Tag: Books & Movies

Unexpected Pleasure

Entertainment, Literature

While New Wife was off doing girl-shopping the other day, I decided that instead of hanging around the department store looking bored (a.k.a. the Husband Exile), I’d go over to a nearby bookstore and browse some second-hand books because I’ve run out of fiction to read.

I have written several times before how much I enjoyed the wonderful Stieg Larsson “Millenium” TV series — The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest — and I’ve watched the series several times.

Anyway, I decided to read Larsson’s original novels, just to see for myself how bad they are — yes, he’s a filthy socialist but then again #Swedish so that’s not entirely surprising — and I discovered something quite rare:  the TV series is actually better than the novel series, but not by much.

What the TV show of Dragon Tattoo  did was to cut out, for example, the relationship between Lisbeth Salander and her boss, as well as Mikke Blomkvist’s affair with one of the murder suspects — both of which were quite extraneous to the plot.

More importantly, the sexual encounters between Blomkvist and Salander, which were numerous in the novel, were pared back to a only a couple in the TV episode — making their relationship much more fragile as a result.

I’ve only read the first novel so far (Dragon Tattoo) because I didn’t want to buy all three in case they sucked terribly and I would be stuck with two unread books.  But now that I’ve read that one, I think I’ll go back and get the other two because once I’d learned to ignore the rampant socialism, I rather liked Larsson’s writing style.

If you’re really stuck for some reading material (as I was), you could do a lot worse.

Better still, though:  buy the Extended Cut DVD version of the TV series*.

And do not repeat NOT buy the non-Swedish version with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, because Noomi Rapace (Salander) and Michael Nyqvist (Blomqvist) are both beyond-words brilliant while the other two aren’t.  We won’t even talk about the stunning Swede MILF Lena Endre…

 

*Be warned that the current version of Millennium available through Netfux has been severely edited, and it’s terrible:  whole scenes have been deleted and even some characters erased, making the show almost incomprehensible, not to say less enjoyable.  (Netflix delenda est)

Surprising Turnaround

Movies, Music

…from me, that is.

I’ve made fun of that skinny little Brit actor with the fey name, Timothee Chalamet, currently the bonker of one of the Kardashian coven (Kimmy, Kluless, Kunty, whatever).

But the other night I watched him play a young Bob Dylan in  –Out Of Nowhere   A Complete Unknown  and his performance blew me out of my socks.  And I’m not even a fan of Dylan’s, to put it mildly.

Not only did Chalamet nail Dylan’s speaking voice and attitude, he also got the singing voice almost perfectly.  And the movie was a gem:  a little time capsule of the early 1960s — the best compliment I could pay it is that I wished it was longer.

Do yourself a favor, and watch it, and him.  (I can’t remember which channel it’s on, but whatever.)

R.I.P. Val

Movies

I’m sorry to see that the Big C finally ended the life of Val Kilmer, who I’ve always thought was a fine actor.  If he’d played no other part, his role as the dying Doc Holliday in Tombstone  would make a hell of an acting legacy.  In The Saint, Heat  and even the silly Real Genius:  likewise brilliant.

As for the rest… pick your favorites.

(Apparently, according to some directors, Kilmer could be a total asshole to work with, but I don’t care about that.  Sometimes, talent excuses a few peccadilloes, a.k.a. the Barrymore Exception.)

R.I.P.

Bad News, Entertainment

Like most people, I suspect, I was saddened to hear of the death of actor Gene Hackman a couple of days back.  I know he retired from acting well over a decade ago, but his career was so long, and featured such brilliant roles that he deserves to be in any pantheon of great actors. He might even be the best.

While his forte was dramatic roles, he showed an unexpected flair for comedic ones too, and some of his best performances were when he combined the two.

So my question for the day:  What are your 5 favorite Gene Hackman performances?  (list is here)

Mine:

  • The Conversation (Harry Caul)
  • Unforgiven (Sheriff “Little Bill” Dagett)
  • Mississippi Burning (FBI agent Anderson)
  • Get Shorty (Harry Zimm)
  • Target (Walter Lloyd) — by the way, a totally silly movie, but Hackman is beyond brilliant in it.

Honorable mentions (next five, any of which could have been in the top 5):  The French Connection (Popeye Doyle), Bonnie & Clyde (Buck Barrow) Under Suspicion (Henry Hearst), Hoosiers (Coach Dale) and The Royal Tenenbaums (Royal Tenenbaum).

