Manny Farber, film critic

Storytellers

Finished The Canterbury Tales. At times, the genius took my breath away - like the Wife of Bath segment. Started off on Jane Austen's Emma (1816). Austen truly is a genius of the novel - quiet and wise. What an artist! It is held by many that true character is revealed by extremities of situation - a Conradian view. To know what you are, you have to visit the heart of darkness. But I remember someone having said: "Any fool can face a crisis. It is the day-to-day living that wears one out." In that sense, Austen's quiet observations of domestic life may be one of the truest statements on the human condition. I remember reading her Persuasion years back and feeling it to be like a story told by a very wise, very old woman. A lesson that can be learnt only through experience. Experience and age were the very themes of the novel. Reading Emma now, I am also aware of the formal construction of the novel - its art. An unobtrusive narrative that flows with very few agitations, with a slightly detached air that lends a cosmic comicality to man and woman's most ardent efforts. At the same time free from the sentimentality that cloys some of the best work of Dickens, who was the later novelist. In some ways, Dickens is more feminine than Austen - for control of form, I think Austen ranks higher. Both are, however, among the great entertainers. Once, in a grey mood, I thought of Dickens' novels and looked forward to life again! Long ago, under the stars of a cold night, after the raw meals of the hunting life, we gathered about the communal fire and listened as the old man spun his tale. And for many this was the time of day they looked forward to the most. Life in its living gave no pause to reflect. But now as the old man weaved his plots, we saw the moral in the event, our character reflected in the one who stayed and fought or in the one who ran away, the patterns of life. And we learnt that understanding and wisdom is a great thing, and though among the last of life's fruits, not among the least to be prized.

Finished The Corrections. Watching “Deadwood”, Season 3. Reading The Canterbury Tales.

On bachelorhood

from the New English Review.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Glengarry Glen Ross. 1992. Directed by James Foley. Written by David Mamet, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 play. Top notch. Art. Ensemble acting par excellence.

Movies that I saw recently

Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray

Chungking Express
Wong Kar-Wai

Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer
Tom Tykwer

Welcome to Sarajevo
Michael Winterbottom

The Wild Bunch
Sam Peckinpah

Beowulf
Robert Zemeckis

9 songs
Michael Winterbottom

Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa

Mean.Streets
Martin Scorsese

La Grande Illusion
Jean Renoir

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
Carl Theodore Dreyer

The Cranes Are Flying
Mikhail Kalatozov

Beyond Borders
Martin Campbell

The Kingdom
Peter Berg

I am watching some of these for the second or third time.
Planning to add a little comment on these films in the coming days.

ah! films

“I believe the film world must be analogous to be world of the circus, where the bond between the bearded lady, the lilliputians, the trapeze arists, the clowns, is greater than the one they have with their normal brothers and sisters who live 'civilian' lives away from the circus."
Federico Fellini

Releasing today: Wall-E. Pixar appears to have done it again.

Clooney

Having watched him in the gloriously entertaining Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) couple of days back, last night I watched one George Clooney co-wrote and directed, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) - a serious, upright recounting of the revered American television journalist Ed Murrow's conflict with Senator Joseph McCarthy, that also examines the role of the media in a democracy and raises pertinent questions about American, and therefore world, politics.

Donnie Brasco. 1997. Al Pacino, Johnny Depp. Directed by Britisher Mike Newell. Good film.

Yesterday I started off on Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections. Published in 2001. About a hundred pages in the afternoon, and it has lived up to its stupendous acclaim.

Insomnia has got me on a regular diet of cinema. Trainspotting was a highlight. As was Sidney Lumet's debut as director, 12 Angry Men. The acting was uniformly superb. For me the standout was the explosive Lee J Cobb, who had been so good even alongside Marlon Brando's iconic performance in On the Waterfront. It's also great to know that, having made his first film at the age of 32 in 1957, Lumet last year made Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which received rave reviews. In the 1970's, Lumet had directed Al Pacino in some of his best films: Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. His book Making Movies is considered by some to be the best ever by a filmmaker on his craft.

Christopher Nolan's Memento was original and its techniques exhilarating in their audacity. His script calls for attention and repays with gripping excitement.

Couple of weeks back I read E Annie Proulx's (famous as the author of the short story "Brokeback Mountain" - the basis of the Ang Lee film) novel The Shipping News (1993). An extremely impressive work; very readable too despite the argot of Newfoundland fisherfolk. The character studies that make up the book are unfailingly engaging, and we are made to feel for the decidedly unheroic protagonist Quoyle. Wise and witty too. A favourite passage of mine, perhaps for personal reasons:

'There's two ways of living here now. There's the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there's the new way. Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, your brother's in South Africa, your mother's in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it.'

I prefer the old way.

Five terrible atrocities against women around the world

Please dont support these atrocities

The 1000 best movies ever made

according to the film critics of The New York times here

Philosophical Films

A categorized list of about 200 films that deal with philosophical and religious themes.

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

What does it take to run Microsoft?

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, 2001



More

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."

Modernists

Phone-line interference in the form of children's voices singing just beyond the range of human hearing, mole-narrators meticulously describing their protective burrows, salesmen less shocked by being turned into beetles than embarrassed by the fact that their boss and family might see them this way - Kafka's warped and absurd snapshot of 20th-century humanity is, perversely, probably the most objective one there is.

Link

Bataille collapses the sublime into base matter and fragments the self within the kaleidoscope of its desires. He chops man's head off, makes the sun bleed and the sky reek with the stench of God's decomposing flesh.

"Top 10 short stories"

Very few story writers work with the safety net of a plot conceived in advance. They trust in the humming tension of a single opening line or in an image that rises in their mind, or in a fragment of a character's voice.

Remembering Joyce's "The Dead" gave me goosebumps.

[How could I resist?]

"With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg

Merry Christmas