"Cheese" (2007)

Mika Rottenberg's video installation currently on view at the Whitney Biennial "conflates farm-girl imagery with the fairy tale 'Rapunzel' into a story loosely based on the Sutherland Sisters, renowned for their extremely long hair" and also blows my mind.

A teaser:

Ghosts I Have Been

Richard Peck's "Ghosts I Have Been" left a formidable impression on me when I read it as a youngster. I picked it up again last week with much excitement, read it in a night, and can happily declare it thoroughly un-disappointing (except for the new cover illustration, which sucks, compared to the original, by Rowena). What still delights me as a jaded adult is the protagonist's voice, the pithy, wise-crackin' turn-of-the-century heroine, Blossom Culp.

"Many's the ignorant person who claims that spirits and haunts have forsaken the modern age in this new twentieth century," she opines in the book's prologue, "But what they do not know would fill a book. And this is the book." This book is set in the early part of the teens, a preferred era of mine (for some reason), and features details (some wonderfully random and vivid, like the Pope-Detroit Electric brougham) and dialogue that feel authentic in ways that seem more lived than researched, as if the author had spent some quality time with his grandpa rather than getting things out of books. Or, rather, maybe he spent some quality time with a sassy grandma or maiden aunt, because the best-drawn characters in this book are all female, and many of them are that finest of female specimens, the spinster.

Blossom herself is firmly outside the mainstream, living with her half-gypsy mother down in a shack on the wrong side of the tracks. "There are girls in this town who pass their time up on their porches doing fancywork on embroidery hoops," she says by way of introducing herself. "They're all as alike as gingerbread figures in skirts. I was never one of them. My name is Blossom Culp, and I've always lived by my wits."

Blossom finds herself in stuck-up Letty Shamabaugh's house one day after school (how she gets to be there is another story) and has a sudden visitation from the Second Sight -- inherited from her mother's gypsy blood -- while in the middle of a fake seance designed to amuse (herself) and frighten the gingerbread girls. In the midst of pretending to see a vision, there it is: a very real flash of something beyond knowing. "Newton Shambaugh has just been run over by Miss Gertrude Dabney's Pope-Detroit Electric auto," she announces in her haze, sending Letty and Mrs. Shambaugh out the door screaming, looking for poor dear Newton (Letty's little brother).

This bizarre happening sets off a chain of events that will lead her to great fame and a reputation as the country's leading psychic, take her aboard the ghost-ship of the Titantic, and eventually, into the drawing room of the Queen of England, along with her new companion, Miss Gertrude Dabney, an Angolphile who who wishes America had never won the Revolutionary War.

Miss Dabney, who "had a reputation as the town character and lived up to it," takes Blossom under her wing after the electric auto incident. She has her over to her house one day for tea, cakes, a little chat, and a brief exorcism. During tea, she asks the psychic children to help her with a ghost in her kitchen. It turns out to be the ghost of Minerva, a plain, raw-boned hired girl who killed herself out of unrequited love for Miss Dabney's father. Once Blossom assures Minerva that all is forgiven, the ghost becomes a helpful servant girl and bakes spectral scones for the grateful spinster.

Some weeks later, Miss Dabney gets it into her head to expose a traveling roadshow charlatan as a fake, with Blossom's help. They attend a seance where, despite her noble intentions, Dabeny is promptly flummoxed out of her watch by the trickster, who pretends to be the ghost of her dead father. Blossom sneaks back into the Odd Fellow's Hall at night to recover it. In a delicious scene, she discovers the professor's hollowed-out cabinet, complete with secret cupboards and compartments, and a young English waif who plays the ghosts while the public's in the house. Here, Blossom and the waif, Sybil (of the Berdmondsey Road), have the following exchange:
''We travel at night. I ain't seen daylight in two years.'
'You look it,' I remarked.
'You're no American Beauty Rose yourself.'
There's nothing like swapping insults to clear the air."

Blossom convinces Sybil to hightail it out of there and decides to perform the ceremony herself the next day. She also convinces Miss Dabney to show her face in public again, despite her embarrassment at her conduct the day before, in this particularly touching scene in which Miss Dabney says,"'I am nothing but a feather-headed old maid.' Tears zigzagged down her face. 'Don't call yourself names,' I said in a small voice. 'We are a couple of ... unmarried ladies. And we have to stick together.'"

Blossom's triumphant performances as Sybil is somewhat dampened when her teacher, Miss Spaulding, catches her in the act. Miss Spaulding is another marvelous character -- a spinster schoolteacher -- who is wonderfully described as "slender as a wand and ladylike, [with] an arm on her like a bartender." Miss Spaulding takes Blossom back to her office not, as one would imagine, for a good thrashing, but rather for an audience with local newspaperman Lowell Seaforth. (She figures she'll get Blossom's need for attention out of her system.) Lowell Seaforth asks her to go into a trance on command, and, boy does she deliver. She travels astrally on board the Titantic where she witnesses the tragic tale of Lady Beatrix and her son Julian Poindexter. Chillingly, the blanket from the ship appears in her hands as she awakens from her trance drenched in seawater, and determined to intervene in Julian's fate.

