Find Your Quail

Right now, I'm happily listening to "Find Your Grail" from Monty Python's Spamalot over and over and over again. YouTube rocks.

So does Sara Ramirez. She's an amazing singer. Pity she's being wasted on Grey's Anatomy now, but that whole show has jumped so many sharks that... I can't come up with anything suitably hyperbolic to finish this sentence.

Atonement trailer!

Finally watched the trailer for Atonement! You can see it here.

I love this novel (Ian McEwan again). Can't discuss it terribly well without giving away far too much, but the hook goes something like this: 13-year-old Briony accuses her older sister Cecilia's lower-class boyfriend Robbie of a terrible crime, and spends the rest of her life trying to... atone. The novel has several different tones and points of view... all great, but I did spend quite a bit of time arguing about the earliest section with my friend, who found 13-year-old Briony 'unrealistic.' Why, because we're all so logical at any age that we can expect all 13-year-olds to sound like... what? (I'm still unconvinced, clearly.)

This movie has been getting great buzz, with Keira Knightley (Cecilia) already tipped for another Best Actress nomination. Romola Garai, who I liked so much in As You Like It, is the older Briony, and Vanessa Redgrave is the very old Briony. That character's getting some good acting. The trailer does look good, so I am now officially excited.

But can I be totally superficial for two points? One being that Knightley coming out of a fountain in a wet dress is just scary. I don't want to be one of these women who bitterly castigates other women for being too thin, but I do hope that no young girl thinks she should try to look like that. The other being that while James MacAvoy (Robbie) is a very good actor, I unfortunately cannot get the image of him as Faun Tumnus from Narnia out of my head. And not just Tumnus -- Tumnus wearing green spandex pants with dots on them so his goat legs can be CGI-ed in later.

Frost/Nixon; Morgan/Howard

Tiny whimper.

I've just learned -- having apparently blocked it out when looking on the imdb page in the past -- that Ron Howard is directing the film version of Frost/Nixon. Directed, rather, since it has gone into post-production (shooting started right after the Broadway run ended).

Some of you know that I was stark raving mad about this play in August, and still am really. I saw it on Broadway twice, the first time from quite high up and the second time just two days before the end of the run, from front row center. Both times were fantastic for totally different reasons; from high up, I could appreciate the blocking and lighting and get a better sense of the audience reaction, while in the front row I could see beads of sweat and also see through the blackouts to watch the actors setting themselves up for the next reveal, which was technically fascinating. It is a great play about David Frost, the TV journalist, and Nixon coming together to do an interview post-Watergate and post-resignation. The play's tension revolves around the fact that both men see this as one last chance at the spotlight, with Frost's career in disarray and Nixon's quite obviously on the rocks. No need to tell you who wins.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that it was an intensely gripping 100+ minutes (no intermission). Nixon's summation of their divergent personalities, playboy and pigheaded fighter, is devastating in its simplicity: "You don't know how fortunate that makes you." Beautifully written and some of the greatest stage acting I've certainly ever seen. Frank Langella and Michael Sheen are reprising their roles. The lesser roles will be taken by Hollywood fodder rather than the stage players, which is to be expected. Sam Rockwell takes the narrator's role, which the first time I saw it was played by Remy Auberjonois, son of Rene Auberjonois from one or the the other of the Star Treks, but who I'm embarrassed to say I know chiefly as Frasier Crane's professor.

Right. Whimpering. The reason I'm whimpering just a little, and very quietly, is that Peter Morgan wrote this play (you might know him best from writing The Queen). I must have asininely assumed that Stephen Frears would be directing. But from what I've just googled, that apparently was never even an option; there was a lot of jockeying, Howard was very keen on doing it and doing it now, and Morgan wanted it made and out before the Bush administration leaves. Now, not having seen the Da Vinci Code, I feel no fear when I hear that Howard is directing a film. Actually, I figure that it will be solidly entertaining, well knit, dramatically gripping. But I never expect true greatness. And for me, Frost/Nixon was one of those experiences -- twice -- in which the entire world around you disappears. I was kind of hoping to have it on DVD.

No Prestige

Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johanssen, and David Bowie. That's all the advertising the Prestige really needed, or so you would have thought. It more or less flopped in the wake of the Illusionist, which featured Ed Norton, Jessica Biel, Paul Giamatti, and Rufus Sewell. Two beautifully pedigreed magician films. I liked the Illusionist quite a bit, but I wasn't throwing bouquets at it. Now, Prestige... aimed higher and fell harder, I think. It might have been more interesting if I hadn't figured out the movie less than halfway through, which left me sitting hopefully on my futon, waiting for some crazy other twist that I hadn't figured out. There wasn't one. The title of my post comes from the formula for illusions given in the film, which says that the setup is the pledge, the disappearance is the turn, but that the trick is nothing without that final reappearance, the prestige. Well, this movie tried to follow that formula, but if you know what the prestige is and the whole movie is about showing you how it happens, then where's the magic?

Probably in the character development, which it could have used a touch more of. The acting was fine, but you basically have to take it on trust that Hugh Jackman's wife's death precipitates a lifelong obsession; it's not developed in any interesting way. Oh, and not to be snippy, but I'd like to see Scarlett Johanssen sharpen up those British consonants a bit more in The Other Boleyn Girl, in which she's playing the eponymous heroine.

Alas, poor Oprah

It's going to be a bit of a winding road here at the start. Stay with me.

One of my profs, of all people, pointed me towards the NY Times article on Jessica Seinfeld, who apparently was always a little hated by those in the know, was recently accused of plagiarizing her cookbook, and thanked Oprah by sending her somewhere from $10,000-$20,000 in designer shoes as a thanks for appearing on Oprah's show.

