Category Archives: The Morgue

Olive Kitteridge: on TV

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Olive Kitteridge, HBO, Elizabeth StroutI hope you  spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO’s Olive Kitteridge instead. I’d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I wasn’t optimistic about the television version. Talented Anna Maxwell Martin should have stuck with The Bletchley Circle, where she had an innovative, meaty role.

Olive Kitteridge will be playing on HBO (2 parts) numerous times in coming weeks, so if you missed it the first time, try to catch it. Just for the acting alone, it’s terrific, with Frances McDormand playing Olive and Richard Jenkins as Henry, her long-suffering husband. I’d read the book, so was prepared for Olive’s prickly personality. She’s likely not someone you’d want to spend a lifetime with, but Henry hung in there, and NPR reviewer Eric Deggans calls the production “maybe the best depiction of marriage on TV.”

For me, the television version posed much the same question as did the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. Why was Olive so unyielding, so unmoved by others’ feelings, even as she registers them? She is that rare creature—someone who truly won’t bother to be likeable. “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology,” a character in the book says. Her father’s suicide is talked about on several occasions, and did that cause the big disconnect? It doesn’t seem so. And just when you’re about to give up on her, she’ll do something remarkable.

Finding Philip Marlowe

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Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart

(art: wikimedia.org)

Some authors are unalterably linked to a particular place and time—Faulkner, Dickens, Cheever. For Raymond Chandler, the time and place are Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s. His books about that era convey a very specific mindset, with such classic lines as “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself” (The Long Goodbye), “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” (Farewell, My Lovely); and “You know what Canino will do—beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling” (The Big Sleep). You can’t read his rhythms without seeing Humphrey Bogart as the perfect personification of his detective, Philip Marlowe.

According to Electric Lit, from Malibu to Pasadena, Chandler’s “iconic spots dot the landscape.” Now you can retrace the high (and low) points from this master of the hardboiled detective novel with a new map of the City of Angels
, written and compiled by Kim Cooper and designed by Paul Rogers, which the publisher calls “an insider’s guide to the city Chandler knew.”

Cooper’s company Estouric conducts literary, true crime, and California culture tours, including “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In a Lonely Place” and “The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare,” as well as the uplifting “Mausolea of Los Angeles.” (Mystery writers attending the big Bouchercon conference will have a special edition of the Chandler tour.)

Given the amount of research done for the tours, the map was a logical next step. Cooper had to do a fair bit of digging, too. “I was thrilled to be able to confirm the actual location of Victor’s, the bar where Marlowe and Terry Lennox grow close over gimlets in The Long Goodbye,” (my review) she told Electric Lit.

Winners’ Circle Too Tight?

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Japanese print, road, stream

Flanagan’s book’s title is from a 17th c. Japanese epic poem (photo: wikimedia.org)

The day after the U.K.’s prestigious Man Booker Prize longlist was announced last summer, UK publisher Tom Chalmers expressed his doubts. While he noted the importance of book prizes as “an increasingly key route through which to discover and champion the best writers, to elevate and highlight the brilliant above the masses of books now being published every year,” they too often fall short, he thinks, by making safe choices.

Still, he pointed to a couple of happy exceptions: the 2013 Costa Book of the Year Award that went to The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer and the Bailey’s Women Prize for Fiction that went to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride.

Unfortunately, this year’s Man Booker longlist caused him to make “a quick check of the calendar to confirm I was still in 2014. In fact, in this Millennium.” Last year’s Man Booker prize was the 826-page doorstop The Luminaries, by Elizabeth Catton, while the big U.S. prize, the Pulitzer, went to Donna Tartt’s 784-page The Goldfinch, an award promptly subjected to rampant second-guessing (though not as much as the consternation in the U.S. literary world in 2012, when the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded no fiction prize at all). I read and liked both of these Big Books, anomalous as they are in a world where 350 pages seems the upper limit on publishers’ risk-taking.