Honestly, considering that Hackman’s career spanned sixty-odd years, I could have picked yet another five quite easily;  and it was absolute hell to pick only a Top 5.

I’ve seen pretty much all his movies, and I’m trying to think of a bad performance.  Can’t.  (Some of the movies stank — see Target, above — but that’s not his fault.)  I have several Hackman movies on DVD, and I think I’ll watch a couple tomorrow.

Random thought:  he had the worst hair of any actor, ever.  Yet he still turned in brilliant performances regardless.

R.I.P. Gene, and thanks for all of them.

For what it’s worth, John Nolte agrees with me, more or less.

Addendum

Entertainment

Here’s something from Insty:

I haven’t seen any of them, of course, and am unlikely to do so — unless they’re on Netflix already, and even then…

…which brings me to a new movie — okay, series — that I have seen, watched over the past weekend, in fact.

My one-word review:  Don’t.

My longer review:  total and utter bullshit, with a paper-thin plot, an unbelievable “heroine”, and more holes in the plot (and action sequences) than in the average piece of Swiss cheese — and I apologize in advance for any slight against Swiss cheese.

Suffice it to say that the good guys all shoot like Jerry Miculek, while the bad guys (predictably) all shoot like guys who flunked out of Imperial Stormtrooper Beginners Marksmanship Qualification.  And watching the 82-pound Keira Knightley fighting a Special Forces sniper hand-to-hand — and winning — is enough to make you reach for the barf bag.

There’s even a sub-plot where the good-guy assassin is (surprise, surprise) a homo with (of course) a Black lover.  That this relationship is actually one of the more interesting and entertaining parts of the show should say it all.

I would go into greater detail, but that would require making an effort which this stupid series really does not deserve.

And to prove how totally crap this show is, Netflix has committed to Season 2 already.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Faded Memories

Entertainment

…or more accurately, no memories at all.  The still-lovely Isabella Rossellini laments:

Rossellini admitted struggling with being known largely for her parents at first, but now she wishes more young people appreciated her parents.

‘I used to be introduced as “Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini’s daughter,” and it bothered me, because I would think, “I am my own person,”‘ she admitted.

‘But now, the younger generation doesn’t know them, and it breaks my heart. Their reputations outlived them, but fame is very brief,’ she added.

I’m keenly aware of this, because my own kids, all in their mid-thirties, have not the slightest interest in watching any movie — no matter how much I extol its virtues — if it was filmed in black & white.  They claim that they just can’t get past the “unreality” of the B&W monochromatic colors.

This is like refusing to read Shakespeare because it wasn’t written in modern-day English or in text-speak [spit].

What’s worse is that while there are a huge number of old movies that are, well, crap, there remains a body of work which is so much better than anything being released by the movie studios today that it scarcely needs an exposition — and that even allowing for the clunky special effects of those old movies which used them.

Side note:  That’s  not always the case.  I remember an occasion when the original (and restored uncut) King Kong was shown to a group of movie students in Scandinavia somewhere, and the gruesomeness of the scene where giant spiders eat the hapless sailors actually caused half the audience to flee the theater.

What’s even worse is that the oldies were made for grownups, yeah, actual adults, before “adult movies” became a euphemism for thrusting naked buttocks and gynecological close-ups of female pudenda.  I guess that part of this can be blamed on my Baby Boomer generation [sigh], when “young people” became a distinct market of “teenagers”, whose enormous buying power caused movie makers to make crap like Beach Blanket Bingo or Wild In The Streets, whereas ten years earlier such shallow and simplistic fare would have been roundly decried and boycotted.  Throw in the Playboy  ethos of the 1950s and, well, you know the rest.  (I’m not decrying Hefner’s magazine for causing the sexual revolution, but it no doubt facilitated it.)

It pains me that B&W movies per se  are going to disappear, not because of the propensity of generations to denigrate the output of their parents and grandparents (in the case of movies), but because so much incredible artistic work will disappear along with them.

And you’ll forgive me if I would be somewhat unimpressed by the efforts of some modern director like Michael Bay or Christopher Nolan to do justice to Hitchcock’s Rebecca., or a Quentin Tarentino redo of Casablanca.

I think I threw up in my mouth a little, just thinking of that.  My heartfelt apologies.

Here’s Isabella’s mom, to atone:

“Dear Mr. Rossellini,

“I saw your films Open City  and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only ‘ti amo’, I am ready to come and make a film with you.”  — Ingrid Bergman