Ghosts I Have Been is remarkable not only for Blossom's wit and voice, or for its sense of time and place, but also for its delightfully eccentric and self-sufficient female characters, from our heroine and her ma to Sybil to Misses Dabney and Spaulding. I'm glad to say that, nearly twenty years after reading it for the first time, Ghosts I Have Been remains on my list of favorite YA novels (along with A Swiftly Tilting Plant, The Westing Game, and The Long Secret). It's definitely the kind of book I'd be happy to re-read periodically, because, as dear old potty Miss Dabney says, "It is ritual that gives shape to life." And as Blossom also says, "There are many kinds of wisdom in this world and Miss Dabney is very wise in her way. "

Dream Lobsters

He Did and He Didn't (1916) is a dark little film directed by and starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and the fabulous Miss Mabel Normand. Films like this draw me to the more grotesque comedies of the silent era, representing, as they seem to do, a sub-genre fraught with unconscious dream symbolism and unspeakable violence (Keaton's Convict 13 is another).

He Did and He Didn't showcases Arbuckle the director at his best. He was less a slapstick/physical comedy genius (though he can gracefully wiggle his butt to great comic effect) and more of a director who made excellent use of his sets, framing and staging the action beautifully. In addition to really working the mise-en-scene, he continuously elicits some of Mabel's best performances, showcasing her cuteness to beat the band.

The plot unfolds thusly: Fatty, a prosperous physician, is married to pretty Mabel. One night, Mabel's old school-friend Jack comes to dinner. Fatty becomes consumed with jealousy as Jack and Mabel flirt and reminisce. Fatty becomes frustrated:

After a rich lobster dinner, Fatty and Jack both have dark and violent dreams about Mabel, sex, strangulation and gunplay. They awake simultaneously and run to Mabel's room, where she is fast asleep safe and sound. Jack retreats to bed while Fatty creeps into Mabel's room and closes the door, after flashing a devilish grin at the audience.

Considered unusual comedy fare then as now, I'm sure, there's something uniquely disturbing about the imagery of this film (in addition to the obviously disturbing nature of the violent sequences that are played for uncomfortable laughs, such as the scene where Fatty physically abuses his butler, or menaces Mabel, or, well, strangles Mabel). The version I watched also has multi-hued toning (alternating, mostly, between twilight purple and mustard yellow) which adds to the overall disorienting effect. And yet, it's completely marvelous, and I enjoyed it a lot more than the usual Keystone romps-in-a-park. There are some great moments where one absolutely has to appreciate Arbuckle's use of the medium, such as a dissolve in which the two lobsters the men ate for dinner are super-imposed over them as they wake from their nightmares and discover the cause.

Why is it that Fatty is much funnier strangling people and grinning evilly than he is falling into ponds? Perhaps I don't want to answer that. In any case, it's definitely one of the more memorable Keystones, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who likes their slapstick comedy rough, and indeed, anyone interested in some of the better uses of the medium in early comedy. Really -- the image of the dream lobsters is quite indelible.

Highsmiths

Having never read any Highsmith other than her immensely handy and practical manual on how-to-write-thrilling-bestsellers, I was hoping her body of fiction work would justify all the advice I've been taking from her lately. So I read The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, which had me in tears by page three, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, which kept me up way past my bedtime on a schoolnight and, suffice it to say, I was not disappointed.

Apparently Highsmith was a loner and a misanthrope, and it totally comes across in these books -- she may have been the only spinster crankier than myself. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, the title character hates the vulgar people he lives with in New York, and isn't particularly enamored of the ones he meets in Europe. What makes him happy there is the lifestyle, the possessions, the ability to live like a king. He's not even particularly wedded to the Tom Ripley he knows, and willingly sloughs him off at the first opportunity. He throws on Dickie Greenleaf's identity like a new suit, with no regard whatsoever to the human being behind the attractive package. Some wonder if Tom is in love with Dickie, but it's so clear he's a total sociopath, with no capability for love or empathy. He identifies not with the humans, this Ripley.

Highsmith's talent lies in taking a chilling, murderous sociopath and making him utterly understandable. Who wouldn't rather relax in their Italian villa reading books till four in the morning rather than go to work at some dull job in dull old New York City? And if you should have to kill one little person (oh, come on, Freddie Miles doesn't count as a person!) to make that happen, so be it. One little silly person who doesn't deserve to be living the life you'd appreciate so much more than he would, who's not even a good painter! Utterly worth it. It's not fair that some dullards are born into wealth while those who truly deserve it actually have to work for it. Somehow, all this because plausible, and we root for Ripley, we want him so badly to get away with it, and when he does, it's the happiest feeling in the world.

That same malice is turned on the human protagonists in Beastly Murder, where you can't wait, you absolutely can't wait, for the animals to get their revenge on the humans who tortured them so brutally. I found myself skimming over all the bits where the poor animals were building up their rage and resentment, and getting straight the parts where their nasty old owners got it right in the gut.

There's something so satisfying about entering Highsmiths' world of pure spite and malice, like stepping on someone's toe in the subway after they've taken your seat. They say this reclusive misanthrope lacked humanity; au contraire, she was the very dark, shriveled, petty soul of humanity itself.

"Christie Done It!"

Initially I dismissed 10 Rillington Place as the kind of movie I'd recommend watching only if it came on TCM, not one that warranted going out of one's way to see. But I've been thinking about it since I saw it a week ago and I have to admit: it's crept up on me.

10 Rillington Place is Richard Fleischer's 1971 suspense thriller/biopic, the story of murderer John Reginald Christie, who lured seven women to their deaths over the course of two decades. It ran briefly at Lincoln Center as part of an ad-hoc mini-retrospective of Fleischer's films (along with Mandingo and "Violent Saturday" at Film Forum, which is also awesome and deserves its own post).

Dave Kehr writes, "Fleischer [films] don’t invite the spectator to identify surreptitiously with the power and impunity of the murderer, but neither are they simple expressions of moral outrage. They focus, with sober detachment, on the details of crime and the working of the criminal mind, expressing no more shock than would a documentary on the functioning of the Ford assembly line..."

