"The Great Pretender"- The Platters

The School of Life: Jane Austen and Lev Tolstoy

Too much about ethics, message, moral purpose and effect, too little about art- what about form and style? what about innovation? what about their genius? what about their contribution to the art of fiction, and influence on later writers? We don't come to Jane Austen purely for her teachings, and if Tolstoy hadn't been such a great storyteller and scene-setter and psychologist, nobody would put up with his long, repetitive digressions about the meaning of life and love and happiness, or about determinism and the 1 great man theory. 
But then this is The School of Life. The 1st video is nice- people often attach the word "romance" and therefore "sentimental" and "light" and "unrealistic" to Jane Austen, and don't realise how serious she was as an author. It's a good reminder. 

100 latest films I've watched

From January 2015 to February 2016
Bold: films I consider good

1/ Mean Girls (2004)- again
2/ The Imitation Game (2014)
3/ The Immigrant (2013)
4/ Monsieur Hire (1989)
5/ You Were Never Lovelier (1942)
6/ City by the Sea (2002)
7/ Malice (1993)
8/ American Sniper (2014)
9/ Shakespeare in Love (1998)- again
10/ The Little Prince (1974)
11/ A Room with a View (1985)- again
12/ Charlie's Angels (2000)- again
13/ Birdman (2014)
14/ A Few Good Men (1992)- again
15/ The Diary of Anne Frank (2009)
16/ The Theory of Everything (2014)
17/ The Brave One (2007)- again
18/ Still Alice (2014)
19/ The Sessions (2012)- again
20/ Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
21/ Inherent Vice (2014)
22/ Daniel Deronda (2002)
23/ The Name of the Rose (1986)
24/ Great Expectations (1999)
25/ Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
26/ Irma la Douce (1963)
27/ Fingersmith (2005)
28/ Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
29/ The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
30/ The Killers (1946)
31/ White Heat (1949)
32/ Alice in the Cities (1974)
33/ Furious 7 (2015)
34/ One, Two, Three (1961)
35/ Bringing Up Baby (1938)- again
36/ Brief Encounter (1945)
37/ 12 Angry Men (1957)
38/ Some Like It Hot (1959)- again
39/ Middlemarch (1994)
40/ Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum- Germany- 1979)
41/ A Most Violent Year (2015)
42/ The Silence of the Lambs (1991)- again
43/ The Long Goodbye (1973)
44/ Magic Mike XXL (2015)
45/ Annie Hall (1977)- twice
46/ Psycho (1960)- again
47/ The Birds (1963)
48/ The Godfather (1972)- again
49/ The Godfather Part II (1974)
50/ The Godfather Part III (1990)
51/ Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
52/ Anatomy of a Murder (1959)- again
53/ The Graduate (1967)
54/ Chinatown (1974)
55/ I Vitelloni (1953)
56/ Scarface (1983)- again
57/ Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
58/ Mission: Impossible- Rouge Nation (2015)
59/ A Crush on You (2011)
60/ Count Dracula (1977)
61/ You Only Live Once (1937)
62/ The Fortune Cookie (1966)
63/ Agent Cody Banks (2003)- again
64/ 마더 (Mother- South Korea- 2009)- again
65/ 東京物語 (Tokyo Story- Japan- 1953)
66/ Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria- Italy- 1957)- twice
67/ Fellini Satyricon (Italy- 1969)
68/ Amarcord (1973)
69/ Sweet Charity (1969)
70/ Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
71/ Spectre (2015)
72/ The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
73/ Family Plot (1976)
74/ Bridge of Spies (2015)
75/ Marnie (1964)
76/ Manhattan (1979)
77/ Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003)- again
78/ Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)- twice
79/ Bandslam (2009)
80/ Jackie Brown (1997)
81/ Nothing But The Truth (2008)
82/ Match Point (2005)- again
83/ Love and Death (1975)
84/ Footloose (1984)
85/ Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972)
86/ Whiplash (2014)
87/ The Hateful Eight (2015)
88/ Cabaret (1972)
89/ Joy (2015)
90/ A Foreign Affair (1948)
91/ The Gift (2015)
92/ The Revenant (2015)
93/ 45 Years (2015)
94/ The Big Short (2015)
95/ 8 1/2 (1963)- again
96/ Festen (The Celebration- Denmark- 1998)- twice
97/ The Danish Girl (2015)
98/ The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
99/ Brooklyn (2015)
100/ Room (2015)

