my 10 best films – “Copenhagen”
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Category: at the movies
October 18, 2020
my 10 best films – “Closer”
“The Bolt” (c.1778)
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
________
in the spirit of recording my ten best
ever films, my favourite films of all
time, something that, at my relatively
advanced age, 71, I feel entitled to do,
however might some think me
presumptuous, others, not inaccurate,
I started last night with Closer
Mike Nichols directs, who also helmed
another of my ten favourites, Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which, having
just watched it recently, I won’t again
soon, having been, once more,
devastated, I cry from the first roll of
the credits, bawl when the music
comes on, a theme that’s reverberated
with me through the several ensuing
ages, same as just happened again
to me with this one
The Blower’s Daughter, listen, tells
the story, breathes the essence of,
anguish, the tale itself follows, four
individuals, in a tight, literary, conceit,
live out the agonies of participants in
modern emotional interactions, or, at
least, my modern, 2004, it all takes
place in London, with a brief, though
revelatory, postscript in New York, in
order to tie loose ends together, they
are called upon, the performers,
consummate in every instance, Julia
Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman,
Clive Owen, however reduced might
be their full cast, a mighty, note,
professional challenge, to display the
myriad tragedies inherent in all loving
entanglements
try to find it, it ought to knock your
socks off
meanwhile, think about your own
best list, if you don’t suppose it’s
at all too early
R ! chard
psst: stick around, incidentally, for the
final credits, to Mozart’s
transcendental Soave sia il vento,
from his Così fan tutte, aptly,
and sublimely, introspective
June 9, 2019
the conditional
“If Once You Have Slept on an Island“ (1996)
Jamie Wyeth
________
the conditional mood is easy, it always
follows if
if I had a hammer, for instance
or
if I were a rich man
it is not a real event, as Classical
representation would be in art, were I
to make that synesthetic juxtaposition,
which is to say, were I to replace the
visual sense with that of letters, but
rather like Surrealism, for instance,
in that other context, a superimposed
idealization
here’s a poem you’ve probably
already heard, or heard of, through
its final, and epochal, verse, Kipling’s
“If“, a towering instance of moral
suasion on our culture
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
in the spirit of juxtaposition, compare
that to Polonius’ admonition to his son,
Laertes, upon that young colt’s imminent
return to France, where he had earlier
been, reputedly, carousing
Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, act 1, scene 3,
all, incidentally, in the imperative, the mood
of command, authority, however consequential
there, or not
a film called “If…” is also worth visiting
in this context, from the 1970s, with an
iconic soundtrack that gripped the
generation then that heard it, listen,
watch, the Missa Luba, be gripped
R ! chard
November 11, 2018
“A Delicate Balance” – Edward Albee
“Theatre Drama“
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
___________
there are only a very few 20th-Century
American playwrights who’ve weathered
the rigours of time, two with several
successes, Eugene O’Neill, and
Tennessee Williams, but only one to
tower above those two with only one
work to outmatch them, Edward Albee,
his “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?“
is every inch a king
this is not an impossible feat, Margaret
Mitchell wrote her only book, “Gone
with the Wind“, a contemporary “Iliad“,
which will find its rightful place again
in world literature, note, when our own
too reverberant still times cede to the
concerns of another, less pertinently
fraught era, like reading “War and
Peace“, for instance, now that
Napoleon is long gone
“Gone with the Wind“, quick, name
another 20th-Century novel to top it,
seconds are too long, “Gone with
the Wind” is in our bloodstream,
like Walt Disney or Marilyn Monroe,
even if you’ve never read it, which
you should
but Edward Albee wrote another play
which deserves some attention, and
with redoubtable performances from
both the consummate ever Katharine
Hepburn, and from our own Canadian
tower of unutterable talent, Kate Reid,
abetted by masterful presentations
from no less than the revered Paul
Scofield and the iconic Joseph Cotten
when their supporting numbers come
