Since I no longer cook, shop, or indeed leave Carolina
Meadows at all, I find there are many more hours in the day. Yesterday afternoon I watched a three part
BBC rendering of Jane Austen’s Sense and
Sensibility on Netflix. Some of you
may have seen the great 1995 movie version of that novel starring Emma Thompson as
Elinor Dashwood. The movie is immortalized
in my memory for one luminous moment almost at the very end – what is sometimes
called a “recognition scene” – when Edward Ferrars reveals that it is his
brother, not he, who has married Lucy, and that his heart is and always has
been Elinor’s. For the entire movie
Elinor has kept her volcanic feelings under total control while she deals with
the melodramatic but rather shallow romantic attachment of her sister Marianne
to the unworthy Willoughby. Now, the
controls break and Thompson, as Elinor, sobs uncontrollably until she turns,
her face in a radiant smile, and looks at the man she has loved virtually since
they met. It is an acting tour de force that lifts the film to the
ranks of true art.
The BBC version is not bad, for all that it lacks
Hugh Grant as Edward and the always splendid Alan Rickman as Colonel
Brandon. But the actress who plays
Elinor, although she does an entirely creditably job, simply cannot match
Thompson’s brilliance. The scene in
question is staged almost identically in the BBC rendition, but while it satisfies,
it does not electrify.
I am a great fan of such cinematic moments. I am sure my readers have their favorites. In these terrible times, as we wait to see
how many of our fellow Americans will die of the virus, pure art can lift us
and soothe us and excite us.
11 comments:
Here's a very different cinematic moment, which shows how banal and trivial details of everyday life make themselves present in emergencies, when our minds "should" be focused on details of the extraordinary moment we are living in order to save our lives and those around us.
It comes from Broadway Danny Rose, a Woody Allen movie.
The Mafia is after Danny Rose (Woody Allen) and Mia Farrow and they want to kill them.
Mia is urging Danny to flee because in a few minutes the Mafia killers will arrive. But Danny can only think of his socks which are drying on the clothes line. He's got to see if they've dried before he flees.
Every day with Corona Virus is like that for me.
One sequence that your readers may not have seen is the last few minutes of Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us. In a remote village in Iran, a documentary filmmaker has been waiting for an old woman to die so that he might film the mourning ritual. At the end he hitches a ride on the back of a doctor's motorcycle; they ride through stupefyingly gorgeous fields while the doctor urges attention to the beauties of this earth. The filmmaker notes something like "Yet some say that the other world is more beautiful." The doctor: "But who has returned to tell us of it?" etc.
I'm not a fan of movies, for various reasons nobody needs to go into. But I am a fan of all kinds of music, and knowing our host is also a fan and a musician, I'll recommend the video here (about 20% down-screen at right) by remarkable early music vocal group out of Boston: http://www.blueheron.org/
There are exceptions to my movie allergy. I like Kubrick's work until The Shining. Diane Kurys' debut, Peppermint Soda (Diabolo Menthe), is a favorite, but one which I haven't seen in decades.
Paths of Glory is the most powerful war movie I've ever seen. The first scene, as I recall (it's been years), of the men in the trenches before entering into battle is impressive.
Well, our Prime Minster (Jacinda Ardern) has just made an announcement that effectively confines me to barracks. Those over 70 or those or the with a respiratory condition should stay home. I am only 63 but I do suffer from asthma (I get a terrible cough after every cold which lasts for weeks - indeed I am just recovering from such a cough right now). That’s about 1.8 ‘co-morbidities’. So although I will be working from home a lot (as well as gardening and taking solitary walks and runs) I expect to have a more leisure for binge-watching. As a help to other readers in a similar position here are my Netflix/Neon /Acorn picks.
