1943 was not a happy year for the Third Reich. After the disaster of Stalingrad came the catastrophe of Kursk, then the loss of North Africa. The Wehrmacht was on the defensive. America was beginning to enter the European theater in earnest. But it was a great one for German cinema due to the release of Munchhausen . Based on the exploits of Baron von Munchhausen, one of the literary world’s most famous yarn-spinners, it was a very high-prestige production made in full color, directed by Josef von Baky and starring Hans Albers as the Baron. (more…)
Author: Steven Clark
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The recent coronation of Charles III was a bit of a relief for me: He finally made it! The old girl’s gone at last. That being said, it appears that much of the old girl’s Britain is gone as well. It seemed that every ethnicity in Britain was given a place at the coronation, and we were serenaded not by the glowing choruses of Purcell, Handel, or Elgar, but by a black gospel group in tacky white clothes. Nida Manzoor’s first feature is therefore a timely delight. (more…)
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When we think about Third Reich films, we always go to the usual: Triumph of the Will, Der Ewige Jude, Jud Süß, and Kolberg, Goebbels’ final, fist-shaking epic call to resistance as the Reich crumbled. Yet, German film a the time was quite varied, innovative, entertaining, and more than just propaganda films for the master race. Jewish writer Walter Laqueur observed that German film had a worldwide reputation in the 1920’s and ’30s, and even in the Nazi era films were made with a high level of competence and had considerable entertainment value. Unlike the other arts, movies under Hitler were given a great deal of latitude. (more…)
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The Secret History, originally published in 1992, was Donna Tartt’s first novel, and I admit I approached it backwards, reading her novels The Little Friend and The Goldfinch before tackling this one, which will complete my reviews of her works on this site. It is a compelling and masterfully written tale. Tartt’s style is dense and beautifully descriptive, with passages such as:
My path took me beneath a row of apple trees, full-blown and luminous, shivering in the twilight like an avenue of pale umbrellas. The big white flakes drifted through them, dreamy and soft. (more…)
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Philippa Jayne Langley (Sally Hawkins) is an office frump in Edinburgh — and a depressed one. She is passed over for promotion because she isn’t charming enough, which is true. She dresses like she gets her clothes from a bad aunt’s closet, her hair is clipped, and her doleful eyes suggest a mousy wife whose marriage to John (Steve Coogan) is in freefall. Her two sons are obsessed with video games, and her husband openly tells Philippa that he has a mistress. This is not done out of bitterness; for all their marriage’s failings, John and Philippa are honest and rational. They may not be happy, but they are decent in the old English way. (more…)
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I finally saw this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once, by directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and enjoyed the film. Like many of you , I think it’s a shame Tár didn’t win, and note that The Banshees of Inisherin also didn’t win — but I think many of you are glad about that. Nevertheless, Everything Everywhere All at Once hits all the bases for this year’s woke base — but it’s also a fun movie, very fast-paced and a visual delight. (more…)
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After Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel The Little Friend, she published The Goldfinch in 2013, a novel that won her a much-deserved Pulitzer. The novel has been described as a latter-day Dickensian work, hailed as “a soaring masterpiece” by the Washington Post and as “a triumph” by Stephen King. Does it soar? Is it a triumph?
The Goldfinch does fly, although there are times when it hovers. It is nevertheless a remarkably beautiful, well-crafted Bildungsroman about Theo Decker, a pre-adolescent youth in New York City who is on the cusp of a new beginning. (more…)
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Joanna Rakoff is a writer, and My Salinger Year is Philippe Falardeau’s film of her memoir about 1995, when she is on a visit to New York from Berkeley, fresh from university. The visit becomes permanent, however, because Joanna is a writer; she’s determined to make it, especially to get published in The New Yorker. Joanna, played by Margaret Qualley, is determined, a bit shy, and has a slurred, squeaky voice that hints English major. God knows, I heard enough of them. (more…)
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Southern writing may be the last American literature in that it has retained a true Anglo-Saxon base in terms of its authors, themes, and relation to history — specifically, white history.
Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, published in 2015 and winning a justly-earned Pulitzer Prize for best novel, has a real command of writing, and her prose is a roller coaster dipping and rising from sad to exuberant that keeps you reading. (more…)
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In Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Whale, Moby Dick gets referenced a lot, but its subject isn’t an actual whale. Charlie (Brendan Fraser), the protagonist, is rather a monstrous human leviathan whose massiveness can easily disgust others, much like the monstrously-deformed John Merrick, who was depicted in David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man. Merrick had to live masked and wrapped in canvas so as not to shock people. (more…)
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As I was doing my usual TV-watching in 1965, waiting for the Three Stooges to pop up, the screen suddenly erupted with a flashy, peppy ad for The Secret of My Success. Revolution! Suspense! Giant spiders on the loose! Rescue beautiful girls from horrible spiders! Rescue horrible spiders from beautiful girls! It looked like a barrel full of sixties kookiness that I couldn’t wait to see.
But I lived 65 miles south of St. Louis at the time, and the film never made it to our local theater. I longed for it, always recalling that goofy commercial and its promise of nuttiness. (more…)
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January 6, 2023 Steven Clark
Tár:
Reflections on the Artist vs. the HiveGore Vidal once said to Dwight McDonald, “You realize we have nothing more to say; only to add.”
I feel the same way in this review of Todd Field’s Tár, the recent film so artfully described in Trevor Lynch’s review (“The Talented Miss Tarr”), but the film made an immediate impression on me in terms of how it dealt with life and power when applied to art. I recall Lynch’s discomfort with Tár’s opening monologues which could, by virtue of their length and the fact of there being two in sequence, could easily kill a film. (more…)
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In Bruges (2008) was a dark, funny, sad, and violent film by Martin McDonagh using Colin Ferrell and Brenden Gleeson’s talents to play two hitmen, a kind of Laurel and Hardy meet Harold Pinter. In his latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin, the two are paired again: a wise, older man and his younger, more immediate partner. But here the pairing has strains of tragedy, commenting upon existential human solitude at war with the need for society and companionship.
Set on Inisherin, an island off the coast of Ireland, in 1923, life is dull and predictable despite pops of gunfire and explosions on the Irish mainland. (more…)