Posted on: March 19, 2009
Kate Bush
Kate Bush’s first album came out when she was just 20 years old, in 1978. She had been “discovered” prior to that by David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd fame. I imagine it wasn’t that difficult to notice how unusual she was, how eccentric, cerebral, gifted, and glowingly strange. Many of my favorite female singer/songwriters from the 90s were influenced a great deal by her. Milla Jovovich, Tori Amos, and P.J. Harvey, especially. And she was quite the buzz in the literary circles of two colleges I attended. Which made sense. Sound and sense. Kate Bush utilized literary sources for many of her songs, and recently contributed to the songtrack of The Golden Compass. Dickens, Bronte, Joyce and Tennyson are some of the literary giants she integrated into her music. Bush wanted to use at least some of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses in her song, The Sensual World, but the Joyce estate said no.…
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Posted on: March 16, 2009
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York
Baffling, surreal, and haunting, Synecdoche, New York presents a world within a world, a stage within a stage, doubled, tripled, extended, bounded and unbounded by dream logic and existential dread. It is a film that needs to be seen more than once. More than twice. I know because I watched it yesterday for the first time …
and it’s still banging around in my head.
Charlie Kaufman, the writer behind Being John Malkovich; Adaptation; and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directs for the first time from his own script. And it’s a Vianesque doozy.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady, New York. Cotard is married to Adele Lack (played by Catherine Keener), an artist of miniatures. They have a daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), age 4 when the movie opens. The film traverses roughly 40 to 50 years, with much of the passage of time being lost on Cotard.…
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Posted on: March 14, 2009
Elsa Zylberstein and Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved you for so Long
I’ve Loved you for so Long is not a movie for everyone. As has been noted perhaps a billion times, we live in a culture with mounting pressure for quick payoffs, and our attention spans have shrunk. This brilliant film takes its time. It builds up story elements slowly, develops its characters and their relationships with great care, nuance and subtlety, and never hits you over the head with messages or symbols or histrionics. It treats you like an adult. The subject matter could easily call for endless scene chewing and heightened melodrama, but the director, Phillippe Claudel (a novelist and professor of Literature at the University of Nancy), chooses a different path.
Kristin Scott Thomas plays Juliette Fontaine, a woman with a tragic, terrible secret, just released from prison. Her sister Lea, played by Elsa Zylberstein, welcomes her into her home to help her get back on her feet.…
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Posted on: March 12, 2009
Head of a Peasant Girl, by Kazimir Malevich. 1913
In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, class and age play a big part. Hierarchies play a big part. Elitism and the stigma of the lower classes are dissected and become almost characters in the novel. Madame Michel, who suffers from a very poor background, feels obliged for many reasons to present to the wealthy tenants of Number 7, Rue de Grenelle, that which they already assume: her ignorance and her virtual insignificance. This is a tragedy that underlies other tragedies in the novel, and it works two ways at least. At the very least.
Madame Michel both loves and hates the fact that she must hide. There is perhaps a secret sense of joy that she has a secret life. This lifts her up to the degree that it remains hidden. But at the same time she realizes she is trapped by a stereotype, by the projection of that stereotype upon her day to day existence.…
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