This deceptive blandness is what makes the figure of John Christie and his domestic murders so terrifying. There's something so mundane about Christie, and in this particular version of the story that is much more effective than an attempt at a sensational retelling might have been. The dull complacency, delusion and self-absorption of those around Christie allow him to commit his crimes virtually unnoticed for years: Vincent Canby's original review in the NYTimes attributes Christie getting away with it (for a while) as "not due to a lunatic brilliance but to incredible luck and to the incredible stupidity of the people around him."

The film doesn't sensationalize the murders, but chooses instead to devote a lot of attention to the details of working out the crime. It also allows us to spend some time with Timothy Evans, the husband of the murdered woman Beryl Evans, a simple, rough, somewhat brutish man who blundered his way into involvement in Christie's crime. It's his helpless refrain, "Christie done it," that I can't get out of my head. Evans stares blankly at the policemen, judge and jury, unable to articulate any defense, saying only over and over again in bewilderment as case-workers imperviously jot down notes on his mental fitness, "Christie done it!"

The Other Boleyn Girl Surprisingly Doesn't Suck

While the novel was apparently an over-researched Harlequin that evoked deepest hatred in my smartest friends, the film adaptation doesn't overreach; content to be an entertaining bodice ripper and studio-slick historical drama, it ends up delivering on all levels.

Stripped of the novel's lousy prose by screenwriter Peter Morgan, The Other Boleyn Girl emerges as a rich genre piece that looks good, entertains, thrills with its vicarious peeks into court life, and is surprisingly well-cast -- considering I originally didn't buy Natalie and Scarlett in those roles, I was surprised at how much I ended up liking them both. I enjoyed watching Natalie act like a total manipulative bitch for the first half of the film (and completely desperate during the second, when she realizes producing a male heir on demand is harder than she thought) and found myself growing increasingly fond of ScarJo's ingenuous sweetness. Ana Torrent was wonderful as Catherine of Aragon, all quiet, righteous anger, and Kristin Scott-Thomas delivers a fine performance as Mrs. Boleyn.

One thing I will admit to: when the dialogue got a bit too "costumey" for me (if you know what I mean by "costumey dialogue") I did resort to adding little voice-overs in my head to amuse myself. Also, in my head, the movie is called, "I Boned The King of England."

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun at The Met

Came for the Poussin, stayed for the Vigee le Brun.

It's Rue McClanahan's Birthday for Five More Minutes!

Come on, you have time for one more drink! I raise my glass to thee, Blanche Deveraux.

I'm a Pushover for Streptococcus

People say Ball of Fire is one of Hawks' lesser works, but I don't buy that. Lesser-known, maybe, but it's certainly a marvelous comedy: to say it isn't as good as the others only goes to show how brilliant the others are. Interestingly, some people also have a problem with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is another one of my favorites, so frankly, I can only conclude that these people are idiots.

So there.

Now, on to the film. Seven adorably nerdy old professors, and one young, handsome (and still adorably nerdy) grammarian played by Gary Cooper, all live in a big Upper West Side house researching and writing an encyclopedia. When Cooper ventures out into the field to collect new data on the latest slang, he becomes entranced by singer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). He introduces himself to her and leaves his card, asking her to join him for a round-table discussion the following morning. Sugarpuss blows him off, but later changes her mind -- it turns out she has to hide out from the cops for awhile, because her boyfriend, Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) is in trouble with the cops, who want to drag her in as a witness. And where better to hide than in a musty old house full of dusty scholars?

The dear old gentlemen quickly become entranced by her, and she ends up falling for Cooper, naturally. I won't spoil the ending -- it's available on Netflix, so just rent it already.

It's hard to convey the general awesomeness of this movie without quoting nearly every line (though hopefully the premise has conveyed to you some idea of it) so I'll just run down some moments in particular which delighted me.

I love the early scenes with Cooper out collecting slang, leaning in to catch people's conversations on the subway and jotting down what they say in his notebook. I love it when he asks the waiter at the nightclub the name of the song Stanwyck sings, and he replies "Boogie" and Cooper says, "What does 'boogie' mean?" and everyone laughs at him. Oh, and I love the roundtable discussion of the word "corny," complete with diagrams! Hell, I love all the old-timey slang in general, which I guess makes me a bit of a loose-tooth. As such, I find the dialogue to be simply divine throughout, especially Stanwyck's lines (hey modern directors, here's an idea: give the girls a funny line every once in a goddam, while). I particularly enjoy the scene where she's convincing Cooper to let her stay overnight in the house, claiming she's too sick to go out in the night and the rain.

Stanwyck: Look at this throat, what do you see?
Cooper: A slight rosiness?
Stanwyck:It's as red as The Daily Worker, and just as sore!

Then she claims she catches cold easily, and that she's "a pushover for streptococcus." At which precise moment I inwardly declared my everlasting love for this movie. Any movie that can work in a reference to a genus of spherical bacteria holds my heart forever.

Cooper gets his lines in too, though. When he asks Sugarpuss to leave, he says, "Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body."

The repartee between Stanwyck and Cooper is effervescent, and both their performances are great, but Stanwyck, of course, steals this movie. She's the center of attention, and rightly so. Some elements of the plot are loosely based on the Snow White story -- the seven professors, the charming, girl who breezes into their lives and makes them love her -- but with a modern twist, of course (this Snow White doesn't clean house, she cha-chas).

