papeetepatrick

Yes, you do need to . That description is closer to 'Interiors', which it resembles in some ways, but is much more subtle without such things as that absurd contrast between Page and Stapleton, which is so crude. It really is very interesting the way these two women--Rowlands and Farrow--pick up on each other's lives, become aware of the other. It's the kind of thing few would have thought of even approaching, a bit like the 60s 'Bye Bye Braverman'. Even at the time, reviewers who didn't like it all that much, did say 'well, it's not we're going to get another movie about New York Jewish intellectuals'. I remember liking George Segal in that, but it never went to commercial video, so I haven't been able to see 'Bye Bye Braverman' a second time, and I would like to. Rowlands uses her strong jaw stunningly when the father of the child she had aborted becomes enraged when he finds out. I forget if that is her husband, or whether this other, more wimpy type is the husband--yes, you have the hardest time figuring out why Rowlands even cares--these wimps seem to populate Allen's movies a bit too much for my taste. I guess they're authentic, I've certainly seen enough of those smug and bland types around New York through the years--esp. ridiculous when they think they are some kind of Lothario. I do remember that Mary Beth Hurt somehow made 'interiors' worth seeing, and sorry we haven't seen more of her. I remember Diane Keaton is in it, being tearful and disgusting, almost like the 'Miiii-chael' in 'Godfather' we talked about. Some people like 'INteriors', if so., I'd say it was very overrated (remembering Penelope Gilliatt's rave review when it opened), and would definitely say 'Another Woman' is underrated, but I'm not sure I can judge, because I might not have cared had it been Another Actress than Gena.

Pas Sur La Bouche A must-see for anyone interesting in musical comedy and operetta on film. This is the only way you can easily see it, and it is glorious, the best musical film IMO since 'Hair', easily. A musical which is blessed with Alain Resnais's genius is rare and rarefied indeed. Superb young musical actor Jalil Lespert, who has that big kind of face that Maurice Chevalier used to have. This is a sumptuous feast of a movie, and is based on an old 20s or 30s operetta. There is one ghastly song, but everything else is sterling,.

Going through old posts that always get revived, I recall I said I hated all of Woody Allen, but I recently remembered there's one I admire, partially for what he does with it, even though I'd never have watched it unless I was a huge Gena Rowlands fan--that being 'Another Woman'. Also with Mia Farrow.. A blogger recently said she thought this an 'anti-woman' movie, and it does seem so in that Farrow's dizzy character with the babies is seemingly allowed to prevail in her judgment that Rowlands's successful like, which includes a secret abortion, is empty. It's a very arcane sort of film, dated and exotic but still worthwhile--a writer (Rowlands) rents an apartment in lower Manhattan and hears Farrow's psychiatric sessions through an AC vent. I've heard very few people ever mention this film. So even if I think most of Woody Allen's more famous films are overrated, I don't think this one is. OTOH, I don't know if this one is considered 'underrated', so I wrote it up under the auspices of my previous assessment of his general overratedness.

Definitely Resnais' 'Muriel', which follows 'Last Year at Marienbad', both with magnificent use of the superb and luminous Delphine Seyrig. Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the script for the high-fashion super-sexy 'Marienbad', focussing on his famous surfaces and serialism. In 'Muriel', you can see the influence of R-G still, but also that he's gone. It requires a good number of viewings, and is a strange movie by any measure. If not for my adoration of Delphine, I wouldn't have kept at it. She's dressed dowdily in this one, but gets to go back to gorgeousness in 'Les Baiser Volees', one of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel movies, and which some consider his best. A little later,I'm going to write a brief note about Resnais's magnificent lavish filmed operetta 'Pas Sur ls Bouche' on my old 'scores for musical shows, which was never released theatrically in the U.S. as far as I know. I saw it at the French Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater. It's stunning, from 2003, and is finally on DVD, I'll put a link to Amazon, where you can get it. I plan to watch it again in a week or two now that there is access to it finally.