up, here is a show to watch for, if
nothing else, those individual stellar
contributions
but “A Delicate Balance“, also an
incontestable masterpiece, is about
friendship, and tells a lesson you’ll
not soon forget, friendship is more
than, for better or for worse, just
knowing each other, it says, an
idiosyncratic, indeed recurrent,
Albee theme
cinematography, note, is, here,
dreadful, though actually in that
manner conceived, however
improbably, by an otherwise
noteworthy director, you’ll even
think they’ve shrunk his frame
but visual style shouldn’t let you
forego the play’s profound substance,
nor the triumphant work of its illustrious
cast, at the very top, mostly, of their
considerable, even defining, powers
watch
R ! chard
July 15, 2018
at the movies – “Phaedra”
“Phaedra and Hippolytus“ (1802)
_____________
Phaedra, according to Greek myth, fell
in love with her stepson, and, of course,
ruined, for everyone, everything
she’s been represented in music by
composers from, at least, Rameau,
1733, to, here, now, Benjamin Britten,
1976, by way of even Tangerine
Dream, 1973, however peripherally,
and the hits just keep on coming
in literature, the story goes back to
Euripides, 480 – 406 BCE, through
Jean Racine, 1639 – 1699, poet at
the court of Louis XlV, the version
that I studied in French Literature,
along with, in English, Shakespeare,
who was doing courtiers, rather,
and royalty there, then, incidentally,
instead of the Continent’s iconic
Mediterranean figures – it remains
my favourite play in my mother
tongue, next to, for me, its only
other equal, “Cyrano de Bergerac“
but I’d never seen a production of
“Phaedra“ until this searing,
modern, rendition, set in, relatively
contemporary, Greece, London,
and Paris, with the irrepressible,
the irresistible, Melina Mercouri,
torrid temptress, the very goddess
Hera, here, and Anthony Perkins,
perfect as her suitor, a youth still,
pulsing with a young man’s
unbridled intentions
sparks fly, from moment to
incendiary moment – I had often
to pause to catch my breath –
portents of an inescapable, and
eventually epic, indeed mythic,
apocalypse
watch, if you dare
R ! chard
April 29, 2018
“Something for Everyone” – an intermission
__________
to my mind, the already formidable
then Angela Lansbury, 1970,
should’ve been at least nominated
for an Oscar, not to mention won
it, for her indelible impression of
Countess von Ornstein, an
aristocrat if there ever was one,
in the delightful “Something for
Everyone“
she has no money left after the
Second World War, but lives still
in her castle, which remains, as
stipulated in the relevant
documentation, in the family
into perpetuity
but she has trouble getting the
strawberries which she feels
are her right still, among other
threatened entitlements, out of
her sheer nobility
the young Micheal York, as Konrad,
on a bicycle trip through Austria,
sees the castle – Neuschwanstein,
in actuality, Ludwig ll‘s pied à terre
in Bavaria, standing in for the one
supposed to be in Austria – and sets
out to transform it into his own
domain
there’s yodelling, and dirndls, and
lederhosen aplenty, not to mention
a great deal of skullduggery, but it’s
a fairy tale, and, as such, leads to a
happy, of sorts, ending
R ! chard
November 17, 2017
Dmitri Shostakovich – “Symphony No 4” in C minor, opus 43
“Portrait of Joseph Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili)“ (1936)
_________
if you’ve been waiting for a Shostakovich
to write home about among his early
symphonies, here’s the one, his
Symphony no 4 in C minor, opus 43 will
knock your socks off from its very
opening gambit, have a seat, settle in,
and get ready for an explosive hour
the Fourth was written in 1936, some
years after the death of Lenin, and the
instalment of Stalin as the supreme,
and ruthless, authority, after several
years throughout the Twenties of
maneuvering himself, cold-bloodedly,
into that position
from Stalin, “Death is the solution to
all problems. No man – no problem.“
fearing retribution after Stalin had
criticized his recent opera, “Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk“, Shostakovich
cancelled the first performance of
this new work, due to take place in
December, ’36, others had already
suffered internal exile or execution
who had displeased the tyrant, a
prelude to the infamous Great Terror
the Symphony was eventually played
in 1961, 25 years later, conducted by
no less than Kirill Kondrashin, who’d
partnered Van Cliburn a few years
earlier in Cliburn’s conquest of Russia,
but along with this time however the
