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Boxing Day in the West Village
I was having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad day so I went over to the gym and beat up the boxing bag. It took more than an hour but, eventually, whaling on an inanimate object restored my ability to glean something besides self-serving bullshit in myself and other human beings. Boxing is a solution I happened upon while working at Us Weekly. That place was like a pressure cooker containing all the second prettiest sorority girls–you know, the ones who compensated for their insecurities by terrorizing each other–and if I hadn’t worked out a healthy outlet for my rage I probably would have pulled out someone’s bad dye job (possibly mine) by the root. Or simply evaporated in a pool of abject misery. While working on my left hook this afternoon–no joke, I was blasting Public Enemy at the same time–it occurred to me that fewer women might suffer from eating disorders and depression if they just externalized the crap out of their anger like good ole red-blooded American men do. At the very least, everyone should experience the high of fucking something up every once in a while. The act of striking is a very specific pleasure. So let’s get get this party started right/ Fight the powers that be.
‘Violette’ Is No Bed of Roses
The following is a review originally published in Word and Film.
Violette, about French author Violette Leduc’s quest for success, may be the ultimate literary love story: At core, it depicts how the creative process can be seen as a love affair, both with ourselves and with an imagined audience. It takes a lot of fortitude to sit still with the imagination – to trust that, if we hang in there, we may produce something worth sharing with the world. In this sense, Leduc, who throughout her career had the temerity to demand love for her controversial self-expression, was powerfully strong if also powerfully frustrating. Much like this movie.
To be clear, “frustrating” is putting it nicely. Radical self-exposure was Leduc’s strength in her writing but her weakness as a person, a fact that director/co-writer Martin Provost captures in excruciating detail. French actress Emmanuelle Devos channels Leduc’s inability to contain her rawest feelings – her jealousies, her resentments, her neediness – so effectively that the result is an almost unbearable character. Almost. A woman who won’t rest until she is wanted on her own terms may not be an easy story but it is an important one. Continue Reading →