As for the Booker, Chalmers doesn’t object to the new addition of U.S. authors to the pool of potential longlistees—though some of the prize-winning authors do, feeling people from smaller Commonwealth nations will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Americans. Case in point: The 2014 winner, Richard Flanagan, is from Tasmania, which most Americans couldn’t find on a map. He won with a book about World War II, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on his father’s experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war. (Flanagan dedicated the book to his father, who died the day he was told the book was finally finished.)

Chalmers does object to the rules change that allows automatic entries for previous winners. And he notes the selection committee’s neglect of independent publishers. These factors shift the prize toward the familiar, the safe, when it should be “discovering and highlighting the most exciting, dynamic and talented writing.” I want the winnowing role played by awards judges to help me find the best-written books. It will be disappointing if it becomes just an insiders’ club.

Henry VIII

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Henry VIII, English king

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, a wildly popular play up until the 1800’s, is rarely performed today. Surely not because we like our history delivered with somewhat more accuracy, and surely not because producers are unable to cut its approximately six-hour running time down to a more manageable two-and-a-quarter, as the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has done in its current, excellent production. The prologue includes a bit of optimistic false advertising in that regard:

Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree
The play may pass, if they be still and willing,
I’ll undertake may see away their shilling
Richly in two short hours.

Today, the play is probably best known for a mishap during a 1613 performance, in which the play’s cannonfire set afire the thatched roof of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, which burned to the ground.

Twenty-four pivotal years are condensed in the play’s action, which covers the early days of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon up to and including his infatuation and marriage with Anne Bullen (Boleyn) and birth of their daughter, Elizabeth. The end of the play is a long forward-looking tribute to the future of baby Elizabeth, anticipating a glorious era, her father’s legacy.

Although most modern dramatizations of Henry’s life linger on the problem of the six wives, the period of the play is much more interesting for the conflicts between Henry and the Pope and his agent in England, Cardinal Wolsey (subject of Hilary Mantel’s award winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies). Although the conflict came to a head over Henry’s wish for annulment of his marriage to Catherine that would free him to marry Anne, it was fed by Henry’s desire to acquire the massive wealth and property owned by the country’s hundreds of churches, monasteries, church schools, priories, convents, and other religious entities. His break with Rome led, of course, to formation of the Church of England with him at its head and turned that country from a Catholic to a Protestant one—a course his daughter Elizabeth vigorously pursued in her long reign.

The STNJ production is brilliantly acted, with special praise going to Philip Goodwin, who inhabits the role of Cardinal Wolsey like a second skin, David Foubert’s King Henry, and Jessica Wortham’s Queen Catherine. The “just enough” set design offers plenty of flexibility and space for the action, allowing large groups of the cast of 15 to be comfortably on stage at once, including for some period dance scenes (Henry was a fair composer). The costume design is spectacular.

I wondered at the drawing on the cover of the playbill of the baby wearing Henry’s locket only to realize that in this play, the baby is much the point.

Halloween Reads

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pumpkin, Halloween

(photo: pixabay)

Book lovers have been compiling their favorite scary reads for this season, and here are 10 culled from Book Riot and various other sources:

  • Snowblind by Christopher Golden – phone calls from dead people, missing children
  • The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon (this one was on some other lists, too) – poor housing choice
  • The Woman in Black by Susan Hill – (film starred Daniel Radcliffe) stay away from Eel Marsh House
  • The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero– from gothic to “wickedly twisted treasure hunt”
  • Booster & Reeves: The Night of the Revenants by Troy Blackford – both terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny
  • We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory – a support group of survivors of stuff “too crazy to be true”
  • The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers – classic inspiration for much that has come after, including last spring’s tv series True Detective
  • Song of Kali by Dan Simmons – on several lists, takes place in the dark (in every sense) setting of Calcutta
  • The Boy Who Drew Monsters by Keith Donohue – art not only imitates but becomes life
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King – a horror classic; even King thought it “too scary”
  • And here’s a bonus link to Neil Gaiman talking about the value of scary stories

The links are to Amazon.com for convenience, but, as always, I encourage you to do business with your local independent bookstore!

