Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man
(A Memoir, 2022; edited by David Rosenthal from taped conversations, recorded from 1986 to 1991) George Segal said, “Paul Newman is the last star. He’s the link. We’re just actors.” Impossibly pretty, and self-consciously ‘cool,’ Newman was a Great Big Movie Star for about thirty years, and since filmgoers managed to look past the looks and the sass, he avoided becoming a symbol during most of that time. His best films are (or include) The Left-Handed Gun (1958), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch…
Continue Reading →The Weir Career
The films of Peter Weir (1974 – 2010) Peter Weir’s career is an enigma. He has huge reserves of talent, and we absolve him of all sins thanks to Picnic alone, but there are pockets of emptiness in many of his films, all of which are watchable (OK, maybe not Green Card). (As Norman Gunston might have asked, “13 films in 40 years, Peter? What do you do for a living?“) With the once respected Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences giving Peter a career-end-Oscar at its Governor’s Awards late last year), we review his oeuvre. 1974 The…
Continue Reading →Tár
Directed by Todd Field (2022) To err is human; to forgive, Divine; to cancel, de rigueur. Lydia Tár (not her real name?) is a pianist, ethnomusicologist, composer, and the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s as busy as a bee: at a festschrift, she plugs her new book to Adam Gopnik of the ‘New Yorker’ (they wouldn’t invite Steve Bannon, but this luvvie? No problem!) and she is preparing the forthcoming live recording of Mahler’s 5th. She’s teaching (and bullying) at Juilliard; lunching with a moneyman who wants to pick her brains; she’s hiring and firing; she’s…
Continue Reading →A Difficult Woman
Renée Geyer (11 September 1953 – 17 January 2023) “A white Hungarian Jew from Australia sounding like a 65-year-old black man from Alabama.” This how Geyer described herself, one of the true originals, and the first (and best) Australian woman to master Soul, Jazz, R & B songs (think “It’s a Man’s Man’s World,” “Since I Fell for You,” “Heading in the Right Direction,” “Stares and Whispers,” “Stormy Monday,” “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Difficult Woman,” and the pop classic “Say I Love You.”) She was interpreting, and enhancing, the great world songbook long before Rod Stewart or Jimmy Barnes. Whilst…
Continue Reading →The Old Stoic’s Lethargy
POEM FOR THE YEAR (with apologies to W. H. Auden) This earth in 2023 Is not the planet fit for me, A world, I need, to give me hope Opposed to the end of a rope. *** My Eden landscapes and their climes Are great constructs from rational times, When reason meant, at least, induction, Not dogma posed as deduction. *** The plastic bags we gather to be Transformed as if by alchemy: I chose to send them whence they came, The ground, from fossil fuels by name. *** I’m now required to approve Blighted wind farms that rarely move:…
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