Yes, glad you repeated that, the one truly loathsome sentence in the piece, truly a howler. She's almost contradicting everything else she calls for in her 'asking-please-for' post-Balanchine rant. Yes, but important to point out that it's moving in a different way. Fact is, some abstract work can seem 'romantic' to some. But nobody responds to Xennakis and Stockhausen the way they do to Tchaikovsky or Chopin. It's not even possible. Being moved to tears is something we've been discussing as the thread has progressed, but I doubt that anyone was ever overcome with emotions of the heart from Boulez's 'Repons'. I've heard it performed twice in concert, and conducted by Boulez, but while totally dazzled, certainly it's not about any of the 'human themes'. A modernist film like 'Last Year at Marienbad', is clearly all sex, even when 'x' says 'I loved you' to 'a', he is not talking about getting married and starting a family. In other words, you can definitely be moved by this film, for example, because it's HOT, but not because the relationship of the two knockouts is 'touching and tender'. A less extreme example, then, is Balanchine as opposed to the old Petipa classics. I know lots of people who would still much rather see a shabby Burger King 'Sleeping Beauty', than have to 'endure' Apollo or 'Davidsbundlertanze. There's already a coolness in Balanchine that is not in the work from which he evolved. And there all sorts of minutiae to this: You get a great partnership between Farrell and Martins, breathtaking yes; but it is in no way that fully realized duo that Fonteyn/Nureyev had, who were dancing together, not together and apart, which is what Farrell and Martins were doing (I liked it, and it expresses different kinds of things, but it's not the same kind of warmth. I saw Nureyev and Fonteyn only separately in person, Martins and Farrell numerous times, but even on video, Rudi/Margot partnership is more intertwined. You can feel their real personal affection, and smoe could say that is irrelevant, but it is there for all the world to see, and you can't miss it, it is adorable.) Things like that. But there was still, even with the Balanchine coolness, a lot of Romanticism in many of the ballets--maybe even most of them. They are not as plangent as some modern dance works, but then they're not supposed to be. This happened less in music that was in the vanguard, and only the most kinowledgeable connoisseurs are going to call Boulez's Second Sonata 'romantic'. Atlhough it is, it is never going to be popularly hears as such--until there is a lot more robotic and singularity-type evolution, so that all that difficult High Modernism seems to be 'quaint' at some point. But with things like 'Jewels' and anything done to Tchaikovsky, you have instant Romanticism no matter what, so that the works in the vanguard of the Arts at a given time do not nearly always parallel each other.

These two together get to the core of it all. However much we may wish to disdain 'relevance' in some sense, relevance in terms of being able to generate choreographers, etc., as miliosr has put it so well, has to then do this. If it is finished with Balanchine (I don't kinow if it is), then there will just be the museum-piece prestige item continuing. But the 'genius not waiting around for an invitation or a contract' is part of the equation too. If ballet has real validity in further continuance, rather than just preservation and pleasant tinselly effllorescences from time to time, it will find these geniuses, as per miliosr and Adorno. The artist conveys, carries the artwork forward by virtue of the form not having been exhausted. He CANNOT do it in a vacuum. Ballet's greatest days could well be over (and I imagine they are), while still having other 'symptoms' that make it seem 'greater than ever'--such as dissemination to all the provinces and many more competent companies all over the world. It's as with concert pianists and others. There were many great pianists in the 20th century, some Olympian like Horowitz and Richter, but even these came nowhere near the sheer hugeness of ripeness and incomparable fulfillment of Franz Liszt, whose very life was an adventure in richness of all kinds, all of which only enhanced his virtuoso playing. He was like a rock star as a celebrity. The great pianists of the 20th century and beyond are very circumscribed as they develop new packaging and specializations, try to find something 'that nobody has gotten around to yet'. The great days of concert piano, in other words, were OVER even though great work continued anyway. It's definitely true of all the major traditional arts, opera, ballet, and also in the more popular arts. I believe dirac was talking a while back about the exhaustion of film noir, which I agree is finished. The Broadway musical still has occasional charm, but its great days have long been over, and there's really no reason to think there will be any reversal of this. And do we really even want it, if it truly is exhausted? Of course we do not. The only question is then to find out if a form is exhaused, and can just exist as a 'minor art form', a kind of 'backwater'. Media is outstripping culture very fast, this is unarguable. The masses are more interested in how they get their culture than what it is. Right now even John Kerry's talk about the newspaper being an endangered species (I think that's what he said) has all the op-ed people going to town. CD's are a;ready outmoded by iTunes, and DVDs are going the way of all becoming-obsolescent phenomena (and, of course, these are only media forms themselves, not culture). When you've got Japanese girls writing cellphone novels and making money on them, a lot of numbers begin to feel as if they're up (and that's already 2-3 years since I heard that vile report.) Even so, miliosr's 'singular suceess' is still to be hoped for, as when a new film comes along which proves that someone can pull up something even if the form itself seems to be steadily degraded. One possibility that hasn't been mentioned much is that someone from way out in a seemingly non-ballet nation or situation might be able to transform all the old stuff, seeing it all anew, but I agree with miliosr that none of Balanchine' proteges have done it, even when they've run companies well. It has to be fresh are just get MANNERED, which happens to all art forms at some point (or in some movements of them, because obviously painting only continued all the more robustly after Dutch Mannerism's glory days.)