Tolstoy's embodiment of a kind of universal physical existence

In Tolstoy and the Novel, John Bayley writes:

“... Indeed we might make a distinction, in the context of Russian and Western literature, between the author who writes about himself and his experiences, and the author who exists. Gide writes about himself: Tolstoy writes about himself: but with the former we feel the will to create and impose upon us the idea of a unique and significant person; with the latter, only the transparent statement of an existence. It is the same with the comparison, made by Thomas Mann and others, between Goethe and Tolstoy. Both are supreme egotists. But Goethe is absorbed by himself because he is a national genius, a god-like apparition; Tolstoy, because he finds himself experiencing what all other human beings experience. Goethe’s self-preoccupation strikes us as perpetually narcissistic, incapable of disturbing its own image; Tolstoy’s is the egotism of a man like any other, but immensely more so.
[…] For surely the collapse of the sense of existence in Tolstoy is the surest proof both of how superb and how universal it had been? All of us are subject to such a temporary collapse: Tolstoy experienced it on an overwhelming scale. Tolstoy’s embodiment of a kind of universal physical existence would be nothing if it had not been so continually haunted and obsessed by the question of what there was, what there might be, outside himself. A Tolstoy who continued to write novels of the same kind would be an intolerable phenomenon, for his egotism seems to encompass all physical existence. But what grows with it, haunts it, and finally dominates it, is the admission of its limitations, the confrontation of self with what is not self, of life with death. Tolstoy is not ill, not perverse; he plays out in himself, and on his scale, the most universal and inevitable of human dramas. He is the state of our existence: he does not, like Goethe, attempt to conquer it and to put himself above it. Ultimately, as Thomas Mann comes near to admitting, Goethe cared for nothing but himself. Tolstoy was nothing but himself, and his sense of what awaited him, and what was outside him, is correspondingly more intimate to us all, and more moving...”

At the same time, I’ve been reading The Cossacks, because of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which I think applies to most readers. It is very much a Tolstoy novel (I would not use the word “Tolstoyan”, which refers more to Tolstoy's philosophical and religious ideas and the social movement): cold description and hot interiority, an obsession with death and the meaning of life and happiness and love. Dmitri Andreich Olenin is a complex, susceptible, self-contradictory young man torn between pleasures and his own idealism, a socially awkward man fed up with the artificiality and hypocrisy of his own class but unable to cut himself off from that world because he belongs nowhere else even while feeling that he doesn’t quite fit in with people of his class. His struggle to find meaning and to give his life meaning makes him feel even more alienated, because his motives are unknown and his efforts are therefore misunderstood, and because he’s uncertain. Like Pierre in War and Peace. Like Levin in Anna Karenina. Like Tolstoy himself. And in a way, like us, in our musings about life and struggle to make life meaningful and pursuit of happiness—just “larger”, more complex, more self-contradictory. 

