Links for the Day (August 4th, 2008)

1. "The Books": At The Sheila Variations, Sheila O'Malley is doing daily excerpts from and commentaries on her vast collection of entertainment biographies. Keep checking the link above for updates. So far, Lauren Bacall and Carroll Baker.

["By Myself, by Lauren Bacall: The first of her three autobiographies. She wrote every word. You can tell. You can hear her voice. This is my favorite of the three. Lauren Bacall grew up in a Jewish family in New York, with a powerful mother - lots of powerful women in the family - and very early on, it was discovered she had an aptitude for this acting thing. She was obsessed with movies, Bette Davis in particular (and there are VERY funny stories of her and a girlfriend cutting class to go sit in the balcony of a movie theatre to watch a Bette Davis movie, and they would sit up there and "cry and smoke".) There is also a very funny story of how she basically stalked Bette Davis, and ended up alone with her in an elevator, quaking in her shoes. Now things happened quickly for "Betty" Bacall - after all, she made her debut (perhaps one of the most spectacular movie debuts of all time) at 19 in To Have and Have Not. There's a sense of destiny about it. Bacall was studying dancing and acting, she was in class with Kirk Douglas - a young hottie - (I love, too, how boy-crazy Lauren was - and still is ... she loves men ... but it's also amazing, when you see that performance in To Have and Have Not, and all its subtle sexy knowingness - to know that it was a virgin playing that role. An untouched teenager. What?? Howard Hawks really COACHED her ... and so did Bogie ... but lots of people are "coached" and the results come out stilted, they look coached. That role looks natural. She was an amazing study.) Bacall did some modeling, nothing big, mainly trying on clothes for people in private rooms in Loew's and things like that - and somehow she came to the attention of the powerful and innovative Diana Vreeland. Vreeland put Bacall on the cover of Harper's Bazaar:"]

***
2. "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918 - 2008": GreenCine alerts us to the news. Click here for the New York Times obit. Please feel free to post any additional links or thoughts in the comments section.

["Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow. His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment."]

***
3. "Everything Is Cinema and Criticism Is Nothing": At Only the Cinema, Ed Howard responds to Stephanie Zacharek's New York Times review of Richard Brody's Godard biography. Comments at Howard's blog as well as here, at the a_film_by discussion forum.

["Earlier this month, Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek published a review of Richard Brody's new 700-page opus about Godard, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. I haven't yet read the book, which has been receiving mixed but mostly positive-leaning notices, but my outrage over Zacharek's article has been steadily growing over the weeks since I first read it. Every once in a while I stumble across another reference to it and am reminded anew how a major critic for one of the major cultural purveyors of our time published, in the most prestigious newspaper in the country, an utterly misconceived and poorly argued piece about how one of the great living directors has become an "intolerable gasbag." This, apparently, is what passes for cultural criticism these days. The breaking point was a must-read post by Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity, who briefly mentions Zacharek's anti-intellectual Godard takedown in the midst of his passionate advocacy of leftism. I decided that Zacharek's melange of unchallenged assertions and snide insinuations deserved some of the close critical examination that she so steadfastly refused to extend to either Godard's films or Brody's biography. I'll start with her opening paragraphs:"]

***
4. "High Anxiety": At The Moviegoer, Paul Matwychuk reviews Pineapple Express.

["Franco, whose career has been derailed by a string of pretty-boy roles in movies like Tristan and Isolde, Annapolis, and Flyboys, gives a performance here that’s almost as much of a who-knew-he-had-it-in-him? revelation as Heath Ledger’s turn as The Joker in The Dark Knight. He plays Saul, a heavy-lidded, greasy-haired stoner who still bears dim traces of the nice Jewish boy he used to be before he got into pot dealing as a way of paying for his grandmother’s retirement home. The key to Franco’s performance may be the way he suggests Saul’s loneliness—there’s a telling bit early on in the film where he tries (sweetly, pathetically) to persuade Seth Rogen’s Dale to hang around his apartment for a few minutes longer. “Be my friend!” he might as well be saying. “Please by my friend!” When Dale cruelly informs him that he’s not Saul’s friend, he’s his customer, it’s the most emotionally devastating moment in the film."]

***
5. "The Hills Are Alive...": House contributor Kenji Fujishima goes classical.

["I hope I'm not the only one who feels that music may well be the most mysterious of all the art forms out there. With painting, at least you have an image in front of you to associate with other images, both by other painters or from your own experiences; books have words; films have both. Compared to music, those art forms feel more concrete, or at least have more concrete elements to them. But what do you see when you open up a music score? All staves, notes and foreign-language instructions on a page! It's like a secret code that only the initiated---composers, conductors, soloists, etc.---can access. Obviously, a good conductor can bring that code to life for audiences to hear and perceive---but even then, the ways in which music affects us can be extraordinarily difficult to try to put into words. How does one vividly convey the sense of disorientation at losing your tonal bearings at Wozzeck? The sense of spiritual peace that accompanies the drawn-out coda of Mahler's Ninth Symphony? Unless the piece has a choral setting, you can't necessarily point to any specific lyric or line of dialogue to illustrate the point. (But hey, even lyrics can be tricky, too; Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello may load up their songs with puns and clever wordplay, but do those prosaic virtues totally account for the exhilarating experience to hearing the whirling "Like a Rolling Stone" or the controlled viciousness of "This Year's Girl"? Not entirely, I would say.)"]

***
Quote of the Day: Publilius Syrus

"I have often regretted my speech, never my silence."

***
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The bone of a dinosaur believed to be an ancestor of the T-Rex.



***
Clip of the Day: The Shining tricycle scene, with robots.

_____________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.