Okay, if I put it with your remarks, you see I said exactly the same thing you did--both things. It's sometimes about sadness, but in the other matter, I used 'wonderment at how something could be done', instead of 'feels universal'. They both have to do with beauty or truth or both. I just cry if I do, I don't do it often, no matter how moved, but I'm not ashamed of it either, else I wouldn't have written that I do it at all. Has nothing to do with male or female, despite the stereotypes. Well, as for it being 'about emotion', it has to be about emotion, there isn't anything else crying could be about. Interesting that you say you 'enjoy crying'. I do in some cases, but that's changed over the years. It used to be more of an indulgence, now I never cry unless I'm overwhelmed, and that doesn't feel like an indulgence (no judgment on anyone else's crying, we can't know most other people in those ways. It is true that the one Balanchine ballet I mentioned that made me cry 20 years after seeing it had to do with sadness--which doesn't mean that the vehicle, the choreography, was not well-suited for carrying that emotion forward, but that was secondary. It's one of my favourite ballets, but if I saw it danced again, I wouldn't cry, I'm sure of it. It had to do with that specific performance and circumstance and no other.

Well, that interests me. I've never cried at a Balanchine ballet, with one exception. And that was 20 years later, and had to do with the performance and specific elements of that performance only, not the work; or rather the work was secondary, and I know it was because I love the work, but don't 'cry over it'. But I don't 'require that I cry' for judging the merit of something, although I've cried at the work of others (one at least, and that was more because of wonderment at how it could ever be done, not that it was 'sad'). It's not that it's the 'abstract', because I might weep at something that was abstract. I knew a woman who cried at 'The Prodigal Son', but only when Baryshnikov was in it, and only because of that. And she'd cry every time she saw it on tape. Edited to add: Having now read the article, I think it's very good and thought-provoking, whether or not all of it is 'perfect'. Good paragraph on epaulement in particular. She should have stopped short of the overdone title, that was bad strategy, because it probably stopped a lot of people from paying attention to the many very worthwhile details even before they started reading it. Lots of good ideas in it.

I thought they were very good, and probably apply very well to some of the BTers I consider True Balletomanes.

This is a good topic, seems almost strange nobody came up with it till now. No, I'm not one. I love ballet, but I've found out from BT what a true balletomane is.

Adore this book. Hardy is always sublime. Like the movie too. Glad you mentioned this, because Faulkner is as de rigueur as possible, I've read maybe 15 of them, and they are all breathtaking, even the first 'less mature' ones like 'The Unvanquished'. But the BEST i've read are 'Absalom! Absalom!' and 'Light in August', as well as the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion (the last has one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful moments in all literature, for me.) But I have NOT read this one, nor 'The Reivers', nor 'A Fable' (tried that one, liked it less than other Faulkner, and may not retry, don't know.) Love this, too, you've got a good list of must-reads going.

I gave up on Roth after "I Married a Communist" and I find the glowing reviews he tends to receive nowadays a little puzzling. Would be interested to hear from those with a differing view! I never read anything but Portnoy's Complaint, right after it came out, forgot all about him, except once heard he and Claire Bloom were an item. Thought Portnoy was terrific, but never thought of it again. I also find Salman Rushdie sometimes great, sometimes horrible. Saw him at one of those Barnes & Noble things several years ago. He's a charmer and think 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' is excellent, although full of shtick. Would definitely say that reading both Rushdie and Eco was a form of 'reading as duty', just like reading Don DeLillo (except I read all of his, because think he's the greatest.)