45 Years

You see a work differently when you do some writing yourself. The choices you made- how to tell the story, how to structure the plot, whose perspective should be the focus, what to show and what to hide, what to keep and what to omit... help you notice and make you think about the choices the author made that otherwise you might have paid no attention to.
Yesterday evening I watched 45 Years. The plot is simple: it's almost a week of Mr and Mrs Mercer before their 45th wedding anniversary on Saturday (the structure: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,..., Saturday). On Monday, at the start of the film, the husband receives a letter in German informing that people have found the perfectly preserved body of his ex-girlfriend Katya, who 50 years earlier slipped into an Alpine crevasse (right before him). 45 Years isn't about the anniversary party alone. It isn't about Katya and her death or the love story between her and the husband, Geoff, before the future Mrs Mercer, Kate, comes along. It isn't about Geoff and how he deals with the news and comes to terms with it, how he immerses himself in memories with all the pains and regrets and what-ifs. 45 Years is about Kate- how she's affected by the news and its effect on her husband, how she deals with that past of her husband of which she wasn't a part, how she's bothered and then pained by his reawakened grief and something like an attempt to get Katya back, how she ponders over hypothetical questions, how she tries to come to terms with some newfound knowledge that seems to tear her world apart, how she all of a sudden sees her whole marriage differently whilst arranging on her own the wedding anniversary that she herself isn't certain they should have.
I watched 45 Years and thought about Andrew Haigh's artistic choices. The photos of the friend Lena's grandchild that she shows the couple, whilst Geoff is distracted with thoughts about climate change and the Alps and the accident and Kate is also distracted with concern for him but looks out of politeness, aren't shown; the photo of Katya that Geoff looks for in the middle of the night and Kate demands to see isn't shown; what we have instead are Charlotte Rampling's and Tom Courtenay's faces. Geoff's visit to the travel agency isn't shown; instead, we see Kate go there to ask and discover that he has come to inquire about Switzerland, and see her reaction. Geoff's meeting with long-time friends, of which he wanted to back out but couldn't, isn't shown; instead, we see Kate pick him up afterwards and him whine about it. Haigh omits all that can be redundant, unnecessary. And he goes further. Many details are withheld, the characters' motives and emotions aren't verbalised- why the Mercers have no children isn't explained, whether Katya dies pregnant or what happens to the foetus/ baby if that's not the case isn't stated, how Kate really feels about the discovery isn't expressed; all we have is what we can see on the screen. He even lets Kate imply but not talk about what she has known, and we thus can never know how Geoff might respond to what she eventually leaves unsaid.
The most interesting decision is perhaps not to show any flashback. None whatsoever. We never see the young Geoff with Katya. We never see Katya's last day and the accident. What Andrew Haigh does is to let Geoff tell it to Kate. The camera turns from the husband telling the story, to the wife hearing it. This is usually a "crime" in films- the language of cinema is image, and what can be shown with images shouldn't be told in words. By not showing the accident, Haigh seems to choose an easy way, at the cost of not conveying the awfulness of the memory, thus reducing its nightmarish, haunting impact and not depicting to the full extent Geoff's pain. The reasoning isn't hard to grasp- from the beginning to the end, 45 Years focuses on Kate. It begins with her, and ends with her. But Haigh's decision has an effect- as we the audience hear the story from old Geoff, as we can't see it and are kept distanced from it, as we know only what Kate knows, that puts us in Kate's position and brings us closer to her, as though we wonder the same things, ask the same questions, have the same doubts. That is interesting. And it makes us realise the painful truth that the happiest and most stable of couples are made up of 2 persons that are essentially alone, and strangers to each other.
Come to think of it, it's not an easy way that Haigh has chosen. The focus now is on emotions and reactions, the weight is now on the actor and actress (and Haigh's casting and directing). Like Marion Cotillard in De rouille et d'os or Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, Charlotte Rampling has a subtle performance, and says so much more with her face than many actresses could with words. Without her and Tom Courtenay, 45 Years wouldn't be such a beautiful and moving film. As it is. 

"Can't Help Falling In Love"- Elvis Presley vs Celine Dion

"Can't Help Falling In Love" is better in Elvis Presley's rendition than in Celine Dion's. It's not only because of his low, warm voice, but also, and more, because he sings it simply, which conveys more effectively the spirit of the song, the feeling that the speaker's love is simple and natural and meant to be. Pay attention to the lyrics- "Wise men say only fools rush in", he doesn't want to rush; "Shall I stay? Would it be a sin?", he hesitates; but it happens, naturally, "like a river flows surely to the sea". Celine Dion, great as her voice is, drags the notes and chooses such a dramatic, melismatic, affected approach that it goes against the song and the "assertion" that the speaker can't help falling in love. She butchers the song. 

