Category Archives: The Morgue

A Painful Memorial

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Philip Seymour Hoffman, playwright, American Playwriting FoundationYesterday’s New York Times included a front page story and full-page announcement of the establishment of “The American Playwriting Foundation,” to make annual $45,000 grants for creators of new American plays, one of the largest awards available for this purpose today. The Foundation was established in honor of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, “who relentlessly sought out truth in his work and demanded the same from his collaborators.”

Initial funding for the Foundation came from the National Enquirer, which published an interview with someone falsely claiming to be Hoffman’s friend David Bar Katz. In its haste to print this information, the newspaper “made a good faith error” by inadequately checking its source. Katz’s subsequent lawsuit led to an apology, and “instead of seeking a purely personal reward for the harm done to him, Mr. Katz brought the lawsuit as a vehicle to . . .create something positive out of this unfortunate turn of events.”

Out of one man’s tragedy, another’s unselfishness, and the foolishness of an entity with more money than sense, miraculously, something good may rise.

My 7/28/14 review of Hoffman’s last major role, in what is both movie title and obituary, “A Most Wanted Man.”

 

End-Game for Downton?

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Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes

Highclere Castle, filmic home of Downton Abbey (photo: farm9.staticflicker)

In an interview with the New York Times, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes allowed as how the show isn’t like a soap opera that can go on for decades. Seems it’s like a soap opera that can go on for no more than 10 years, he thinks. Next season will be season five, so he’s thinking about an end-game. Last night’s season finale—if not the whole season—left some critics cold.  “What happened to the formerly addictive, splendid, elegant costume drama?” asks Daily Beast reviewer Kevin Fallon. Not enough, in his opinion. Not enough change. Especially last night, when Charles Blake was revealed as an aristocrat himself, which relives Mary of one terrible choice. The mention of Brown Shirts as the possible attackers of Edith’s lover was a dark bit of foreshadowing that change may finally come to Downton.

So you think you know Washington, DC?

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U.S. Capitol, Washington

(photo: farm4.staticflickr)

Take the House of Cards opening credits quiz and find out just how well you know our capital city.  I got 46 points out of 100.  House of Cards (the Netflix-produced show starring political shenanigans and Kevin Spacey) returned recently with 12 new episodes released on the Netflix website.

And enabling the binge-viewing popular among friends who’d watch a season of 24 over a weekend.

The most important way in which Congressman-now-Veep Underwood’s fictional Washington differs from the real thing? Spacey said it: “Our Congress gets s— done.”

Assessing Blight

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Detroit, my long-ago home town, “is one of those taxing places that require you to have an opinion about them,” says Paul Clemins in the New York Times.

Numerous recent books, films, and photo essays have tried to shape and inform those opinions, and I’ve covered a number of them on this website, from the ruin porn phenomenon, to the Heidelberg Project, to the threat to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The plot-thread of of this once-great city was allowed to unravel until the American automotive dream drove right out of town. City lots filled with abandoned homes, the wrecked shells of once-beautiful buildings, suitable for nothing more than desolate parking lots.

A story by Monica Davey in the Times this week describes yet another effort to get a handle on the devastation. A central office is collecting information and photos of every abandoned and dilapidated building in the city, recorded by teams outfitted with computer tablets. The comprehensive database they are compiling will be ready this spring and is expected to help city leaders decide what to try to save and what to demolish.

Former Mayor Dave Bing suggested shrinking the city to a core that could be maintained, instead of continuing to provide city services to blocks with only one or two standing, habitable houses. But even people residing on empty streets that look like farmland—and in some areas actually are being farmed—don’t want to give up their homes. Some officials say demolishing the worst buildings might cost $1 billion, while a public-private effort called the Detroit Blight Authority has begun an aggressive demolition campaign, clearing lots that will become . . . . ? Enough human drama here for scores more books and films.

On the list of LA Times finalists for 2013’s best current issues books is Detroit native and journalist Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy. It tells the history of a city, but more important, the stories of the people struggling in it. In his review, Clemins says, “Many city supporters [and a nascent creative class is among them] will object to the ‘autopsy’ in the subtitle, though it’s not the suggestion of civic death that rankles. Rather, it’s the suggestion of the surgically precise.” As the teams of surveyors roaming the streets who are in a sense conducting that autopsy can attest, decay is a messy business.

See All Those People Down There? They’re Reading!

