Movie Notes: "Ladies in Lavender"

Saw this last night. Beautifully done, in a special sort of little British manner: charming, slight, but made with exquisite taste (itself perhaps a decent self-criticism) and with lovely performances by the two dames, Maggie and Judi. The actor Charles Dance adapted and directed. (It's his debut on both counts.)

As the young Polish virtuoso whose sudden apppearance in a Cornwall village sets up a small (tasteful, British) tempest of jealousy and buried sexual tension Daniel Bruhl is one of the most stunningly beautiful youths I've ever encountered at the movies. I kept looking for a physical flaw in this boy and couldn't locate one for a gander, as they say. With his finely-chiseled cheekbones, thin but sensual lips, thick boyish eyelids, aqualine jaw and slender yet surprisingly muscular frame (which, to our delight, we get to see in both a tailored tweed suit and a deliciously skin-tight period bathing suit) he not only acts a treat but is, as John Gielgud would have said, a dream of beauty. You can easily imagine him shagging other pretty boys in a Bel Ami video. At least, I can.

The only sort of odd note about the movie, or its story, is that—even though Dame Maggie converses with the boy in German, and even after he's learned to speak a bit of English—no one asks him how he got washed up on the shore in Cornwall. No one. Ever. Was he shipwrecked? We don't know. Did he fall off a boat somewhere in the Atlantic? Is he merely a figment of the world's fervid, pre-War imagination? Did fairies leave him on the beach for want of a cabbage-leaf? Pick one solution or any combination—it's all the same to Charles Dance.

Some thoughts on watching "All the President's Men" for the sixteenth time

Too bad there's no Oscar for Casting ...
... because Alan Shayne would have won it, hands-down. This is maybe the finest ensemble cast ever assembled for a major movie (and yes, I'm counting Robert Altman's oeuvre). Every single role, no matter how brief, is cast with absolutely the right actor. Aside from the principals (Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford—in what is arguably his best performance—Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Hal Holbrook—chillingly serpentine as "Deep Throat"—Jason Robards—a perfect Ben Bradlee—and Jane Alexander) the movie offers a panoply of richly detailed character work from the likes of Meredith Baxter, Ned Beatty, Stephen Collins, Penny Fuller, John McMartin, Robert Walden, Lindsay Crouse, Polly Holliday, Allyn Ann McLerie, Neva Patterson ... and on and on and on.

The movie also provides an increasingly important pair of messages for the present era: 1) The utter necessity of a free press, unfettered by threats of jail-time for the current sin of refusing to reveal one's sources; and 2) The importance to a investigative journalism of appallingly tedious leg-work and the application of craft-something the would-be heirs of Woodward and Bernstein ought to take to heart instead of printing rumors as fact, and grabbing headlines without engaging in the soul-numbing practice of painstaking research. They've become so enamoured of what Woodstein achieved that they've lost sight of how it was done, and why it held up so magnificently.

Sick at home with (not sick from) Gene Wilder

15 June 2005

I missed several days of work last week due to cold and flu-like illness, and filled in the time during which I was awake largely with reading. Herewith a few stray thoughts.

(Note: This was the only title I actually got to writing about. So shoot me.)

Kiss Me Like a Stranger—Gene Wilder's sweet little memoir, this month's package from Zooba.com

Wilder's approach to the book, punctuating his memories with a few asides and several conversations with his old psychiatrist, gives the material a kick. It's a gentle, humane little book—rather like the man himself, or at least my sense of what he must be like. It might have been just a bit longer; Wilder's observations on his movie projects and stage performances, and on the people with whom he's worked, are rather maddeningly brief—especially concerning the movies he wrote and directed himself, which generally get a passing nod. I adored Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother and The Woman in Red, and I'd love to know more about their writing and filming. Conversely, Wilder provides just enough about his two most famous collaborators, Richard Pryor and Gilda Radner. I always thought Radner and Wilder make an adorable couple, but I wasn't aware of Gilda's clutching need for validation nor that Wilder and Pryor, although a superb team on-screen, were (like Laurel and Hardy) little more than friendly acquaintances off the set. In keeping with his image, or at least with my image of him, Wilder has few bad things to say about people, and when he does they're either dead or anonymous. Which is probably as it should be.

"There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance": No, just unbalanced egocentric arrogant movie stars, apparently

Listening to Wait Wait ... don't tell me on NPR has become a weekly ritual. Under normal conditions Adam Felber is not my favorite semi-regular panelist on the show. But Felber got off a remark this past weekend that will probably keep me laughing for a week.

The topic was Tom Cruise's current, and very public, meltdown: his latest rant against antidepressants, the "pseudo-science" (a subject on which he ought to know plenty after all those years of Scientology) of psychiatry and the "irresponsibility" of Brooke Shields taking psychotropic drugs after a severe bout of post-partum depression. The discussion turned to Tom's bizarre history of publicity-grabbing devices (usually indulged in right on schedule: when he has a new movie in release) about which Felber noted, "Sometimes he shows up with a beard, sometimes he shows up with facial hair."

I don't know how many in the Wait Wait ... audience got the joke (the laugh was not one of the episode's larger bursts of public merriment) but I nearly fell off the couch.

Adam Felber, I officially love you. (But not in a gay way. Heh-heh.)