1) I just watched the new His Dark Materials dramatisation. I am not a big Pullman fan. His object was clearly to supersede CS Lewis by writing better books than the Chronicles of Narnia but with an atheistic (as opposed to Christian) subtext. Unfortunately he just doesn't have Lewis’s literary talent. His writing style strikes me is decidedly clunky and the stories lacking in joy. However the books scrub up well in this adaptation; the CG is good and the young actress who plays the lead (Lara) is excellent. Four stars
2) ‘Better Than Us’. This is a Russian sci-fi drama about the introduction of humanoid robots, adequately dubbed into English, featuring an obnoxious Russian oligarch, his even more obnoxious princeling son-in-law, and a down on his luck surgeon with a disintegrating family who is forced to work in a morgue. We are supposed to care about the surgeon’s children ,which fortunately it is easy to do as the child actress who plays his four-year-old daughter is again really excellent. (I often find the children in American dramas so repellent that I end up wanting them to die.) Well-written, well acted and taut, along the lines of Westworld but with a much smaller budget. I have not yet binge-watched to the end. Four stars
3) ‘DEVS’ a Sci-Fi miniseries directed by Alex Garland who also directed the excellent ‘Ex Machina’ a taut psychological drama with a really interesting Sci-Fi McGuffin. I Love Garland's visual style which for with eyes to see is clearly heavily influenced by Klimt. Thus far the story has not featured an actual Klimt picture (Ex Machina includes Klimt’s picture of Wittgenstein’s sister) but there are gold on gold effects which clearly suggested Klimt to me. It helps to know a little bit about both philosophy and physics. Again I like the lead actress, in this case a lean Sonoya Mizuno
Four stars.
4) Foyle’s War. Long running historical drama series featuring a middle-aged Detective Inspector in Southern England during (and immediately after) WWII. (In the later episodes he becomes a rather dissident member of MI5.) Well-acted, well-written with a brilliantly understated hero. The episodes work as ‘police procedural’ mysteries but also as dramatised slices of history. There are even Cambridge spies. Probably works better if you are Oxbridge types as I and my wife am. Five stars.
5) The Crown. Standout performances form all concerned but especially John Lithgow as Churchill. (Only problem: Churchill was middling to short, but Lithgow is tall and tends to loom over the other characters physically whereas the real Churchill only loomed over them psychologically.) I also liked Matt Smith as the Duke of Edinburgh. It’s always been a puzzle to me as to why Elizabeth liked him so much (she apparently had to overcome a lot of opposition to bring him to the altar). Smith portrays him as the sort of man you can understand a young woman falling for, without so far as one ca see radically falsifying his character. Perhaps a slightly too sympathetic portrayal of the Duke of Windsor. The more you read about him the more worthless (by almost any standard) he appears to have been. Helena Bonham Carter is also excellent in the second series as Princess Margaret. Five stars
Here is that moment from Sense & Sensibility.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t_NZNgm66xI
I have watched increasingly less TV/movies this past year; I either start something, find it redundant, and lose interest or re-watch something I know I like. Foyle's War, however, sounds promising - thank you, Charles, for the recommendation. To take a break from work at the end of the day I started watching the (free) Met Opera streams. I've never much been into opera and granted watching on my laptop is nowhere near the same experience as being present in the theatre, but the sets and the orchestra are stunning. A different way to pass the time. Stay well, everyone!
"Weisensee"--a German series about the last years of East Germany.
"A French Village"--a French series about the Nazi occupation of France and its immediate aftermath; quite emotionally harrowing much of the time but not simplistic; good acting
If you like Emma Thompson (and you should!) I highly recommend the movie "Carrington", based, fairly accurately, on the life of the artist Dora Carrington, and centered around her relationship with Lytton Strachey. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112637/ It's one of my favorite movies of all time. I can't pick out a single scene to nominate here, but it's all excellent. Both Thompson and Jonathan Pryce, who plays Strachey, are excellent. It has added fun for philosophers in that Stracehy was deeply involved with the Cambridge Apostles group at this time, which included Russell, Moore, Keyens, etc. They are only mentioned in the film (Carrington herself was on the edge of, rather than involved in, the Bloomsbury Group, so not in so much direct contact with those people) but it provides interesting context to the early days of analytic philosophy.
I'd also recommend the beautiful and haunting first film by my favorite contemporary Russian director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, "The Return": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376968/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 . The delivery of the line, "I could love you if you were different" just kills me each time. All of Zvyagintsev's movies are great, but this first one still stands out.
I saw Foyle's War (quite a few episodes anyway) some years ago when I still had a working TV. Enjoyed it, even though I'm USian w no personal ties to Oxbridge. Don't think that's required to enjoy it.
Nowadays I cd watch things on my laptop but I usu don't, nor have set up a Roku stick and TV. (Occasionally I would go to a movie theater but of course that's not possible at the moment.)
Re s.w.: I've seen Paths of Glory, also years ago. It's good, though I'm not quite as big a fan of it as you are.
If you haven't yet seen the HBO series "Rome", you should definitely check it out. The end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire woven around the fictionalized lives of two soldiers that are given aristeiai in Caesar's Gallic Wars (Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus). As with a lot of HBO shows, it comes on strong with sex and nudity at first, but once it gets down to business it's about as good as TV can get.
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