There's also a genuine sweetness to this film that makes me love it all the more -- never are the dear old professors objects of derision (jokes are made at their expense, of course, but they're more like a gentle poke, friendly-like). One particularly sweet scene stands out in which they old sing a nostalgic song for Professor Oddly, as he remembers his dead bride during a bachelor party anecdote. Their friendship and camaraderie are so innocent and touching, they've been known to bring a tear to a grown man's eye. In an interview, Hawks defended this scene, saying, "When you're doing a story about old people, you can afford to be sentimental." Professor Oddly, by the way, was played by Richard Hadyn, who voiced the Caterpillar in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, one of the few Disney movies I actually adore.

Funny Ha Ha or Comical Education of Young Girls

There's a film series screening in London England right now devoted entirely to comediennes of the silent era -- sweet!

Called Clowning Glories and Screwball Women, it features films in which Mary Pickford makes 'em laugh, and couple of gems starring my personal heroine, Mabel Normand! Hurrah! Now make this a traveling road show already and bring it over to New York City!

In other news, check out Scarlett Cinema's Women Aren't Funny, a weeklong series devoted to women in comedy: up-and-coming filmmakers and comics, reviews of all-female comedy shows.

The Angel of History

In The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson describes how seventy residents of London's Golden Square neighborhood were dispatched by disease in a single twenty-four hour period during the cholera epidemic of London in 1854. So rapid and sudden was their demise that their bodies were wheeled out of the neighborhood by the barrowful. Common wisdom of the era suggested that cholera, like all human disease, was caused by a foul smell. This "miasma theory," would have seemed credible, even likely, to a resident of Victorian London, which was plagued as it were, by innumerable foul odors. But a physician named John Snow had trouble believing it himself -- the evidence just didn't add up. It seemed unlikely to him that smell would transfer disease in such a manner, and he knew a thing or two about inhaling: he was one of the first to practice and perfect the art of administering inhaled anesthetics like chloroform.
(Before this, the administration of anesthetics had been spotty at best, with some patients waking up halfway through surgery, some not at all. Check out the description of Fanny Burney's mastectomy sans anesthetic on page 62, if you revel in the gruesome.)

But despite the fact that he was a celebrated doctor who had administered deadly gases to the Queen, people had a hard time buying this theory that cholera didn't come from the air, but rather, from the water. The city fathers clucked their tongues, stroked their beards and said, "What's to be done with this John Snow?"

So the good doctor had to build an irrefutable case to convince them. To this end, he had an unlikely ally: clergyman and Golden Square resident Henry Whitehead. Henry had read about Dr. Snow's waterbourne theory and thought it nonsense. He set about trying to disprove it by gathering his own evidence, but began to notice that the disease did seem to trace its origins to one locale: 40 Broad Street, precisely the area Snow had theorized was the source of the outbreak. Once he realized Snow was probably right, he became a staunch supporter and foot-soldier in Snow's one-man army.

Together, the two drew the "ghost-map" of the title, marking black lines on top of certain houses, one for each person who had died.


The map showed the thickest, darkest masses of lines all located near 40 Broad Street, radiating out from the pump located there. Whitehead was even able to locate the index case (an epidemiology term for the first person to fall ill in an outbreak): a baby belonging to a woman named Sarah Lewis, who lived at 40 Broad Street, and disposed of her sick infant's dirty diaper in the cesspool there.

Eventually, they managed to convince the board of health to remove the handle of the Broad Street pump, though they had a hard time convincing people of the validity of their new waterbourne theory. (Amazingly, an Italian scientist Filippo Pacini isolated the cholera germ in water at the same time as Snow's discoveries in London, but his work was ignored by the academy for thirty years. ) Miasma theory must be hard to shrug off in a stinky city.

I really loved this book, and not just because I'm fascinated by disease. Although Johnson's descriptions of the events that transformed these cholera-stricken Londoners from "healthy, functioning humans being to a shrunken, blue-skinned cadavers in a matter of days" are fantastic. Johnson doesn't hold back with the gory physical details of the disease. The early symptoms are indistinguishable from "a mild case of food poisoning." An upset stomach. Next comes vomiting, muscle spasms and sharp abdominal pains, and a "crushing thirst." "But the experience was largely dominated by one hideous process: vast quantities of water being evacuated from [the] bowels."

Those small white particles? That's your small intestine.

Once this loss of fluid started, you'd be be dead in a matter of hours. Well, first you'd swell up and turn blue. Then you'd die. But you wouldn't be a state of febrile unreality, no, you'd be lucid up till nearly the end, when you'd pass out just around the moment massive organ failure set in. Writes Johnson, "The actual cause of death with cholera is difficult to pinpoint; the human body's dependence on water is so profound that almost all the major systems begin to fail when so much fluid is evacuated in such a short period of time."

In a city emblematic of modernity's triumphs, inequality allowed an underclass to live intimately with filth, disease and death. And yet it was precisely this condition, the overcrowding of large cities, that would eventually lead to the knowledge and skill base that would allow humans to cure disease. Quoting Jane Jacobs, Johnson writes, "All the apparatus of surgery, hygiene, microbiology, chemistry ... are fundamentally products of big cities and would be inconceivable without big cities."

Which leads me to the other reason I love this book. I love reading the history of modernity, of big cities and their attendant technological and social developments. When does modernity begin? Is it after the French Revolution? The Industrial Revolution? The Arcades Project? Post-colonialism? What marks it? The eradication of fatal diseases? Solid things suddenly melting for some reason? Reading this book made me feel like Steven J. is really into this stuff too, and maybe my masters degree in "interdisciplinary humanities" ain't so stupid and worthless after all.