Sarah Brightman- "Scarborough Fair"

On the new BBC adaptation of War and Peace

I tried watching the new adaptation of War and Peace last night.
I couldn't watch a whole episode.
You know I love Tolstoy. You know what I often think of adaptations. You know what I think about Andrew Davies and the Colin Firth effect (my fear came true, by the way).
So I won't say anything about this series. What I say instead is: fine, this isn't for me, but we'll always have the book, and if this adaptation gets more people to read War and Peace, great.
You can say, let's be realistic, most people won't. Some will be interested but find the size daunting. Some will think watching an adaptation is good enough. Some will intend to read it but never come round to reading it. After all I'm not much better- I can humiliate myself now by making a list of classic novels I haven't read despite watching the adaptations: Les Misérables, The Three Musketeers, The Age of Innocence, A Room with a View, The Wings of the Dove, Washington Square, Jude the Obscure, Far from the Madding Crowd, Barry Lyndon, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and so on and so forth. The seen-the-film-not-read-the-book list will be much longer if we include more modern works: The Green Mile, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Psycho, The Shining, American Psycho, No Country for Old Men, True Grit, Brokeback Mountain, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, We Need to Talk About Kevin, etc.
Still, it will get someone to read the book. However critical I am of the adaptations of Anna Karenina, they led me to the novel. For years I heard my mom's praise of Tolstoy and was indifferent- or I was interested, but not enough to tackle the book, partly because of its size, partly because of its tragic ending, partly because of my ignorance of Russian literature and indifference to Russia. Then after watching about 4 adaptations, I thought: why not read Tolstoy's novel when I'm obsessed with Anna Karenina and already know the story so well? So I won't be angry now. I'll see this new adaptation as 1 of those TV series that other people watch and I don't, like Games of Thrones or Downton Abbey (I'm indifferent to many things in popular culture anyway*), or something that motivates someone to read Tolstoy's book. That's it.
We'll always have the novels.





*: I intended to write a post called "Di Nguyen on pop culture, or Why I have no friends", but it sounds pretentious and hipsterish, so never mind.

Patti Smith- "I Ain't Got Nobody"

Sanditon

Jane Austen never ceases to surprise me.

Reading Sanditon, I thought of The Watsons and Virginia Woolf's comment "... the stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere...", only to realise that Sanditon's not so bare. Indeed, the writing is not very polished, and there are superfluous remarks that could and would have been removed (for example, she doesn't have to say that the 3 Parkers' ailments are imaginary, which we can see for ourselves, and she often says enough), reminiscent of the abundant comments and unnecessary explanations I see in Trimalchio that aren't in The Great Gatsby, and yet it doesn't really look like a rough draft, and doesn't look like it was written by a dying person (I mean, look at the sentences!). 

I was also expecting something different. After a melancholy, autumnal work like Persuasion comes a satire of hypochondriacs, hypocrites and fortune hunters? That feels odd. I know, I know, after publishing the bright, light and sparkling Pride and Prejudice, she created an opposite of Elizabeth Bennet to be her heroine, and created an anti-heroine superficially similar to Elizabeth; after the sombre work Mansfield Park, she returned to comedy with Emma; after the sparkling Emma, she wrote a novel sadder than anything she'd ever written. What feels strange is that Persuasion is melancholy and passionate and romantic, and Jane Austen seemed to be going in another direction. Now I read Sanditon, and she in a sense goes in yet another direction, writing about the verbal construction of a town and people's reactions towards change; in another sense goes back to her early self, goes back to comedy and satire, to depicting, mocking and making fun of ridiculous, affected people. The ridiculous characters in Persuasion are pushed far into the background, pale, insignificant, more forgettable than such characters in previous works, as the focus is entirely on the story of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. In Sanditon, at least in the draft we have today, the caricatures are prominent. Whilst The Watsons is clearly a story of Emma Watson, Sanditon doesn't quite look like a story of Charlotte Heywood (or the Parker brothers).  
Another interesting thing is that Jane Austen seems to expand her scope beyond love/ courtship stories. If in Persuasion, she mentions war, deals with change in society and writes about old money vs new money, in Sanditon she again takes up the theme of changes in society and writes about the construction of a seaside town, a bathing place. 
Sanditon takes me aback, so to speak. It's different, there are so many things in it, and the story can develop in any direction, I wonder how Sanditon might have turned out if Jane Austen had been able to complete it.