"she's never wunk at you?"

the first thing you think once 'who's afraid of virginia woolf?' has started is 'lord, what a cackle that elizabeth taylor has!'

edward albee of course wrote the play, and it is a much more delightful play than old edward himself, whom i met several years ago when appearing in a production of his one-act play 'the death of bessie smith'. i shook his hand and told him i was playing the lead role. he said "it's a very difficult role." charming, just charming. he then gave a talk in which he mainly bad-mouthed his adoptive parents for half an hour.

in 1966, it was the most expensive black and white film ever made, due to the astronomical (at the time) salaries of taylor, burton, and albee. taylor won her second oscar, while burton lost out to paul scofield in 'a man for all seasons'. i would have had a hard time deciding that one myself.

for most of the film, george is the only character it's possible to feel much sympathy for, and i feel this is largely due to the fact that everything he says sounds vaguely shakespearean in that rich welsh voice of his. yes, even during the roadside cafe when he calls honey first 'angel boobs' and then 'monkey nipples'. he's the only actor i can think of who can come off dignified saying 'monkey nipples'. he's got that devilish little laugh, which will suddenly break and he'll give martha that look, and he's suddenly as sad as his grandfather cardigan. martha and nick can keep up with his steady stream of verbal brutality (honey is simultaneously too stupid and too sloshed), but neither can match his eloquence.

the thing that always astounds me about elizabeth taylor is her ability to look either beautiful or trashy, or a weird combination of both. last week i watched 'a place in the sun', in which she is about as porcelain and untouchable as a girl can be. but in this film (thanks in part to the weight gain?) she looks cheap and vulgar and used. she throws around that raspy, sex-infused voice, and you find yourself wondering why george doesn't just go ahead and kill her. (burton and taylor were only on their first marriage at this point.) it's pretty incomprehensible that he could still love her at all, but when he finds her clothes on the stairs and the door chained, you believe that he does. the best scenes, for me, aren't the yelling and the screaming, or the not-even-thinly veiled barbs, but the episodes of genuine camaraderie, like when they team up in humiliating nick, or the moments immediately following the rifle turned umbrella.

sandy dennis provokes her own sympathy, partially due to the fact that she really does look like the mouse they refer to her as (especially when crawling around drunk in a fur coat), and also because she is truly pathetic, defenseless, ridiculous, and unaware of how pathetic, defenseless, and ridiculous she is. sadly, i couldn't rid my mind of the mental image of george segal as the magazine editor on 'just shoot me'. his character comes across as the worst -- out for himself and hypocritical to boot. george and martha may have their moments of extraordinary cruelty, but even though it seemed to be aimed at each other, helping someone else destroy you is tantamount to self-destruction.

it really is a great, great film, and at a little over two hours, is not at all too long, and in fact ends at just the right moment, with george and martha finally having to face up to the fact of what their lives have been, and what they will have to be.

(the picture is from the george and martha series by james marshall. when i was a kid, i thought maybe the reference was to george and martha washington, but now i'm not so sure....)

maybe it sounds better in chinese?

the title 'lust, caution' is a bit off-putting, at best. on the other hand, it's an uncomfortable title, and that certainly matches the rest of the film. ah. i just read that the chinese title is an unstranslateable pun. makes sense.

it starts off with a little mahjohng, always nice. four catty, wealthy chinese ladies trading veiled barbs under the guise of leisure. joan chen, perfect as usual. leave it to her to snag a husband like tony leung. although i suppose it wasn't exactly a marriage built in heaven, so i'll try not to hold a grudge. like the title, the mahjohng doesn't translate, as some of those tiles seemed to be pretty ominous, and that last one was apparently hilarious.

it's a beautiful film. everything looks like those vintage haruki murakami cover designs. the lead actress' sideburns are quite impressive. tony leung gets in a fair bit of eye-raping in the first half an hour, and wei tang gives it right back to him, morphing from innocent schoolgirl into dragon lady with the puff of a cigarette. it's really just one step -- co-ed to spy. and lest you think it, this is not a 'fun' spy movie. this ain't julia child. (as to that, though, i was under the impression that we all knew that already...)

really, the film moves along at a nice little clip, not feeling at all like it clocks in at well over two hours. there's action, violence, romance...well, sex. i can see why a few feathers were ruffled over the sex. am i the only one to whom it all seemed a bit...donald sutherland and julie christie? but ickier? the thing is, i'm not sure that it added anything to the film. his behavior in these scenes certainly didn't clarify why she felt the way she did about him, if anything it made it less clear. he seemed very much to be a bad bad man.

there were a number of things that detracted from the film overall besides the explicit sex -- such as the mildly slapdash ending and lack of much character development.

for years i've thought i was a big ang lee fan, but he's just a bit too hit or miss. 'the wedding banquet', 'eat drink man woman', 'sense and sensibility', 'the ice storm' -- immensely enjoyable. i turned off 'brokeback mountain' five minutes before the end, because, whatever was going to happen to the characters, i didn't care. they were bland -- this may have come from the short story, but i don't see how stretching it into a two hour film made things any better. 'hulk'....i can't see that. 'crouching tiger, hidden dragon' -- unfortunately, it pales in retrospect because of the immediate influx of copycat films.

i'll see what he does next. but given my track record with his films, he's simply not a director whose work i will see simply because he directed it.

but man oh man, those sex scenes are somethin' else.