11-1-14 A Mysterious Conversation

Russian Ark (2002)

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Russian Ark, Alexander SokurovA combination of incredibly poor planning and the exigencies of our Netflix list in one week produced two arty but, let’s face it, slow-moving movies set in museums [Museum Hours reviewed 10-22]. Russian Ark (trailer), too, had rave reviews from critics and is perhaps best known for the incredible way it was shot. The whole thing—all 96 minutes of it—is one unbroken take. Really. Filming in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the royal-palace-cum-art-treasurehouse, director Alexander Sokurov and his cinematographer Tillman Buttner had use of this incomparable setting for a single day. You can say this for them, they made the most of it.

The film follows a mysterious and unnamed museum visitor, purportedly the Marquis de Custine, who wanders its hallways, back passages, and famous galleries, encountering notable Russians from the past—Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, the Romanovs (that’s the Romanov daughters, destined to be gunned down in the Communist Revolution in the picture). For the most part he is unseen, or at least ignored, as he turns and talks to the camera (you).

There’s no plot, just this drifting, mostly through the 19th century. But it’s an incredible tour and a costume-lover’s dream. At one point the Marquis heads into a ballroom where an orchestra plays for hundreds of dancers and onlookers. After this spectacular ball, the camera watches the guests leave, ultimately moves ahead of the crowd, and exits the museum. Fini. How I interpret all this is that the people in the scenes, like Noah’s giraffes and sheep and bluejays, may have led separate, unconnected lives (in this case, over time), but they are all inevitably connected in the arc [!] of Russian history.

Some reviewers asked whether the film would have received such a positive critical response if it had been made in the usual way, with cuts and edits, since images and scenes accumulate, disconnectedly, without any discernible central point. Roger Ebert’s response was “ʻRussian Ark,’ as it stands, is enough. . . . If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening. ʻRussian Ark’ spins a daydream made of centuries.” (Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 89%; audience score: 81%).

Writing Tips from The Count

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Dracula's castle, Romania

Castle where Vlad the Impaler (“Count Dracula”) was imprisoned (photo: the author)

Inspired by Halloween’s rapid approach, the editors at Writers Digest have used the opening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a way to demonstrate 10 key writing techniques, as revealed in the book’s annotated version, with annotations by American horror author Mort Castle.

Among Castle’s observations are how tiny clues provide insight into the character of the book’s narrator, Jonathan Harker, including his domesticated notes to himself about getting recipes for his fiancee back in Victorian England. He praises how masterfully Stoker moves Harker through time and space to get the story moving, rather than lingering on blow-by-blow details of his journey to Hungary and on to Transylvania: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.” Leaving the familiar, in other words, and crossing into the realms of the barely known.

A little further on, Stoker describes the people of the Transylvania region, “I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.” Again, as Castle notes, he is setting the reader up for happenings that are beyond everyday knowledge. This must have been quite thrilling for people living in 1897 London.

There was a real Dracula, of course, a 15th c. leader of Wallachia, south of Transylvania. Here’s a well-regarded history of his cruel and violent rule—fighting those Turks, as well as his rivals—written by two Boston College history professors. Don’t read it unless you have a strong stomach. I couldn’t finish it. If Londoners nearly 120 years ago knew even dimly of this real prince, their bones were shivering from the start of Stoker’s tale!

A Dining Room with a (What a!) View

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restaurant, Puglia, Italy, Grotta Palazzese

Ristorante Grotta Palazzese in Puglia, Italy (photo: hereandthere.eu)

At the end of a long week, I’m ready for nothing more challenging than some pretty pictures. And here’s a collection of photos of 35 restaurants with truly spectacular views! I thought some of the dining room vistas in the recent movie The Trip to Italy were beautiful, and here are more, culled from around the world. My favorites: #4 and #33. (The photo above is also from #4, Ristorante Grotta Palazzese in Puglia, Italy).

