Proust—what an author, eh? He can be difficult to dig into, and not only because his work can give rise to an infamous snobbery, an ironic response to an author that made much of his undying contempt for snobbery. He can also inspire so much thinking and self-reflection that his winding tome, as many of his critics and readers have already pointed out, can serve as the ultimate self-help book. And it’s great that the…
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The Tramp has to be the most imperishable character in the history of physical comedy. Buster Keaton, his stoic and graceful attitude toward the beleaguered lives of his characters, his immense poise in the midst of disaster, the well-thought-out stunts and set designs—his might have been a greater talent. And Harold Lloyd might have been more entertaining, more daring, and more versatile as a mainstay of the same pantheon of physical comedy. But the Tramp…
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After watching Teorema, I get the feeling that one of the rivals of the image-focused cinema of Ingmar Bergman in the twentieth century was the renegade and iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini, who with the image of a face, a body, a sudden movement, or a stony silence was often able to draw out the stunning intensity of a character. Above all in Teorema, beyond the piquant provocations of a slew of ideas and the crosscurrents…
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Could it be that the mainspring of the behavior of our delightful twenty-something protagonist, Frances Ha, is a kind of innocuous solipsism? The walled-in world of her self-esteem, her occasional self-amusement suggesting that she’s getting along in the world despite its harshness and cruel indifference, her ability to dance down the street with a lithely flying, pirouetting body in those rich and vibrant tracking shots on the avenues of New York City without the slightest…
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As directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise raises an important question: if the entire milieu in which he finds himself is one steeped in suavity, refinement, the old-world elegance of the jet-setting crowd, what are the limits of a man’s suavity? Surely you can only become so refined and smooth-talking before you simply refine yourself out of reality, like a pencil sharpened to a nub. To this grand and maybe irrelevant question Ernst Lubitsch’s…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