"poop-poop!'

no, i'm not using bathroom words, as my sisters would say. the past few weeks i've had my afternoon coffee with www.dailylit.com installments of kenneth grahame's "the wind in the willows". i know i read it/had it read to me as a child, but honestly didn't remember all that much about it. it's lovely and quaint in a way that children's literature just isn't anymore. and ever since the first episode of toad's motor-car madness, i find myself wanting to shout 'poop-poop!' an awful lot.

(side note -- at disney world as a child, i went on toad's wild ride with my father, and literally burst into tears, first at the bit where it seems like a locomotive is rushing headlong at you down a pitch-black tunnel, and then with renewed terror when you go to HELL. i'd have hated to work at that ride, with sobbing children coming at you every which way.)

and maybe i even saw the 1983 stop-motion animation, but maybe the disney nightmare erased that from my memory as well. the first thing i thought as the film began was that no child in this day and age would sit through it. well, maybe a thoughtful child who only got to watch public television. be that as it may, i quite enjoyed it myself. it's very...gentle. gentler even than the book, i think, where badger seems ever so stern, and you're not really sure if toad is joking when he calls someone an ass. mole's short-sighted little face is inexpressably sweet, and i found myself looking forward to his blinks, in which his eyes don't open and close quite in sync. toad is appropriately madcap and decadent, especially when wearing his very smartly checked suit. the car scenes were much my favorite, as toad seems to go quite drunk with happiness when he crashes, shouting 'bbbbbbrrrrrrrrrr' and 'poop-poop!' and kicking his legs upside down in the hay.

quite a few scenes are unfortunately left out, but i suppose that it would have made for a very long movie, or tv show, at is was originally in britain. i have to say i found the punk-rock weasels a bit unnerving and out of place, but the band of tiny singing field mice more than made up for that.

it is nice, now and then, to watch something that you enjoyed, or might have enjoyed, when you were five, as i would have been when this came out. i was that child that only watched public television, shows like the man who would tell a story while drawing the pictures with oil pastels -- what on earth was that called?

it is....a very....comforting film. i can have the most wonderful time analyzing the most obscure little film from 1976 that even the director has forgotten, but sometimes you just need a comfort film, like sometimes you just need macaroni and cheese. i do think that turning it into a ballet, though, may have been going several steps too far.

poop-poop!

"don't ask a cobbler to make hats."

oh, michael haneke, what is to be done with you?

"benny's video" came rather early in the grand scheme of things, and i suppose in 1992 it may have seemed a different film entirely. before "cache", before "funny games", both german and english (may i just take this opportunity to say that, in my opinion, if english speaking audiences are too lazy to watch a subtitled film, then they do not deserve their own shot-for-shot translation?), before "the piano teacher" (my favorite, which could owe to the fact that elfriede jelinek was the author). before the seemingly never-ending acts of ever-more-shocking violence by teenagers.

but if you detach the fac tof all of that, there still remains that one thing which makes haneke's films so different -- someway, somehow, he always catches you off guard. you've momentarily relaxed, forgotten that you're supposed to be tense and watchful because you know that something repugnant is going to happen. i was completely unprepared for the 'moment' in this film, even though i knew exactly what i was getting myself into, i had relaxed. and it doesn't hit you until a moment after, when you think, 'wait, did that just...?' i confess, i always suspect that he's going to pull some sort of trick, beat takeshi rising at the end of "battle royale". no in "benny's video".

apart from the rather gruesome event that occurs early on in the film, the main terror comes from watching benny's parents quite calmly decide that they will take care of the situation, not necessarily out of love for benny, although good ol' dad does muster an unconvincing 'ich liebe dich' at the end, but because they could be rounded up for, gasp!, child neglect. and that horrific thought alone is enough to convince them that the solution to the problem isn't jail for benny, but rather an eritrean vacation with mom while dad chops up the poor unfortunate victim of benny's curiosity and shoves her down the drain.

i don't care. i don't want him to start making comedies. michael haneke suits me just fine.

3 women

no, not THAT '3 women', although the film 'lovely and amazing' does seem to be aiming for an equivalent level of discomfort.

mother brenda blethyn (who is sadly underused here) and her three daughters have some problems, to say the least. blethyn's character begins the film with a liposuction surgery, which quickly goes wrong. the oldest daughter, played by catherine keener, would garner more sympathy for her lackluster marriage and dismal 'art' career if she didn't have a penchant for ending each and every conversation with 'fuck off!'. it's funny the first two times. emily mortimer, as the middle daughter, is the most likeable train wreck of the group, an excellent example of someone who should never have embarked on an acting career. she oozes poor self-esteem, from her constant pleas to her boyfriend for approval, to her painful self-aware walk. the youngest daughter is annie, adopted as an afterthought. annie is everything that could go wrong with childhood -- fat, aggressive, adopted, nothing in common with the rest of her family, not even skin color.