Yes, all of Jacques Derrida's works, which like whetherwas 'reading novels for a good story',. I read his overly-sophisticated and intricate philosophical treatises as entertainment novels for awhile, then couldn't even stand them like that, all he wanted to talk about was death. But philosophical treatises, as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Deleuze, and many others, now come to mind as often needing to be classed as 'great books', because unarguably important in some cases. Deleuze & Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus' is by far the most important to me. I was so repelled by Franzen I always had The Corrections around the house till I realized I'd never even start it, so threw it out. I don't like Umberto Eco's novels, although only read 'The Island of the Day Before', which was hateful.

There are some unbelievably hilarious new youtubes, easily accessible by googling, of this, by Dawn French & Gennifer Saunders, this time accompanied by Joanna Lumley. Hope this doesn't ruffle any feathers, I am a huge fan of 'the girls', they are the host brilliant parodists in history, and F & S claim to be retiring (they say this is their last for the BBC comedy series) although Lumley claims at the end to 'still be looking for work...' There are titles like 'THE SHEER ACTING OF MERYL STREEP' and 'UNBELIEVABLE' and 'IT'S A NONSENSE'. French and Lumley do 'Chicken Tika' as Medieval Organum...and 'Danzin' Queen' with aerosol bottles as mics. Here they are (mods erase if illegal, I think youTubes are okay by now):

Wow. That hadn't occurred to me, so you have, including African, Asian and South American countries, hundreds, if not thousands, of great women's literature, and should also include poets, I would think. But in America alone there would be hundreds of books by women we 'ought to read', insofar as there is such a thing. And, as you have it, there are all the rest of Austen and Woolf that weren't included. Indeed there must be 20,000 or so books of 'duty'.

Well, the 100 Great Books is still not going to include everything great, not by a long shot, although I think reading everytning on the list is an extraordinary accomplishment. Good for your husband, I certainly haven't done it (nor particularly want to, although I wish I could say I had...)

I can't get very far with it either, and don't have future plans to try. Steiner comes up with all sorts of surprises, as in his book on Heidegger, or some weird ejaculation like 'the SCANDALOUS fact that EVERYONE has to die!'. Hilarious, that one. Just to add that Martin Amis's essay on the maddening aspect of 'Don Q' (may have mentiioned this before) is another example of what is obviously the case--lots of people having to plow their ways through it. Since that's true of a lot of 'duty books', as with Proust and Joyce, and others, I decided I couldn't live without Recherches nor Ulysses, but could live without Don Q, but also without Finnegan's Wake. I must be able to live without 'Moby Dick' to, because I got stuck in the first 50 pages in high school, and never went back to it. Realizing as I write this that it never has anything to do with intrinsic worth, since there really is not enough time to read all of the Great Books-I don't think even Susan Sontag managed, and she had already gotten a good start at U. of Chicago. maybe Harold Bloom, I don't know.

I never watched a whole episode of one of these shows, but she is marvelous in the generally-thought-to-be bomb movie of 'Mame', with Lucille Ball of the many-splendoured filtered face, or whatever they did. Mainly a mediocre Jerry Herman product to begin with, and Lucille's total inability to do the simplest dance movements decently, but Ms. Arthur had quite a hilarious presence in that--although not sure I'd put it up there with Coral Browne, always stupendous, in the Rosalind Russell movie (which also starts charmingly, and then becomes endless).

Thanks so much, Cristian. I can't believe I was so lazy not to look first, but it wouldn't have happened had I not waited for a year on eBay, and tried everywhere else too. I think it really WAS unavailable when I was trying, in I think 2005 or 2006, to find it. i'm going to see if my friend wants to get it. I agree, it is a cast so impossibly rich, I can think of only a few others, say 'Touch of Evil' and 'Separate Tables' (at least among pre-80s films) that have such an unexpected combination of names. Appreciate your getting me started, and I may look around some more, now that I know it's on DVD by now.

A friend has been telling me for years how wonderful this film is, wilth Colbert, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean-Louis Barrault. Anybody seen it or know how toget a copy? I put under 'Watched Favourites' on eBay for a year (or whatever they call it) and never got a response, thought maybe somebody had taped it. He talked more about ti today, and it sounded like something I'd really like to see to, Louis XIV, etc. I believe Colbert does Mme. de Montespan. Thanks. (surprised it's so hard to find.)