A Thrifty Spinster!

First off, I've been terribly lax lately, mainly because I've just finished a very good book and I wanted to write something that would do it justice instead of just dashing off yet another opinionated ramble.

But I just had to post something about this great Reuters "Oddly Enough" article, because it was too awesome not to share (I love their "Oddly Enough" pieces)!

Apparently, a Spinster in England had stashed away an $8million art collection in her "modest home," unbeknown to her family and friends:

"Jean Preston, a thrifty 77-year-old spinster who rode the bus and ate frozen meals, died in 2006. But art experts and auctioneers have now completed the sale of the exceptional works hoarded in her modest home.

Preston, who worked as a librarian for much of her life, inherited many of the works from her father, a keen collector. Her relatives were stunned by the artworks she had tucked away.

"My aunt bought her clothes from a catalog, ate frozen meals and went everywhere on the bus," the Daily Mail newspaper quoted one of them as saying.

"Who would have thought she had the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket in her spare room all these years?"

And she was a librarian to boot!

I nominate her for Spinster Aunt of the Year.

Doing a Lot of Funny Things Outlandishly

It's amazing that, among last year's spate of unplanned pregnancy movies, no critical space was devoted to a discussion of the greatest unplanned pregnancy movie ever made: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944).

This gaspingly funny farce found its way into my living room today (via TCM) and just blew me away. The premise is quite shocking, really, for 1944 (or am I just old-fashioned?). A young girl, Trudy Kockenlocker, gets hastily married and knocked up during a night of carousing with soon-to-be-shipping-out soldiers. When she comes to the morning after, she has only the vaguest recollection of the events in question, confirmed by the presence of a curtain ring on her finger. Horrified, she tries to dupe local pencil-neck and Army reject Norval Jones into marrying her, but he's so sweet and sincerely in love with her that she just can't do it. The rest of the film follows their hijinks as they concoct a plan to salvage her honor, but end up foiled several times along the way.

Which got me thinking: How does Miracle of Morgan's Creek stack up to 2007's twinset of baby-comedies? Let us compare:

1. Heroine Comparison

Juno is smart, worldly, and wise beyond her years, Katherine Heigl, dull, bland and cow-eyed, and Trudy Knockenlocker is naive as a newborn, filled with a strong desire to make each and every serviceman's last day on American soil as sweet and memorable as possible, lamenting, "Oh the poor orphans!" Her careful orchestration of the evening suggests she has got a brain under that mop of blonde curls, but her lack of comprehension re: just exactly what a "good time" entails for a soldier means her good heart trumps brains any day.

Verdict: Being smart is no guarantee you won't get yourself up the pole, and, though brains can help you make witty remarks afterward, being a little scatterbrained makes for even better comedy.

2. Decision-making time

Juno can't go through with the abortion because it makes her too sad, so she opts for adoption, Cow-Eyes plods on placidly, and Trudy can't bring herself to con poor Norval, since he's such a sweetheart.

Funniest decision-making scene: Sobbing to her sister, Trudy says, "He said he's been in love with me since I was no bigger than a fire hydrant or something, and that he took all these classes like cooking and sewing just to be with me --" and her sister says, "Perfect! He can do all the housework!"

3. Complications

During a sham wedding ceremony, Norval fails to remember his fake name, Ignatz Ratziwatski, and the jig is up. Hijinks, arrests, and jailbreaks ensue. Meanwhile, Trudy is falling in love with the nerdy Norval due to his selfless, self-sacrificing actions.

In Juno, things get complicated when one half of the loving adoptive family turns out to be a total douchebag. In Knocked Up, things get sour when it turns out boys are eternal men-children who never grow up, but women age with an inexorable swiftness until they're too old and fat to get into hip nightclubs, which leads to depression all around.

Verdict: Comedy is all about upsetting the natural order of things, and nothing is more chaotically disruptive than an unplanned pregnancy, especially an unwanted one. Babies are comedy gold (but, like flattening someone with an anvil dropped from a height, significantly less amusing in real life). Morgan's Creek is head and shoulders above the other two films in terms of poking gaping holes in the fabric of proper society in general, which is what makes it seem much more shocking and hence funnier. The complete bumbling idiocy of everyone involved adds to that as well, probably. Also, Miracle is the only movie that throws a shotgun marriage into the mix, which only adds to the laughs. The hasty marriage ceremony showcases the two unwitting participants as a bundle of nerves on display, about to be lashed together for eternity by an indifferent officiant in a hurried ceremony. This is also comic gold, and Sturges gets plenty of mileage out of shopworn anti-marriage jokes here ("You think you're nervous now? If you know what what the rest of it was like you'd be even more nervous.").

Also, Miracle is the only film to feature funny insults like, "zipperpuss."

That being said, Juno and Knocked Up are not without their moments, but ultimately they tend to treat relationships and childbirth with a sanctity that undercuts the humor. Sturges cuts through the treacle and remains a satirist up to the very end, the moment when that poor sap Norval realizes what he's unwittingly allowed to be thrust upon him.

Remember, Spinsters: "No man is going to jeopardize his present or poison his future with a lot of little brats hollering around the house unless he's forced to. It's up to the woman to knock him down, hogtie him, and drag him in front of two witnesses immediately if not sooner. Anytime after that is too late."

And write down the names of everyone you sleep with, and get their contact information, just in case.

Movies!