I hope the diners who patronize #23 never see the restaurant from the angle at which the photo was taken. Looks way too precarious in an earthquake-prone country! That would seriously interfere with my digestion.

#5, is pretty spectacular, too. Pictured below, it’s Ithaa Undersea Restaurant in Rangali Island, Maldives. “I’ll have the steak, please.” And the ladies’ room is NOT out back.

restaurant, fish, Maldives, Ithaa Undersea Restaurant

Ithaa Undersea Restaurant, Rangali Island, Maldives (photo: conradhotels3.hilton.com)

 

Little Rock: An American Play

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Little_Rock_Desegregation

(photo: en.wikipedia)

Passage Theatre Company’s current production—Little Rock: An American Play (video)—presents a compelling dramatization of how nine black students integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus allowed an angry, jeering mob of more than a thousand white protestors to intimidate the students, who, not unreasonably, feared for their lives. School desegregation was the law of the land, however, since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, and President Eisenhower sent in troops and federalized the Arkansas National Guard to protect the students. A Civil Rights landmark, this episode was the first major test of the strength of federal support for desegregation.

This production uses nine cast members—six black and three white—to portray dozens of roles: the nine students, their parents, teachers, other students, the protesters, local and national political leaders, and young television reporter Mike Wallace. Comments of a number of people external to the events—including Louis Armstrong, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Lena Horne, Rosa Parks—are presented in vignette.

The show begins with a song, as the cast marches in, and music varies the already lively pace throughout. The single set, classroom desks facing the audience, gives the cast members a place to be while waiting their scenes in the spotlight at the front of the stage. More important, it is a constant reminder that all this turmoil was about only one thing: kids wanting an education—a good education. (That this dream still inspires and is not yet fully realized is evident not only throughout the United States, but in the 2014 award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai.)

The multi-talented cast brings playwright Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj’s conception to life. Little Rock is a reminder of what Passage Theater’s artistic director June Ballinger calls a “shameful time in American history” and of the healing that remains to done. Held over at Trenton’s Mill Hill Playhouse until November 2.

Museum Hours

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Pieter Bruegel, Museum Hours, Jem Cohen

“The Peasant Wedding” by Pieter Bruegel (photo: wikimedia.com)

Quick Netflix queue check: Is Museum Hours on your list? (trailer) If you put it there because you’re looking for an alternative to the deafening noise and frantic pace of action movies, you have succeeded. This 2012 drama was directed by Jem Cohen, the award-winning creator of numerous films about punk rock musicians, including Patti Smith. I haven’t seen those documentaries, but I’m guessing the quiet and snail’s pace of Museum Hours is a significant departure that takes the meaning of “art house film” literally.

Not overloaded with plot, the film includes lots of footage of paintings and sculpture and people looking at paintings and sculpture, a 15?-minute art appreciation monologue on the work of Pieter Bruegel, the point of which was that, in the panoply of people he scatters across his canvases, he doesn’t direct the eye to any single place. You can pick your own center. Each person portrayed is potentially equally important, regardless of the putative “subject” of the work.

That seems to be the Cohen’s point, too. That the two characters—a woman visiting Vienna to attend her comatose cousin—and a museum guard she meets by happenstance, are two random people and subjects as worthy of exploration as anyone else. That’s my guess, anyway.

Only three real speaking parts, all performed superbly: the guard, the out-of-towner, the museum lecturer. Not the comatose cousin. Much of the movie was filmed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott gave it 5 stars and called it “quietly amazing, sneakily sublime.” Rotten Tomatoes called it “a mesmerizing tale.” Mesmerized, I fell asleep (briefly). Critics rating 94% — Audience: 59%. Like visiting an art museum without leaving home.