long-lived Leningrad Philharmonic
Orchestra
to a friend, I said, this is the biggest
thing since verily Beethoven, no one
has so blown me away symphonically
since then
he looked forward, he replied, to
hearing it
the Fourth Symphony has three distinct
movements, to fit thus appropriately the
definition of symphony, though the first
and third have more than one section,
something Shostakovich would have
learned from already Beethoven, it gives
the opportunity of experiencing a variety
of emotions within one uninterrupted
context, add several movements and
you have a poignant, peripatetic musical
journey, more intricate, psychologically
complex, than many other even eminent
composers, Schubert, Chopin,
Mendelssohn, even Brahms, for instance
it’s helpful to think of film scores, and
their multiple narrative incidents,
brimming with impassioned moments,
however disparate, Shostakovich had
already written several of them
let me point out that Shostakovich’s
rhythms are entirely Classical, even
folkloric in their essential aspects,
everywhere sounds like a march,
proud and bombastic, if not a
veritable dance, peasants carousing,
courtiers waltzing, and repetition is
sufficiently present to not not
recognize the essential music
according to our most elementary
preconceptions
but the dissonances clash, as though
somewhere the tune, despite its rigid
rhythms, falls apart in execution, as
though the participants had, I think,
broken limbs, despite the indomitable
Russian spirit
this is what Shostakovich is all about,
you’ll hear him as we move along
objecting, however surreptitiously,
cautiously, to the Soviet system, like
Pasternak, like Solzhenitsyn, without
ever, like them, leaving his country
despite its manifest oppression, and
despite the lure of Western accolades,
Nobel prizes, for instance, it was their
home
and there is so much more to tell, but
first of all, listen
R ! chard
June 26, 2017
“Cairo Time”
“Street In Cairo“ (1873)
____________
many years ago, when I was in my
skittish twenties, and the world had
opened up to me as I’d started work
at an international airline, I opted
to go to Tunisia, less harried than
Morocco, I thought, and probably
less expensive
a friend had asked to come along,
who worked for the same company
Judy was my age, honey blond, lithe,
curvaceous, voluptuous, though
ever entirely unassuming, we made
a lovely pair
but soon the locals had our number,
understood that I was merely her
friend, no challenger for her
affections, somehow
from our seaside hotel in nearby
Hammamet, a coastal resort, we set
out our first day for the nearby capital,
Tunis, a dusty town, I remember, a
cowtown, or a camel town, north of
the Sahara Desert, with shoddy
buildings and not much else, I was
young
we found ourselves on the Boulevard
Habib Bourguiba, the name of the first
President of the Republic of Tunisia,
not paved then, or with what we used
to call soft shoulders, when the
pavement doesn’t reach the sidewalks,
where we looked for a restaurant or a
coffee house to get our bearings
inside a nondescript place we found
for lack of anything else, we sat down,
had a coffee, looked around
it didn’t take long for us to realize that
Judy was the only girl in the place, so
we finished our fare and took off
when all the men in the place followed
we found a cab to take us back to the
hotel and didn’t return to Tunis apart
from accompanied
but that’s another story
it’s seemed so hard for me to explain
this to people who haven’t experienced
this discomfort cause this kind of
indignity is so foreign to us, offensive
and hard to imagine
but a film I just saw about Cairo,
“Cairo Time“, gives a good impression
of the differences in our cultures
were it only for this insight, I wouldn’t
suggest this movie, but because it is
a wonderful travelogue through this
remarkable city, with views of bazaars,
pyramids in the distance, and all of it
in splendid cinemascope and colour,
the film is a marvel
Patricia Clarkson, an actress I greatly
admire, plays the role Katharine
Hepburn played in “Summertime“,
one of my all-time favourite movies,
of a woman alone in a city, needing
to trust in the kindness of strangers
Clarkson‘s kind stranger is no slouch
either
Richard
January 10, 2017
“When You Come” – Daniel Goodwin
“The Accolade“ (1901)
___________
When you come to greet me, shyly,
wearing nothing but your love for me
I will come to meet you halfway
like a falcon returning to your wrist.
And when you raise your arm,
trembling ever so slightly,
I will alight and let you pull
the velvet shroud over my eyes.