My mama used to say that whatever you do on New Year's Day is what you'll be doing for the rest of the year (so don't fuck it up). Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this year I went to see Juno on New Year's Day, and I've been seeing movies practically every day since. Six movies, six days of the year ... I can't keep this up and wouldn't want to because that would make me one of those movie nerd guys, you know? And they smell.

But for now, here's a list of a bunch of movies I watched.

Smiley Face

"You know who else loves lasagna? Garfield."

Technically I saw this when it was still 2007, but honestly, it was like two days before 2008, so I'm going to let it slide. Plus, I really need to mention how much I love Anna Faris and how great she is. I think she's a spectacularly funny person and a superbly talented comedienne, who wouldn't have been out of place in a 1930s screwball comedy (I could just see her holding her own opposite Cary Grant). Some discerning minds have even cited her performance as one of the year's best.

Juno

"I try really hard actually."

Way cuter than I thought it was going to be, this movie made me laugh a lot and cry about, oh, seven times. Quirky clever dialogue means nothing to my ovaries, who only want to look at pictures of cute babies and then make me cry. (My innards have never been discerning critics.) The brainier part of me loved Ellen Page (I forgive you for Hard Candy!) and the feminist in me was glad when when Juno didn't screw Vanessa over (and, admittedly, when stupid aging hipster Mark got his comeuppance). I love Michael Cera even though he was born(ed) in 1988. He has those long legs. I wonder if he's ticklish.

Laura

"How singularly innocent I look this morning."

So far, my favorite Preminger movie. I love Waldo Lydecker's quips, I love the way Laura shows up halfway through the investigation of her own murder, and I really love the way Dana Andrews' character becomes obsessed with Laura. Some wonder if her reappearance was only a dream or a wish-fulfillment fantasy conjured up in his mind. Like Vertigo, it's all about projecting your desire onto the object of it; Lydecker does it, McPherson does it, Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) does it. Laura inhabits a swirling nexus of projections, looking out from the center, more portrait than person. It's interesting because Daisy Kenyon is kind of a projection, too, where each man loves something of the idea of her, but really has no idea who the person is inside there. Hm, maybe that's why they showed them together on a double bill. Duh.

Also, whenever I say or hear the word "Laura," I get the Scissor Sisters song in my head. It's in there right now.

Daisy Kenyon

"Funny thing is, I like him."

This was an incredibly strange movie, tonally. I am still getting used to Premigner's mix of the dramatic and the comically absurd. For some reason it wasn't all that jarring in Laura, perhaps because Lydecker got all the wisecracks, but in Daisy Kenyon it really stood out. Funny thing was, though, I liked it. I laughed whenever Dana Andrews was on screen, the way he called everyone "Honeybunch," and I liked how insane Henry Fonda was ("Come meet my family in Scarsdale!" he implores, after one date) and I liked Daisy's occasional daffyness, mixing metaphors ("Why did you throw in the sponge?") and crashing her car in the woods and feeling much better afterward. I liked the way the world would interrupt deep conversations on stairwells and in restaurants, creating moments of beautiful awkwardness. Thus I did love the occasional dips into the absurd and bizarre that make Daisy Kenyon so much more than a straight melodrama.


4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days


"Let's never talk about this again."

Otilia hoofs it all around Bucharest trying to help out her silly-goose of a roommate, helping her arrange an illegal abortion. And let me tell you, she goes way above and beyond the call of duty. This girl really takes one for the team. In between post-op ministrations, Otilia endures some incredibly surreal moments (like attending a bourgeois dinner party at her boyfriend's parents' place right after the harrowing procedure) and a terrifying flight through darkness in an attempt to dispose of the expelled fetus. Nightmarish, devastating.

Anatomy of a Murder


"The attorneys will provide the wisecracks. "

The greatest story ever untold. Preminger bobs and weaves his way around the details of the story, letting the viewer's mind fill in the holes like the fertile memory of an unreliable witness. I love the way he never really reveals the truth, just lets you speculate and speculate, dropping hints and suggestions that set the mind racing. Another brilliant thing: the whole defense is bunkum, I'm sure of it. Irresistible impulse, my eye. How brilliant that they got away with it and how wonderfully morally ambiguous it was, in that they were totally aware they were flim-flamming ("I love the small-town lawyer bit!").

The more I think about this movie, the better it gets. I love Preminger's ability to mix comedy and drama; he's a master at it. The courtroom lines really get me, as do the hilariously awkward flirtations between the fantastic Lee Remick and James Stewart. I like this bit, in which the Judge asks the lawyers to think of another word to use in lieu of "panties:"

Claude Dancer: When I was overseas during the war, Your Honor, I learned a French word. I'm afraid that might be slightly suggestive.
Judge Weaver: Most French words are.

Finally, the opening credits are great. I love 1950s-era commercial/graphic design, and these credits tickle me.

The Spirit of Hospitality

I'm back after a brief but awesome candy-and-liquor-filled hiatus during which I played with my new presents, the best of which includes: the above-pictured book, The Joy of Cooking, my beloved old Hitchcock anthologies, and many more. (I can now send my clever prose and witty correspondence all over the world on my Nancy Drew postcards!)

My head seems to have cleared somewhat, and I think I'm back now, and ready to follow Amy Sedaris' words of advice in 2008: "Whether you live in a basement with the income of a ten-year-old girl or on a saffron farm in the south of Spain, the spirit of hospitality is the same. It's the giving of yourself, a present of you to them from me for us."

Twelve Delightful Things

In the '80s, my great-aunt Carol used to put on tatty furs and a fake British accent and parody the Queen's annual speech at Christmas dinners.

