The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
The Judge
(dir. David Dobkin)
To make a film as bad as this, more ingredients are required than Hollywood plot #7, additional clichés and dollops of sentimentality. To the mix must be added really good actors – (Roberts Downey and Duvall; Billy Bob Thornton and Vincent d’Onofrio, who is starting to look like a confusing cross between Charles Durning and Brian Dennehy) – so that the hapless viewer is all the more disappointed when it turns out that there really is no more to this than appears. Avoid.
Continue Reading →Bertie
If, like my mother-in-law, you don’t enjoy books about the generation of British and European royals who were Queen Victoria’s children because Queen Victoria was so “beastly” to them, stay away from this biography of Prince Albert Edward/King Edward VII. Victoria is a mother who – knowing that her letters could well be preserved for posterity and made public – wrote to her daughter Vicky, Bertie’s sister, “The nose…is becoming the true Coburg nose, and begins to hang a little, but there remains unfortunately the want of chin which with that very large nose and very large lips is no so well in profile.”
And that’s the problem. Queen Victoria glowered over Prince Albert Edward’s life for so long that much of what we see of him is filtered through her dour presence and influence. Because of this perhaps, I felt that Bertie was always “off stage” or behind glass in this book. But don’t get me wrong – it is an intricate and readable book and a must in any library about 19th/20th century British and European royals. Ridley credits Bertie with restoring the glamour to the British monarchy and with having had a greater influence on foreign diplomacy than he is usually granted – particularly with respect to the Entente Cordiale.
Portrait by John Henry Frederick Bacon of Edward VII’s coronation
Under the Skin
(by Michel Faber)
OK, OK, we get the message, Mr Faber. You have confirmed something we all know. Sigh. But you also confirmed something else for us here at TVC – that in no circumstances, whatsoever, is it a good idea to hitchhike. TVC had seen the film before reading the book (the two share little in common other than the name), and had read a spoiler somewhere explaining just why Isserley works so hard to pick up male hitchhikers; so there were no real surprises.
It would be better to come to this book with little foreknowledge. The story is engaging, but a major element – the visit from an important person – is not successful and is simply there to ram the message home in case the reader has missed it. This is A-grade writing marred by heavy-handed preaching. Overall, despite its flaws, it is worthwhile and TVC does recommend it (unless you are squeamish, in which case – run). And don’t hitchhike. Just. Don’t.
The Hustler
(dir. Robert Rossen) (1961)
A tough, raw, hard-hearted story of Eddie Felsen (Paul Newman) who
wants to move up from two bit hustling at pool to beat the best, Minnesota
Fats (Jackie Gleason). Great pool scenes: Fats’ seven- ball in the corner
is a shot Eddie Charlton would be proud of. Newman is also highly
competent, although he joked of shooting some pool decades later when a
youth approached, declaring he’d seen The Hustler dozens of times and that
watching Newman play pool was one of the great disappointments of his life.
Perhaps Eddie does shoot good but also lucky. Great camera work closes with
great cue-work, giving us a lounge lizard’s eye view. Fats is a wily but
honourable adversary, taciturn and calculating.
Piper Laurie’s lush, Sarah (or whatever her name is today) is magnificent,
matchless, a smart, damaged, feisty woman done down by booze and bastards.
Her relationship with Eddie is really interesting, swinging from “What do
you want me to do, just step out in the alley?” to “I got a fella!” to “We
have a contract of depravity”. As Newman says: “I never hustled you, even
when I thought I was.”
“No one needs an excuse to lose.”
The other standout performance is George C Scott as the gambler/businessman,
Bert Gordon. The ultimate cynic, Bert pegs Eddie as a born loser who has
talent but not character. (Character in this context is a concoction, not a
reality.) Bert’s homily in the bar with Eddie after he has found his ‘excuse
to lose’ and blown his shot at Fats is one cruel, brutish, motivational
pep-talk.