Blog commentary on that last groused about Oprah's shameless delight in this ridiculous extravagance, the same kind of consumer delight that makes millions of women feel that they have to rush out and consume in order to feel as powerful as Oprah. I haven't seen anything positing it against two of Oprah's more recent big events, though.

When popping over to YouTube to watch a little more of Hugh Jackman hosting the Tonys (I am really that girl in your college hallway who listened to the same song all the time), I saw some new feature about Oprah on YouTube, something about her favorites or... I don't know, I couldn't be bothered to look. On the other hand, you also can't get away from coverage of this sexual abuse case in Oprah's South African school for girls. I don't know what the general opinion of this is, but I've seen Oprah as quoted from saying everything from 'responsibility rests with me' to 'I didn't do anything wrong.' No doubt Oprah's faithful will rally to her, fueled by reports that she wept for a whole half hour (poor thing) when she heard about the charges. No doubt they will also want her shoes and watch her uploaded videos.

I don't know what to make of Oprah, to be honest. I never quite have. On the one hand, her rise has been astronomically impressive. She does good things -- lots of charity, lots of healthy living shows, lots of nice books. I enjoy the show. Dr. Oz has taught me a lot. But her aim square at a certain segment of the population with huge aspirations towards more material comfort seems by bypass those who can't possibly afford Christian Louboutin shoes, and those are the ones she affects to love the best.

Of course, as a literary critic, I also found her involvement in the James Frey case rather odd;
most critics I know didn't much care about the whole fiction vs. memoir vs. autobiography controversy, except for the truth in advertising principle, because we know that autobiography and history are always-already (sorry) so convoluted and fictionalized. But there's another case where Oprah swung wildly from 'I don't care' to 'you liar,' and that one was distinctly a case of caving to a media frenzy that she could not control.

Sorry, no big payoff to this set of musings. She is a triumphant bundle of contradictions. But it did cross my mind that I just can't imagine what is going to happen to Oprah's empire of taste as she gets older and slower, let alone when she passes on. I think it'll take me until the void appears to really judge her legacy.

The heat of a thousand suns

Finally finished Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns last night, a tale of domestic abuse in Afghanistan that will make your hair curl and your liberal conscience groan, but all the while you won't be able to put it down. I like Hosseini's writing, I really do, although his heartwrenching moments do get a little manufactured. 1) Depressing or disappointing episode. 2) Long wait. 3) Bring episode up again in a quick, unexpected allusion. 4) Stand back and watch the waterworks.

But he writes so well, particularly in his descriptive passages, that I'm inclined to forgive the vaguely mechanical quality, which might also be a function of the very looping plot. It focuses on two women: Mariam, an illegitimate child who grows up isolated and worshiping her wealthy and Westernized father, and the much-younger Laila, a gorgeous, petted and liberally educated child with a happy family. The Soviet invasion and other assorted disasters that Afghanistan endured combine to trap these two in exactly the same miserable situation, however. I won't spoil the plot twists for you, except to say that it is not a walk in the park.

This book, unlike Hosseini's previous hit, The Kite Runner, takes us up to the present day in full gory detail (KR focused more on the past, as I recall), and that's the part that makes me groan. I don't doubt in the least that Hosseini is depicting the Afghanistan he knows
and clearly loves, and nobody could expect anything but a thoroughly depressing narrative from that. But I do worry about the uses to which the novel can then be put, as in "look how screwed up this country was; clearly we need to invade and fix it." (Not that anyone is worried about fixing Afghanistan these days.) In particular, Suns includes an abusive husband calculated to fulfill all evil stereotypes of Islamic gender relations, and he is rendered so vividly that the loving, supportive husbands also depicted don't balance him out at all.

Hosseini also suffers from Peter Jackson syndrome, the need to have ending after weepy ending in quick succession.

Still, a thoroughly good read, and one I'd recommend, because it clearly has been vexing me. And as you all know, the one thing I love even more than a book I fall in love with is a book that I can carp about until the sun goes down. Or a thousand of them.

Top of the world, Ma!

It's been an exhausting day over on the tennis blog, with the news of Martina Hingis' retirement and positive cocaine test at Wimbledon. But I can summon up the energy for a post here.

The Enola Gay pilot died today. I ought to look up his name, but why bother, when I don't know the names of any of the tens of thousands of Japanese he killed? I never knew much about him, except that he was so well brainwashed that he never regretted even for a moment having been the one to drop the bomb on Hiroshima (he didn't fly over Nagasaki). He was proud of how well the plan was executed.

It's probably best for that man's sake that he was, because otherwise he would have had one hell of a miserable life--and really, can you imagine the higher-ups sitting around a table picking a human weapon for the job? Interestingly enough, I read in his obit that he did have a crew, and presumably there were multiple crew members who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, too. But this guy became the poster boy for the atomic bomb. I wonder what's happened to those others. ("Call him drunken Ira Hayes, he won't answer any more...")

Look, WWII is a war we look back on as a well-justified war, in contrast to this one, and it needed to end. But dropping nuclear weapons is nothing, I repeat nothing, that a so-called civilized nation should be proud of. And there's no doubt that racism made dropping those two bombs easier than it would have been over Germany. Rather, no doubt in my mind; there was controversy again over a Smithsonian exhibit in '95 or so, with the pilot and other groups protesting that it showed too much sympathy for the Japanese (those whining, dead, maimed, cancer-riddled bastards) and, this more reasonably, underestimated the aggression of the Japanese government and possible American casualties in an invasion of Japan. I guess no matter how often we try to flagellate ourselves with the notion that governments aren't people, it doesn't sink in.

Oh, and the Enola Gay? Named after his mom, apparently.

I was thinking to buy my mom a spa visit for Christmas.