The Church of Grown Ups
The older I get, the less interested I am in spending time with people who haven’t weathered serious failure or loss or opposition yet. Choosing to navigate hardship with certitude, with grace, with open eyes and open heart is not only what introduces us to true adulthood but to our best selves. And selfish as I am, people’s best selves are the ones I want to know. As Benjamin Franklin, of whom I’m ridiculously fond, said: “You will know failure. Continue to reach out.” As an unnamed beau, of whom I was once ridiculously fond, said: “It’s all part of growing up.”
The Meta Mea Culpa of ‘Venus in Fur’
The following is a review originally published in Word and Film.
Handily, “Venus in Fur,” which is adapted from David Ives’ Tony Award-winning play, which in turn is adapted from Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella, is about adaptation itself. As if that were not bald enough, it is also a two-person film about a woman and a man worrying over a script on a bare stage. Yet this is Roman Polanski’s finest work in decades. It hones in on elements of horror lurking in ordinary human dynamics with a lurid specificity that the director has not evinced since the drama of his personal life eclipsed his professional life more than thirty years ago.
True, “Venus” treads familiar terrain for Polanksi, who has not returned to the United States since he fled the country in 1977 after pleading guilty to charges of raping a thirteen-year-old girl. It stars Mathieu Amalric – who, with his puckish features and light dusting of facial hair, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Polish-French director himself – as writer-director Thomas auditioning Vanda, a floozy actress played by Polanski’s real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner, for his play about a sadomasochistic relationship. But Polanski seems to be tackling this familiar terrain from a new angle: “Venus” is a superbly crafted meta-mea culpa, a strange new cinema genre that may not be for the faint of heart (don’t try this at home, kids!) but nonetheless transfixes us for its entire ninety-six minutes. Continue Reading →
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.