Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I've not been recording the movies I had watched. Shame on me. Last weekend, two interesting ones, well worth recording. 2015 Truth , directed by James Vanderbilt, is, as imdb has it, "Newsroom drama detailing the 2004 CBS 60 Minutes report investigating then-President George W. Bush's military service, and the subsequent firestorm of criticism that cost anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes their careers." Cate Blanchett was terrific as Mary Mapes, as was Robert Redford as Dan Rather. That was Friday, and on Sunday, we were completely charmed by Shaun Evans's cerebral and isolated Inspector Morse in made-for-TV Masterpiece Mystery's Endeavor,  written by Inspector Lewis creator and Inspector Morse writer Russell Lewis. * Pale daffodils poor wandering things the souls of emperors

It is tempting to describe Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine  (2013) as a Madoff scheme of A Streetcar Named Desire . Last night at the Lincoln Plaza cinemas with GH, WL and DM, I kept expecting the infusion of Allenesque comedy into the Williamsian tragedy to pay off, but it never did. WL was right in describing the serious scenes as melodramatic. I thought only two minor characters carry whatever moral weight the film possesses. Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), the first husband of Ginger, loses all his money and his chance of setting up his own construction business. Their marriage breaks up. He makes visible the human devastation of Hal's scams. Closer to home, Danny, son of Hal, the Bernie Madoff character played by Alec Baldwin, is the innocent victim of father-worship. The short scene in the music shop, in which Danny (Alden Ehrenreich) pleads with his mother Jasmine to get out of his life, is searing. Cate Blanchett is fine as the deluded Jasmine, the Blanche character, but even s...

With EN last night, I watched Sydney Theatre Company perform Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the New York City Center. It was an excellent production that accented the tragedy with comic overtones, so that love and ambition appeared pathetic in both senses of that word. Astrove, the suave doctor, fell backwards from his perch on the windowsill while oratorizing. Yelena, the second wife of the Professor, played a silly prank on Sonya by pretending to see a figure in the window behind her step-daughter. When Vanya came in, trying to shoot Professor Serebryakov, Yelena rode on his back in order to stop him. He missed shooting Serebryakov a second time, and the failure seemed the culmination of a long string of bad jokes that fate had been playing on these people. The director Tamás Ascher is reckoned to be one of the foremost interpreters of Chekhov. His experience with the absurdist drama of Ionesco and Witold Gombrowics certainly colored his take on the Russian. I liked very much his in...

The film follows in the tradition of making a love story out of war material. The eponymous character (Cate Blanchett) signs up to be a British courier in occupied France in order to search for her downed pilot lover Peter (gorgeous Rupert Penry Jones). Working with a local resistance leader Julien (Billy Crudup), Charlotte learns that war kills and makes fools of those it spares. Aided by British treachery, the local resistance, all communists, were killed by the Germans. Julien has to decide between giving up his father Levade (Michael Gambon) and two Jewish children he has been hiding to the French collaborationist police. The cruelties of war are heart-wrenching, but not particularly new. More interesting is what the film says about love. Love with the pilot was instantaneous and physical. It was powerful enough to motivate a woman to put her life on the line by going into service. But the awful experience shared with Julien finally binds Charlotte more closely to him than romanc...