It was just over a decade ago that the young American actor Jeremy Piven had a run-in with mercury poisoning. It must have been a low blow. After getting roles in such touchstones of culture as Seinfeld and Entourage and establishing his renown as an actor of worth and substance in the vast and glittering landscape of film and television, he was appearing on Broadway in 2008 in a revival of Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s 80s satire of the movie business. It sounded like a great idea, it really did, but things were not so clear-cut in the world of Piven. Sidelined by an illness whose cause was unknown, Jeremy Piven…
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For a philosopher with a reputation that tends to be pooh-poohed as excessively gloomy and pessimistic, Schopenhauer and his posthumous popularity find no respite in one incident that occurred in the year 1821, when he was staying in his lodgings in Berlin. A young and brilliant man then in his thirties, with a spitfire’s outlook and the temperament of a boiling kettle, he ran up against something that he had long since started disdaining: the lives and habits of frivolous normal people. Throw in a nervous disposition and the needs for the silence and solitude demanded by the nature of his work, and you have a potent cocktail of confrontation.…
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The luminous and streaky light rippling in the waters of the Inland Sea has the subtle power of a desert mirage. Pellucid like those of an atoll or a sea-green lagoon, these waters fill up an internal space connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Sea of Japan, also making possible the shipping industry integral to an island nation that until the nineteenth century was closed to the world. It hid its secrets from its neighbors greedily, cleaving only to itself, and when at last it permitted the opening of its ports to the American ships helmed by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, it burst onto the modern stage and unfurled its…
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I’m not sure that the wry and half-baked experimentation of Alain Resnais’ movie, Mon oncle d’Amérique, succeeds according to the lavish praise heaped on it by its receptive critics in 1980, the year of its release in France. It is an uneven movie that becomes more and more questionable as the story advances, its deadening thud timed to the smarmy interludes of its clean-cut figure of authority, the writer and neurobiologist Henri Laborit, who lectures us on the hard-wired evolutionary impulses and drives that determine our actions and in consequence our lives. This is behaviorism at its worst, its most specious, and the saving grace of the movie is the…
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It can be interesting to think that the fortuity of your birth and the socio-economic circumstances foisted on you from the first are so decisive and for some so life-ending and catastrophic. Some people seem to strike gold out of the womb and enjoy the benefits of a lavish lifestyle, a wealthy family, and all the assets of the developed world; others find themselves in an immediate hailstorm of fire and brimstone, bullied and brutalized by misfortune, and the world is to them a less stable and carefree place. There is of course everything in between these extremes—but the sheer intoxicating absurdity of the number of possible outcomes, all of…
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A part of the creative artist that tends to be as inseparable from his work as from his personality and character, a certain egotism often comes with the territory. Immersed in the creative process and the material of her work, drawing from the murkiest depths of her mind as a creator, she finds herself face to face with a creative legacy teetering on the ledge of absolute oblivion but with the possibility of some kind of lasting, precarious immortality. It doesn’t matter that this immortality is an illusion; as much a part of life as its counterpart, death concerns the artist, who cannot escape from touching on it. In The…
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It is in the bubbling turmoil of the burned-out banlieues of Paris that the feelings of its characters and of their apparent oppressors become clear. But La Haine distills these feelings into a curt and undeniable one-word message, played out during something less than twenty-four hours on the streets: hate. This is the takeaway that the moral center of the film, Hubert, describes in a recurring joke in which a man plummeting to his death has the consolation or the distraction that everything, as long as he’s still plummeting, is going just fine. As suggested by the movie, if it isn’t the plummeting itself, hate is the feeling of this…
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About the smooth-flowing tracking shots inside what appears to be a seamy and enchanted grotto, with all the buttery and naked flesh that accumulates in this kind of establishment, not much need be said. Sumptuous and apparently sexy—it was first marketed as a titillating thriller—Exotica takes on the suggestive challenge of a strip club and all its associated stereotypes and layers its script and plot with one emotional revelation after another, changing what we’ve seen with a retroactive yank like the most exciting thrillers. But Exotica is more than a thriller. Its slow revelations not only unsettle but stir the viewer to a reevaluation. The seamy nighttime Toronto of the…
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It is said that great art often contains an element of contextual weirdness, a bit of the outré or taboo that contributes to a lasting impression that remains with us for years, even for a lifetime. If such an adage is true, then Léolo, a film directed by the meteoric filmmaker Jean-Claude Lauzon, endures in the cinematic annals as a masterwork of the very kind. The narration in voiceover is that of a man reflecting on his childhood as Léo Lauzon, the poetic protagonist who uses his imagination to flee from the squalor and madness of his blue-collar home in the Mile-End neighborhood of Montreal. Making known early in the…
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Between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Midtown Manhattan, pullulating with hawkers and dealers and prospective patrons, the Diamond District is a prominent interchange of the global diamond industry and an economic mecca for those intending to buy diamonds, jewelry, or various trinkets containing the same. As a bastion of brick-and-mortar enterprise in an era dominated by both the internet and pristine commercial shopping centers, it is the streetwise economic sibling of New York counterparts such as the Financial District, and its grungy gusto has long since continued to hold favor. Mingling with hawkers, dealers, bookmakers, and the cacophony of urban chaos, parting this madness as a diamond dealer with an…
