Archive | Book Matters
I hereby declare this the Summer of Jane Austen. Usually I have mermaid summers but, what with the devolution of public discourse and general etiquette, with the sloppy slide of modern courtship (if it can even be called that nowadays), and with the general erosion of civility, we’re all sorely in need of Jane’s nuance, wit, grace, and rigorous ethics. To that end, I’m revisiting all her books this summer and invite you to join me. As well, I’m only going to play literary I Ching (randomly open book, randomly pluck down finger and read) with her books. To wit: “She had loved, she did love still, and she had all the suffering which a warm temper and high spirit were likely to endure under the disappointment of a dear, though irrational, hope, with a strong sense of ill-usage.”–Mansfield Park. Temperance, not tempus, fugit!The Thumb of Tom Tykwer
Tom Tykwer swears he doesn’t “just walk around reading books in hopes of finding new material.” Given the director’s screenwriting chops (“Run Lola Run,” “3”), it seems a legitimate claim, and yet he does possess a knack for literary adaptations. In his takes on everything from David Mitchell’s millennium-spawning meta-novel “Cloud Atlas” to Patrick Süskind’s period-film explosion “Perfume,” Tykwer has managed to adapt what has largely been considered unfit for screen. (No less than Stanley Kubrick declared “Perfume” unadaptable.) Most recently he has tackled A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers’s post-financial crisis novel about an American businessman adrift in a Mideast desert. As fish-out-of-water as tales ever go, it’s a surprisingly pleasurable effort that suggests Tykwer may be cinema’s new adaptation king – though he still lurks relatively under the radar. Continue Reading →
‘Maggie’s Plan’ Does Not Go Astray
“Maggie’s Plan” is that rarest of ensemble films about attractive, overly educated New Yorkers (and that is a cinema genre unto itself): It doesn’t seem like a poor man’s Woody Allen. This may be because writer, director, novelist and painter Rebecca Miller knows something about emerging from a long shadow– her father is Arthur Miller and her husband is Daniel Day Lewis. I prefer to think, though, that it’s because she has a genuine fondness for humans in all their folly, which is a far cry from the latent misanthropy lurking in the works of such ostensible crowd-pleasers as Noah Baumbach, Nora Ephron, Nicole Holofcener, and, yes, Mr. Allen. Continue Reading →