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

50 finalists for the L.A. Times’s annual Book Prizes were announced recently. Bestselling young adult novelist John Green (whose book The Fault in Our Stars I actually read) is slated to receive the Innovators Award for his “dynamic use of online media to entertain and engage.” Susan Straight, will add a lifetime achievement award to her a nice list of other prizes: the Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, National Book Award finalists (for Highwire Moon), and the Lannan Literary Prize.

Finalists were named in 10 categories: biography, current interest, fiction, graphic novel/comics, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, first fiction, and young adult literature. See the full list at the link above. I’ve reproduced four of the categories below. Haven’t read a one, but eager to read the highlighted ones! Winners will be announced in April.

Current Interest
Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Crown
David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy, The Penguin Press
Barry Siegel, Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom, Henry Holt & Co.
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Knopf

Fiction
Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Graywolf Press
Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs, Knopf
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, Viking
Susan Steinberg, Spectacle: Stories, Graywolf Press
Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version: A Novel, Little, Brown & Co.

History
Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, Belknap Press of Harvard University
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, HarperCollins
Glenn Frankel, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Bloomsbury USA
Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Simon & Schuster
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, W. W. Norton & Co.

Mystery/Thriller
Richard Crompton, Hour of the Red God, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling, Mulholland Books/Little, Brown & Co.
John Grisham, Sycamore Row, Doubleday Books
Gene Kerrigan, The Rage, Europa Editions
Ferdinand von Schirach, The Collini Case, Viking

True Detective

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Been enjoying Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in HBO’s True Detective? Think there’s more there there? Maybe you’re right. I’m not surprised that its weirder elements are generating the kind of easter egg hunt inspired by Twin Peaks and similar entertainments: the human mind searching for connection and sense in chaos. “I think I see a pattern here!” The hunt is so much easier with the Internet, and some people are making discoveries for the rest of us to ponder. There’s the whole thing about The Yellow King, for instance, covered extensively,  and the flatness of time.

The show continues to receive excellent reviews, and you can watch it oblivious to the layers of arcane references and just focus on the psychological interplay among the characters, but for gold-miners, there’s that, too.

A Bitter Reminder

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Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 023Strange to watch last night’s Netflix thriller, Harrison’s Flowers (clip, quite dark), recommended to us by our twenty-something guide in Croatia last fall. The movie wasn’t very good—predictable plot, relentless tank and submachine-gun fire—but the cast was good (Andie MacDowell, Adrian Brody, David Strathairn, Brendan Gleeson, Alun Amstrong). Roger Ebert’s review called Brody’s acting a tour de force, with his character using “attitude and cockiness to talk his way through touchy situations. Watch the way he walks them all through a roadblock. I don’t believe it can be done, but I believe he did it.”

The story, set in 1991, takes place during the height of the Croatian War of Independence, which U.S. media called the Yugoslav civil war, which has been barely covered in film (available here, anyway). It tells about an American photojournalist who disappears in the hotly contested Danube River town of Vukovar and the determination of his wife to travel there and find him, despite the awful risks. Said Roger Ebert about the unlikely plot, “There is a way in which a movie like this works no matter what.”

The interesting part to me was not just that it was shot in Croatia, but that Vukovar is where our river cruise docked, and I spent some time walking around it. Much has been rebuilt in the intervening years, of course, but there were still rubbly areas. Below is my photo of a famous scene from Vukovar, and the one above, taken near the port, certainly displays female determination. A 49 from the Rotten Tomatoes critics; though 77 of civilian reviewers liked it.

IMDb points out some amusing anachronisms in this movie, but don’t let the fluffs in terms of which tanks carried which identities put you off—I lost track of which side was which, and while politically that was key, cinematically, it was meaningless. The regenerated arm, though, I think I can explain: prosthesis.

Incendies

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film, Incendies

“Incendies” (image: nymag.com)

The New Year is off to a great Netflix start with the 2010 Canadian drama Incendies (trailer), adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad, and directed by Denis Villeneuve. In it, a twin brother and sister are directed by their mother’s will with finding their father and previously unknown half-brother, both presumably lost in the human fallout from a Middle East conflict.

The key question is, how can they find their father when they did not really know their mother? Who and what she was is the first mystery they must solve. Incendies was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film), won numerous other awards, and was picked by the New York Times (review) as one of the 10 best films of 2011. It covers a wartime history, so there’s violence, but mostly it’s a moving mystery that captivates until the end. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 92.