(by Thomas Mann) (1912) (Dir. Luchino Visconti) (1971) Gustave von Aschenbach, an artist questing intensely after spiritual perfection, arrives, exhausted, unhappy, at the end of his tether, at the Lido and is entranced by a family staying at the same hotel, including handsome Tadzio in his little sailor suit. Shaken by his depth of feeling, Aschenbach attempts to skip town but upon a hitch in his arrangements, he decides to return to where he was smitten, and to embrace his doom with a light heart. Mann’s novella is a polished gem, a short and sweet epitome of a bitter quest to…
Continue Reading →(Dir. Paul Schrader) (1998) Wade Whitehouse, the local sheriff, gets increasingly out of his depth, paranoid and lethal. On a downward spiral, in full view of the whole town, he realizes that when one is “nothing any more”, there’s not much to lose. We all beware the pointless violent denouement in American films (e.g. the otherwise morbidly compelling Taxi Driver), but this bleak masterpiece contains nothing gratuitous (including its finale) and it features superb performances, particularly from Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, and a devastating turn by James Coburn as Wade’s monstrous Dad.
Continue Reading →(1963) (Dir. Joseph Losey) From a slight 1948 novella by Robin Maugham, a script worked on by Harold Pinter, and with director Joseph Losey, racked with pneumonia during a brutal winter, phoning instructions to stand-in director Dirk Bogarde (who was the only real name in the cast), this remarkable film, bleak, grim, black with snowy dashes of white, was odds-on to fail. Tony, a delusional, well-heeled young wastrel (James Fox) has moved in to new digs and needs a manservant for…”well everything! You know.” Gentleman’s gentleman Barrett (Bogarde) fits the bill, despite a venal, visceral, almost innate hatred between him and Tony’s…
Continue Reading →The Varnished Culture is conflicted: L dislikes Woody with his gaunt, Hebrew gamines, his obsessions, his recherché nostalgia, his nihilistic sentiment and relentless chauvinism. P loves him, truth to tell, for the same reason. He cites a brace of films, maybe with one addition, as examples of his comic, cosmic, genius: Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours, and Husbands and Wives. These films suffer, like his other works, from a stuffy and noisy egocentricity but they are also, by far, the best depictions of modern morality – wise and wicked. Check out, for example, Judy Davis’ sublime failure to succumb to the…
Continue Reading →(Dir. Penn Jillette & Paul Provenza) (2005) The Varnished Culture‘s late great friend, Dr David Barnes, loved this film, a quirky, tight, one-joke riff on the old vaudeville set-up where a truly disgusting and depraved act, auditioned before the jaundiced and horrified agent, is entitled “The Aristocrats!” As Drew Carey observes, the punchline is enhanced if you say it with a grand flourish of the arms. The challenge is to make the middle of the joke, a description of the act, as deviant, degenerate, debased, degraded, immoral, reprobate, debauched, dissolute, lewd, obscene, sordid, wicked, vile, base, iniquitous, vicious, brutal, criminal, warped and twisted as possible. Many heroic attempts keep…
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