character. Watching how his character changes and develops by the events in the film and by Kidman's character is one of the particular pleasures of the film. In this film, I warmed to both Kidman and Penn, something I haven't done in the past, despite my deep respect for Sean Penn's ability; I haven't watched Kidman at work much before this. I think they were fortunate to be able to work with this script and this director, who saw and used their talents in a way that apparently others haven't. Watch all the little featurettes that are on the disc, which are much better than the usual run of such extras.

Beowulf & Grendel

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:19:20 GMT

I just saw a truly great film on DVD, really fine, in the top rank: Beowulf & Grendel. It's so well-done, on every level. This film shows us an era we don't see much about, some of the darkest of the Dark Ages, and was filmed entirely in Iceland (it's a British / Canadian / Iceland co-production). It gives a really good idea (as much as can be given at this distance of time, and a great effort was made to get this right) of what life was like then, including worship of the old gods being replaced, for better or worse, and slowly, by early efforts at conversion to Christianity. It has its moments of high humor, battle, fighting, and much else -- but the thing I saw in every frame was the amazingly fine photography of an amazing landscape, not like anything I've seen before even in photographs... The film is in English but you do have to listen closely to what is said, as (rightly enough for the film, since the characters are meant to come from various distant places) people have different accents. Gerard Butler plays Beowulf, a Geat, and his Glaswegian vowels shine through as they are intended to do. Stellan Skarsgaard is King Hrothgar, who sends for Beowulf to come and rid him and his hall and lands of Grendel, and there are various British and Irish accents in it as well (Ciaran Hinds is one of Beowulf's men, a fighter and a storyteller, but not the teller of our story). None of that takes away from the amazingly beautiful photography of the amazingly beautiful but harsh land and sea... And the story doesn't just recount episodes in the saga of a hero (although it does that too); it has a point to make, not preaching, it's just there, part of the story, somewhere between subplot and subtext. The story in this film is brought into focus for us, without distortion, and we get to see it plain for what seems to me the first time... It's a great film, an overused but accurate word in this case, and I wish it had been recognized more widely (especially here) as one.

The Doctor's Case

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:10:33 GMT

I've just been rereading my copy of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and I came on one of my favorite Holmes stories, 'The Doctor's Case' by Steven King. It's a fine tale, blending originality with staying strictly within the limits established by the canon, it does not imitate any canonical story in terms of type of crime or method of solution (as so many uncanonical Holmes stories seem to), and it gives us glimpses into the characters of Holmes, Watson and Lestrade that are original and yet do not conflict with those we already know. And if anyone is in doubt that Steven King is a fine author and stylist -- and no, there is no horror or gruesomeness here, it's a pure Holmes story -- this story will be proof. There are many other fine stories in the book, which is well worth reading and can bear re-reading, as the canonical (I nearly typed conanical) stories do. Besides, if you got hold of a copy, you could read 'The Doctor's Case.'

Picasso by Patrick O'Brian

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:54:26 GMT

I have literally just got done reading O'Brian's Picasso, and I have to say I have found a great book! Not just good, fine, well-written, excellent, brilliant, bravo and adios -- it's all that; but it's great, too. Not so many of those around. I did think as I was reading it that this made O'Brian to biography what Tuchman was to history... taking events from the records, not just hearsay or what someone else wrote, by itself; unafraid to say the plain truth, when the truth was plain; aiming at neither praise nor blame, but clearly full of liking and admiration, without any kind of truckling, worship, or excuse-making, and similarly full of profound respect for the work, the work, the work, that Picasso continued to turn out almost without interruption until almost literally the day he died, some years past 90 (he was born in 1881). So many biographies, especially of artists, somehow miss the point, the reader feels at the end. After all the stories of love marriage children births deaths bad luck and good luck, friendships made and friendships broken, you quite often feel as though you've had a lot of detail without any real picture of the person -- many leaves without a glimpse of the tree. That is emphatically not the case here. O'Brian is well-acquainted with research using primary documents, interviews and secondary documents, and the problems of sifting evidence and coming to what conclusions one can, and when one can't, saying so in clear terms. Also, while O'Brian knew Picasso slightly (his own term), since O'Brian lived in the Rousillon for so many years, and Picasso spent his summers in various places in the Midi, in no way is this a buddy book or anything like it. One of the nice things about the book is that, only as far as is justified, O'Brian lets you know as major events happened in the world, if there was or was suspected to be an influence on Picasso's art. Picasso lived in Paris during the Occupation of WWII -- he was in his sixties and the Spain that had originally issued his passport was long gone behind the Spanish Civil War, so he was effectively a stateless alien, quite an unsafe thing to be anywhere let alone in occupied territory in wartime. He didn't truckle, a difficult position to maintain under those threatening and ugly circumstances, and many records and accounts of his life at this time provide evidence for this, not just some boastful statement after the fact. The anecdotes of what happened to him and what he did during the war as various Germans from troops sent to 'search' (even at times when troops had just searched and knew there was nothing to find) up to a visit from the German ambassador himself are recounted in the book, and I won't spoil them here (but a hint: Guernica was still in his Paris studio at the time). Hardcover copies of the original 1976 edition titled Pablo Ruiz Picasso are available occasionally, and only on the used book market, while a fine paperback edition titled simply Picasso and with a new preface by the author (the only textual difference from the original edition) was brought out some time after 1989 and itself reissued by HarperCollins in 2003.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 15:52:46 GMT

Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001) - dir. John Madden; Nicholas Cage, Penelope Cruz, John Hurt, Christian Bale, Irene Papas Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a love story, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the overwhelming events of World War II. It is based on the novel Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières, which is a novel of the war as it happened devastatingly on Cephalonia, told through the lives of several fictonal characters, but historically accurate in its depiction of the war and its effects. Every movie that attempts to portray a book, or bases itself on a book, especially a long and complex book, is the result of a struggle to deal with all the complexities and events of a much longer tale than a feature-length movie can tell. This is a superb movie, reflecting key events and characters of the novel, and showing and expressing much of what is there, and deepening some aspects, changing, collapsing or deleting whole story threads in order to make a feature-length movie. Captain Corelli's Mandolin does an excellent job of this, sifting and refining,and not losing its focus on the relationship between Pelagia (Penelope Cruz) and Corelli (Nicholas Cage), with Pelagia's father (John Hurt), her fiance Mandras (Christian Bale), and Mandras's mother (Irene Papas) as major supporting players. Both book and movie keep you wondering if Pelagia and Corelli will find a way to get together. Fittingly enough, given their different emphases, the movie answers one way, and the book another. Go see this fine movie.

Books in Brief

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 20:30:15 GMT

I like books that are intelligent without showing off, well-written so as to be a pleasure to read, cleverly structured enough to be interesting, with characters I actually come to like, love, admire, or be drawn to in some way, and that include some major element of background, field of endeavor, setting, or other factor of some complexity and interest that is unknown or little-known to me. Hence, this list.