—————–
courtly love, an idea of love that took
shape in the 12th Century in what would
become France eventually, though its
development soon touched all the
countries, or kingdoms then, of Europe,
became the primary subject of poetry
and literature especially through the
influence of Eleanor of Acquitaine,
without a doubt the most powerful
woman in Europe during her reign as
Queen of France after her marriage to
Louis Vll, which was annulled after a
time for her having not borne Louis
any sons, then with Henry, Duke of
Normandy, who then became Henry ll
of England, with whom she had
Richard l, the Lionheart, as well as the
later King John – the wonderful film,
“The Lion in Winter” with Katherine
Hepburn as Eleanor is a brilliant
account of her later life with Henry
and their fractious sons, featuring
as well Peter O’Toole as Henry, and a
young Anthony Hopkins as Richard
her patronage of the arts in general
then, from her position of power,
allowed, much as it would today any
potentate, the dissemination of
courtly love as a cultural ideal that
ultimately led to some of the greatest
works of our Western cultures, notably
Dante‘s “The Divine Comedy“, where
Dante courts chastely the married
Beatrice, who becomes indeed even
an intermediary for him during his
passage through Paradise
the idea, through the interpolation of
the Catholic Church, was that courtly
love should be pure, unconsummated,
a noble admiration and reverence of
an object of adulation within the strict
constraints of an impossible physical
conjunction, the model being, of course,
the emulation of the worship of the
Virgin Mary
Cervantes‘ “Don Quixote“ is a later
example of this same disposition,
though by this time, 1605 to 1615,
the practice of courtly love had
been sullied by too many evidently
corrupt practitioners, and a more
cynical therefore culture, so that
Don Quixote despite his blameless
pursuit of Dulcinea, his unwitting
muse, is made out to be a fool
given the context of his more
contentious times, albeit a benign,
and somewhat heroic, fool
but my very favourite such story is
that of Edmond Rostand‘s “Cyrano
de Bergerac“, whose long nose
makes him disparage his own
chances of ever achieving the love
of his beloved, Roxane
José Ferrer got an Oscar for his
superb performance of Cyrano in
1950, but my ideal remains that of
Gérard Dépardieu, a complete
wonder, in 1990, both very much,
however, worth your time
all this as a preface to the poem
above, When You Come, which
seems to me of that tradition,
despite having been written in
2014 according to its inclusion
then in the Literary Review of
Canada, perhaps because of the
introduction of the falcon, not at
all a contemporary image, but
fraught with the impression of a
love that is all devotion instead
of conquest, a kind of love that
in my particular circumstances
I’ve come to reach for rather
than anything less refined
true love, in other words, can
never not love, as I’ve said earlier
Richard
November 12, 2016
“Medea” – Euripides
“Medea“ (1898)
____________
catching up on my Greek tragedies
for a course I’m following online, I
happened upon this marvel
Medea, by Euripides, was written
in 431 BCE, the next significant
playwright in world history was
Shakespeare, the Dark Ages had
been “Dark” indeed, it took a
Renaissance, in fact a new
flowering of Greek and Roman
arts and institutions to get us
moving forward again, you’ll
notice how much of Euripides
there is in Shakespeare, not to
mention in the French Classicists,
Racine and Corneille
none of these, incidentally, have
yet been equalled, never mind
surpassed, except by maybe
Anton Checkov, the superb
Russian playwright
Zoe Caldwell won the 1982 Tony
Award for best actress for her
incarnation of Medea, she was
up against Katharine Hepburn
and Geraldine Page, no less,
among other distinguished
luminaries, this is, in other
words, no ordinary performance,
watch her turn a mere script,
however incandescent, into a
set of spoken arias worthy of
the most celebrated divas
everyone else in the play is also
strong, excellent, impeccable
note the application of the three
unities, of time, place, and action,
there is no set change, everything
takes place within 24 hours,
according to the dictates of the
very plot, the action surrounds
the expulsion from Corinth of
Medea and her two, and Jason’s,
sons, the restrictions of the form
put the tension, the drama, utterly
in the hands of the poet, the
success of the work depends not
on stunts, special effects, but on
words, poetry
Aristotle says in his “Poetics“,
section I, part VI, “The Spectacle has, indeed, an
emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts,
it is the least artistic, and connected least with the
art of poetry. … Besides, the production of
spectacular effects depends more on the art
of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.”
the three unities have no room,
therefore, for “Spectacle“, their
product must be reflections of
the poet’s humanity, heart,
straight through, if s/he can,
to ours
Richard
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