There's a photo of Martha and Sallie Wilson with the racquets in 'Episodes' in the Notebooks. They are more like badminton racquets. Was this 'real tennis'? I just found this, which I suppose could be used as a Prelude, given the affinity of tennis for Tudor executionery: "tt is believed that his second wife Anne Boleyn was watching a game of real tennis when she was arrested and that Henry was playing tennis when news was brought to him of her execution." This is just lifted from wiki, but I think it possible Martha got the idea from these events, though that's just a wild guess.

I think I have a neurotic problem with this story, because of what I've read about the execution. It was unnecessarily cruel even for beheadings, wasn't it? Along these lines, in the last year, I read that the great (and wonderfully eccentric) Dame Edith Evans said in Bryan Forbes's bio 'Edith Evans: Ned's Girl', that she wasn't really sure she liked the idea of an afterlife when all was said and done, because 'you might have to meet so many unpleasant people--like Queen Elizabeth.' It sounds dotty, but that queen does come across as monumentally admirable, and thoroughly hateful. She and her father had definitely mastered the refinements of beheading, and I wouldn't like to meet them either! Elizabeth I TOO rational...or something really, really overdone, I hate her too...I think the scaffold is onstage, elevated, all or most of the time in Graham's piece. It's just too hard not to keep from thinking only about that part for me. Maybe Ashley Bouder as Elizabeth, Nina Ananiashvili or Big Red kondoureva as Mary Stuart, I don't care that much about somebody lookiing like Elizabeth, I think she's so ugly anyway, not a feminine bone in her body. Maybe Aurelie Dupont or somebody else French for Mary, since she loved to 'be French' whether or not in France, imprisoned or not as well. Doesn't strike me as a subject that would work as well as a ballet, but it might. I do like the costuming in the new production with different periods for the women and men. That seems to me very sly and striking. I wonder if it's the first time such a device has been used, but it's a lot more interesting than most period things put in 'present-day settings', etc.

Delicious tidbit, I'd wondered what had become of Suzy Knickerbocker. Good to hear so I can reminisce about Arlene Francis and the old 'What's My Line' days. I think the whole gala sounds pretty stupendous, what with Herbie and Nina dancing Ratmansky, would be even nicer if the Obamas were able to be there.

Yes, and Graham's Notebooks make this sound absolutely fascinating. The tennis game alone is totally inspired, genius. Would love to see the company revive this. I believe rg (or someone else, maybe miliosr) said that some of this had been lost, forgotten, even though you can definitely tell a lot from the notes, which are especially copious for this piece, if I remember correctly.

Oh, believe me, I don't find it sexy either. I can't quite put my finger on it, because the movie was definitely creepy, maybe it's that it really was pornographic in a subtle way--not that that sounds like something that would be admirable, but on the other hand, there was a skill about even some of the most disgusting scenes that made them work for me at a distance in a way that they normally wouldn't have. There was more than usual 'loveless sex' sensation, I think. And I guess I must be thinking that this is Cronenberg's glinting, cold technique. Is it the 'unbearable' that Cronenberg is interested in? If so, I found 'Dead Ringers' even more so--I mean I can hardly even bear to remember it, so I know what you're talking about. The same coldness is always in the Ballard novels, but...it's interesting, Cronenberg may be even colder. There is, for example, some fetishy stuff in 'Super-Cannes', but there is also surprising heroism by one of the same female characters involved in the kinky sex (his characterrs are often cartoonish when you look back on them after some years), whereas in Cronenberg's film of 'Crash', I don't remember a single hint of humanity; it was all like some fulfillment of Foucault's futurized 'world of bodies and pleasures'. And in 'Cocaine Nights', a kind of definite moral line is finally drawn when the 'charming, entertaining criminal' gets into snuff films. On the other hand, at the end of 'Crash', the film, there is horrible physical injury, but little sense of any presence of grief, loss, even punishment is absent--it is more like a statistic. So, to me, Cronenberg does seem attracted to a severely amoral universe, if he can take Ballard even one revolution higher. And there's more than enough of that in 'History of Violence' as well, although that's a great film IMO.