I think of her now, as the twilight of 2007 has brought with it the inevitable list-making of critics, pundits and amateurs alike compiling their best-ofs, worst-ofs, and what-ofs, and I, being the scattershot dilettante I am, compile a list is neither a best-films or best-reads list, nor even a best-of-tv list, but rather all three, linked only, inevitably, by their tenuous connections to my vague philosophy of spinsterism, which some have interpreted as "things designed to make you stay at home" (an interpretation I choose to accept mainly because any literal claim I may have had to being an actual Spinster Aunt fell by the wayside, like so much virtue, on July 24th, 2007). I imagine now that the Queen might make such lists as these, with no regard whatsoever for genre, theme, era, author or anything else, other than what amuses her.

So here is my thematically fuzzy, media-unspecific bit of rambling, based upon absolutely no criteria at all other than each item on it provoked my unmitigated delight, as though the intellectual and artistic detritus of this world was designed solely for my whims and pleasure.

Thus do we amuse ourselves in the colonies.

* * *
The Printed Word:

This year I made a wonderful new discovery when I picked up George Simenon's Maigret Mystified by happenstance in a used bookstore. Maigret's a marvelous protagonist, and I can't wait to read more of Simenon's shockingly prolific output. I also read The Blue Hammer, the final book in Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. Macdonald was really underrated for years but I think there'll be a resurgence of interest in his work now, following a recent reprinting of several titles by Black Lizard Press. I'm glad, because his prose should earn him a place among the best. Another series I was delighted to sink my teeth into for the first time was Joan Hess's Maggody series, which satisfied my hillbilly leanings and my cravings for a good story. Mortal Remains in Maggody introduced me to an astonishingly rich pantheon of rubes and their embittered foil, citified home-girl Arly Hanks.

I managed to get a little touch of the classics, too. Dracula , though published over a century ago, was a thoroughly modern tale of suspense and the supernatural, featuring one hell of a kickass heroine. And I continue to enjoy the work of Ruth Rendell, whose solid one-off One Across, Two Down demonstrates her great ability to craft apparently simple narratives of disarming subtlety. I'd have to say I liked it as much as Lake of Darkness, my favorite stand-alone so far, and Murder Being Once Done, my preferred Inspector Wexford mystery to date.

The Moving Pictures:

Two films I saw recently, Docks of NY and Letter from an Unknown Woman reaffirmed my faith in the medium of cinema, one for the beauty of its lighting and compositions, the other for its camera movement. As a viewer, I tend to get too caught up in theme and story to appreciate other elements of the art form, but these films jolted me right back into the movies' sheer capacity for visual gorgeousness. The Band Wagon had a similar effect, in that it reminded me that the movies are about spectacle, dammit! And Sam Fuller's Forty Guns made me remember how much I love that singular star, Barbara Stanwyck, and so many other strong, brilliant women who hold their on on screen. Finally, the new Nancy Drew was a great example of a clever and effective adaptation, updating the source material while staying faithful to its spirit, and to the spirit of its heroine.

Yay, movies!

Pleasant surprises in the world of television:

I watched my first episode of The Women’s Murder Club with some misgiving. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the show so far. Angie Harmon is great, and the whole cast really brings it -- I've even started to like the spunky blonde D.A., who's character totally improved after episode 1. The show veers off into indulgent moments of pure soap and isn't afraid of cop-cliche melodrama, which can be a lot of fun. Yet the writing is taut and handles "womens" issues with insight and humor, and the mid-season finale was completely satisfying.

Another pleasant surprise: House is good again! After a mediocre season 3, the show is fun to watch once more. Laurie is in top form as always, and the "Survivor" element to the show (eliminating potential fellows) was silly and great. It's as if the writers decided they couldn't push the formula any further, were on the brink of cancellation and decided to go for broke. Now I just want the writer's strike to end! Here's hoping the scribes get all the money they've got coming to them.

Well, here's wishing you and yours a Happy Christmas.

Affectionately yours,

Spinster Aunt

The Blue Hammer

In The Blue Hammer, Ross Macdonald layers plot elements like a painter applying oils. Macdonald displays typical authorial flourishes (rich Californian heiresses with evil daddies) and adds some new elements ('70s counter-culture finds Arhcer eating something called a "natureburger") all enmeshed in one of the richest, most intricately entangled plots he ever wrote.

It was to be his last book, and in it one can already feel that maybe Lew Archer is about ready for retirement. He's settling old scores, and finding new, quite possibly true, love -- something he's never done on any of his cases before -- and reflecting more deeply than usual on the nature of life, work, and the whole dirty business.

The case revolves around a missing painting stolen from a rich woman's home, supposedly the work of an artist who disappeared twenty-five years ago. The twists and turns come fast and loose and almost immediately: the painting was borrowed for analysis by an art student, a friend of the woman's daughter, who is sure it's a fake. The portrait then disappears from the young man's house, which turns out to be a foreboding gray fortress manned by his creepy mother, a nurse who keeps her alcoholic husband under lock and key. More twists ensue: the very shady art dealer who sold the painting in the first place is found bleeding and bludgeoned in the street. With his last breath, he names his killer: the missing artist.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. What follows is a twisting highway of stolen identities, love, murder and revenge that leads Archer from California to Arizona and back again, all revolving somehow around this missing artist. It's such a spellbinding read -- it really is one of those books you can't wait to get back to when you're away from it.

