Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Read A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto by China Miéville last weekend. Passionate and discerning advocacy for the continuing relevance of The Communist Manifest o for our time. Not likely to persuade any conservatives but it gives center-left liberals much to think about. Now I want to read Miéville's fantasy novels, which purportedly makes politics exciting. Yesterday, met Winston and his friend Charles, a historian of Chinatown conservation. Charles is visiting Singapore in January to learn more about the conservation of Chinatown there. Interesting to learn that scholars are leery of the term "intangible" heritage because everything can be intangible and so the term is not very descriptive. Once home. Guy and I watched Steven Soderbbergh's 2020 comedy-drama film Let Them All Talk , starring Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, Lucas Hedges, and Gemma Chan. According to Wiki, "Much of the dialogue was improvised by the cast, and Soderbergh...

Watched a slew of movies during Thanksgiving stay with Ty and Di. On Wednesday, when we arrived, we watched an hour of the stand-up comedian Louis C. K., before turning in.  Across the Universe  (2007), directed by Julie Taymor, is visually entrancing, although the boy-meets-girl story is all too predictable. The fun here is hearing the Beatles songs mesh with the loosey-goosey plot. Evan Rachel Wood plays upper-class American Lucy and Jim Sturgess plays the working class Liverpudlian Jude. Another visual entertainer, but in a very different way, Getting Go, the Go Doc Project  (2013) is framed as a video documentary by a college student named Doc (Tanner Cohen), of his crush on NYC go-go dancer Go (Matthew Camp). Written and directed by Cory Krueckeberg, this is a better gay movie than most. The acting is believable. I love all the split-screens and frames-within-frames that convey the multiplicity and simultaneity of on-line life. After this, I'm off to stalk Matthew...

I did not see this Pulitzer-Prize winning play when it was staged on Broadway, and so thought I would see the movie, directed by the playwright, who also wrote the screenplay. The movie was shot in the Bronx, the play's location, in the Catholic elementary school Shanley attended. To bring that Irish and Italian neighborhood and the Sisters of Charity (who run the school) to life, the movie begins with a strong attention to detail that is not quite integrated into the action. As a result the opening feels slow, feels like scene-setting. The confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn over the latter's illicit involvement with a black student sizzles due to the sharp dialogue, and Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman's performances. I did not feel, however, that the issue of certainty in an uncertain world is explored to any revelatory depth. Sister Aloyisus's pinched certainty is vindicated in the end when Father Flynn resigns and so "confesses...