it's great that the characters are prickly and imperfect, but they're so dreaful that it's awfully hard to dredge up any sort of sympathy for them. the middle daughter is likeable enough, and annie may someday come out of her hard shell, but the oldest daughter is just a hair shy of completely irredeemable, and the mother replaces any character she may have with straight vanity.

the film veers back and forth between genres, from an indie project bent on shock and pain to an embarrassing chick flick. maybe if it could make up its mind what it was, i could make up my mind as to whether or not i liked it. yesterday after watching it, i thought maybe i did. today, writing, i'm not so sure.

i never thought i'd say this, but i would have rather watched '3 women' again.

finally, someone gets what they deserve

in the majority of gritty, uncomfortable, foreign thrillers ('13 tzameti' and 'the vanishing' come to mind), characters do not get what they deserve. bad guys escape with large sums of money, good guys are left to deal with the aftermath or get buried alive. well, just in 'the vanishing'.

i've meant to see 'alias betty' for several years now, but my difficulty in tracking it down was due to the fact that when i first heard of it playing at the irish film centre when i lived in dublin, it was using a much more accurate translation of it's french title -- "betty fisher and other stories" ("betty fisher et autres histoires"). i fail to see why american titles for foreign films have to be consistently dumbed down, often until the meaning is completely obscured (i.e. "nightcap" for "merci pour le chocolat"). "alias betty" puts one in mind of a 1950's women's prison shocker.

whatever you call it, this 2002 film is a nifty version of a ruth rendell novel, "the tree of hands". starring sandrine kiberlain, ever sad-eyed and long-necked as in "apres vous', and 'un héros très discret', has a best-selling debut novel, a quiet toddler, an absent ex-husband, and a mother out of your worst nightmare, played with cheerful selfishness by nicole garcia. the film's major drawback is the fact that you must perpetually suspend your disbelief -- would a woman whose mother stabbed her hand to a train doorway as a child really invite her to stay for a few months? would a woman whose mental illness had supposedly improved really see nothing out of the ordinary about nicking a young child to replace the grandson who'd died three weeks earlier? would that many men really be after mathilde seigner?

but as long as you can convince yourself that these events are feasible, the film is highly enjoyable. tense, but not too tense. in the middle of all the craziness, there are surprising moments of comedy, and the best part is that, bar the exception of one or two characters, everyone gets exactly what he or she deserves. it may not be nice to think that just desserts can involve such nasty things for some people, but you do feel a quiet sense of satisfaction when they happen.

one more thing -- i have to say that the artsy direction and half-hearted division of the film into the stories of different characters served only as a distraction to a story that was complex enough to begin with.

a thousand miles

i wish that this post was going to be step-by-step directions for how to eradicate a cloud of black hatred in your heart, but it's not.

i have an overabundance of hatred inside of me. for many things -- there's the justifiable hatred, for people and things that are easily defined as very very bad. the ones that make you feel good because you hate them. i have a probably less than (or more than?) healthy degree of self-loathing. i get that particulary new york blend of madness when it comes to the tourists who get in my way when i'm late for work, people who walk in front of you slowly, weaving back and forth like drunkards so you can't pass them. loud, obnoxious, pretentious hipsters, with their fedora hats and 80s vests.

most of my hatred these days, though, focuses on one person. i've tried everything to talk myself out of it, pretend that it's all her fault, that i'm blameless, that she drove me to it, but the fact remains -- as a friend once misspoke, "i hate her with the white hot intensity of a thousand miles." i know it's irrational, and i know it's too much, and i know i should just put her out of my mind. i always think it will make me feel better to tell people about WHY i hate her, the horrible, inane, ignorant things that she does and says, but it generally just makes me feel nauseous and ineloquent and crude.

why do i hate her? i think you must know that feeling -- someone you would rather have never even met. you think that the two of you can't be more different. you pride yourself on being their polar opposite. and then they say something -- 'oh, that's MY favorite movie too!' it's more than a cringe, it's like an emotional seizure. you don't want them to like what you like, you don't want them to have even HEARD of the things you like. those are YOUR things, not theirs. i hate hearing her talk about MY things in such possessive, pseudo-intellectual tones, thinking no one will notice that she's quoting straight from the new york times movie review. she passes herself off as the things that i'd like to be, and when i hear her say them out loud, i want to run up and pull away the curtain, expose her as lying and preening and flattering and most of all...less than me.

that's what makes me ashamed. i want it proven. i want to win. i want a certificate that says i'm better. i try to convince myself that i want good things for everyone in the world, but i don't. i want her to fail. i want her to fail. and i want to succeed in all that she failed in, and then succeed in things that she would never even try.

it's a horrible way to live. and it's a horrible way to be, to feel all kindness and generosity in you is corroding like a smoker's lungs. i'd like to think that someday she will not even cross my mind, or, if she does, that i will think kindly of her. but if my soul is a pair of smoker's lungs, then i am still smoking a pack a day.