There's something profoundly affecting about the characters in this novel, the way they're all saddled with the unfortunate results of lifetimes of bad choices. Many of them live in situations they hate merely because they've made mistakes in the past that there's no way to fix, leading to a lifelong compromise. Some of them are tragic, like the art student who steals/borrows the painting. The "boy," Fred, is really a thirty-one year old man, emotionally stunted by poverty and a lifetime with crazy parents. He isn't even finished slogging his way through college, scrimping and saving to get by. Archer initially dislikes him but eventually takes pity on him. The man-child is a complex and tragic figure, while his mother is a loathsome creature but one who's suffered almost enough to justify her twisted actions -- almost. Perhaps Archer wonders what might have happened if he'd ever had a son? There seems to be a subtext of maternal betrayal and paternal longing running throughout this unusually tender and poignant novel.

As with other Lew Archer novels I've read, this one is indeed a very tightly circumscribed universe. Coincidence appears to abound because everyone seems to know each other, everyone seems to be part of the same social circle. It imparts an incestuous vibe that just increases the spine-shuddering disgust these characters inspire. Then there are a number of other characters who are just plain selfish, grasping, and opportunistic, and they're the ones who end up saddled with lifelong burdens in this self-contained universe that seems to take care, and punish, of its own.

Incidentally: wait till you find out what the blue hammer is.

The Docks of New York

The Docks of New York (1928) represents the zenith of silent film-making and von Sternberg at his best, I'd often been told. So I was pleased to discover upon my first viewing that, yes, it's freakin' awesome. The directing, performances, photography, lighting and mis-en-scene: awesome.

Betty Compson and George Bancroft play a hooker and sailor (respectively) who meet when he jumps into the river to rescue her after a suicide attempt. A night of drunken flirtation ensues, which culminates in a quickie marriage, followed by a heartbreaking morning ...

What's amazing in this film is the level of ambiguity in the directing and performances. It's an unromantic romance. A girl with a what-the-hell attitude who allows herself to fall into a thoroughly bizarre situation because she just doesn't give a damn, she's completely at the end of her rope anyway. Why not? And yet, she's strangely devoted to him, perhaps out of this same fatalistic sense that there's no real reason not to be. One man is as good as the next, and yet she likes him. So there's Betty.

And then you've got George, who's this odd mix of roughness and tenderness. He stops to save her. motivated by basic human decency, and yet he does it with an air of detachment. Then he sticks around to get drunk and flirt with her, motivated by the fact that he has one night of shore leave and she's kind of cute. The next day he leaves because he's "never missed a boat in all his life."

So what prompts him to jump off the boat and swim back to her? This same sense of "Why the hell not?" It's all sort of bizarre and intangible and unmotivated in this really beautiful way maybe illustrating how all our actions are kind of unfathomable, really. I don't know, at least they are in this world. I can't explain the strangeness, but I think I have an image that could illustrate what I mean. After Betty jumps in the water, George steals her some clothes to wear since her only dress is wet. And what does he get her to clothe and warm her shivering, traumatized body? This:
This. This sexy, slinky, clingy, paper-thin dress. This flesh-colored dress! It's devastating and surreal. In a normal universe, a hero would get his damsel something solid and modest and warm. In this world, he gets her a shimmering, substanceless slip of gossamer.

Hardly a conventional love story. And yet, as a vintage Photoplay review describes, "if you are one of those blessed with an appreciation of the beauty of realism, then this will be more beautiful to you than a story of young love in a garden. It has power and tenderness."

Malevolent Doubles and Murderous Parents

I was really excited when I read these ruminations on fondly-remembered Young Adult fiction over at Jezebel.

Lizzie Skurnick's rambling remembrances are fun to read even if you aren't acquainted with the books she covers -- I'm not yet, but I absolutely want to be as of right this second. She writes about The Grounding of Group 6, in which a group of teens are sent off to an elite boarding school ... to die! I just love this concept so much, I really need to spend a rainy afternoon reading this book right now. Skurnick has another piece on the works of Lois Duncan, who sort of sounds like a Patricia Highsmith for pre-teen girls (you know, killing someone and stealing their identity? kind of Ripley-esque, no?). I just wish I could hide books under my desk and sneak-read them at work, the way I used to in math class.

Anyway, I look forward to more posts in this series. There's kind of an '80s theme going on right now, which makes me wonder what "modern" kids are reading ...

I Am Cordially Invited to Meet Nero Wolfe

I read one-and-a-half Nero Wolfe novellas this weekend; all of Black Orchids and most of Cordially Invited to Meet Death. I actually prefer the second one so far (maybe because it involves death by tetanus?) but they're both pretty fantastic. I picked up Black Orchids because of the book store, but of course it sat on my shelf for ages.

I was immediately delighted by Archie Goodwin's breezy narration and his witty one-liners, and I love, love, love the 1930s slang ("I wanted to kick him right in the fundamentals!" "Cut the glitter, sweetheart!") plus I adore the New York setting circa so very long ago. According to the books, Nero Wolfe would have lived right around the corner from where I toil all day long, and I like to imagine him puttering around with his orchids as I type away right now.

Some people speculate that Rex Stout was trying to bridge the gap between the hardboiled Sam Spades and the amateur gentleman detectives like Holmes, Wimsey, Poirot, etc. with Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. What's really fun about having these two types in the same books is that they can butt heads in hilarious ways and insult each other good naturedly, laughing at their respective extremes.

I also like that Goodwin tools around town in a roadster. Did everyone have a roadster in the '30s, or just detectives?

Can't wait to get back to my book and see what happens. I'm just at the part where Archie trails Bess Huddleston's brother to Wolfe's front door. My lunch break is coming up, maybe I'll go finish it off ... or maybe I'll meander down to 35th Street, near the river ...