The clashes between Sarah and Bert are electrifying. Bert says he knows
what Eddie was thinking when he folded against Fats because he’s been there
himself; then, peering at her, he adds “We’ve all been there haven’t we,
Miss Packard?” And when Sarah accuses him of owning all the tomorrows
because he buys them today (cheap), he responds, with a smirk, “Well, nobody
has to sell.” In the event, no one comes out of this story undamaged.
Rich, raw, cold and in lovely black and white, with authentic support
players (including Jake LaMotta of all people, as a barman), this is one to
see, but bear in mind, this is Ames, Mister. While you’re in town, it’s
best not to hustle pool at Arthur’s Pool Hall down at the docks, or risk
your thumbs with Turk Baker.
World Order
(by H Kissinger)
World Order is a knotty concept prone to interpretations of violent subjectivity. On the one hand, we have the seers of doom, who see only a world in chaos and inevitable decline (e.g. Mark Steyn). Farthest from this on the spectrum are the utopian promoters of one world governance (to whom one recommends an urgent reading of Thomas More).
Along the way are those who deprecate the notion of order at all, preach heterogeneity and the cult of small-as-beautiful, the barrackers of old powers, cultists for the new such as the revived Middle Kingdom or ISIS, or re-badged Marxists and reductionists.
H.A.K @ W.E.F.
And then there is Henry Alfred Kissinger. Arch-pragmatist Henry receives either adulation or a right panning (the late Christopher Hitchens was a very vocal and unfair critic) and his construction of global architecture is, surely by definition, predicated on a rickety scaffold in Elysium. Yet his world-weary, amoral, realpolitik review of this peopled globe is eloquent, elegant and engrossing, containing what is surely a great contextual truth: “Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.”
Continue Reading →Donnie Darko
(dir. Richard Kelly) (2001)
A lush, Gothic, teen exploitation film of superior calibre. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a typical, upper middle class, cringing dork with anger issues and a friend called Frank, who appears to be a cross between a pooka and Satan Bunny. Frank informs Donnie that the world only has till the eve of Halloween to live.
“there will be so much to look forward to.”
Jam-packed with ideas, some of which should lie on the cutting floor: we have surreal visual homages to the paintings of William Blake and John Martin, a soundtrack oddly reminiscent of Badlands, a rock video sequence with (of all things) Tears For Fears songs, Drew Barrymore as an irresponsible teacher of literature, a terrific Jack Palance-style turn by Patrick Swayze as a dubious motivational speaker on the subject of ‘controlling fear’, Katherine Ross as a mushy Jungian psychologist, a ‘Grandma Death’ who keeps crazily checking her letterbox, a crippled plane, and a slice of hokum concerning the dynamics and philosophy of time travel.
All in all, good atmospheric fun and worth a few viewings, although TVC is wracked with doubt over its “commitment to Sparkle Motion!”
The Empire of Death
(B. Koudounaris)
Those who have gone before well outnumber those of the transitory present and are more swiftly forgotten. It is now overwhelmingly the fashion in Australia to incinerate the dead – burial is a considerable ongoing expense and the real estate is rented (in due course, urban cemeteries will reclaim the space). This incredible book shows and tells us of the veneration of the dead in 17C-19C catholic Europe (and parts of South America and south east Asia) in ossuaries and charnel houses.
The pictures have to be seen to be believed: mountains of bones; garlands of skulls, cages and display cabinets of bones; crosses of skulls, chapels of bones encrusted with skulls, immense grinning cairns of skulls; bones dressed, whitened with lime, lovingly painted or inscribed. Emblematic of the antique catholic tendency to emphasize the majesty of death, these shrines also speak with eloquent silence to our non-doctrinal need, as Freud expressed it, “to make friends with the necessity of dying.” This is beautifully written and researched, though it will give a modern sensibility the absolute creeps.
‘The Triumph of Death’ by Pieter Breghel the Elder
[TVC notes the recent publication that may be of interest, A Tour of Bones by Denise Inge, a moribund lady’s tour of ossuaries in central Europe (sadly, the author has now joined the Great Majority). A possible review for the future.]
Continue Reading →Sunset Boulevard
(dir. Billy Wilder) (1950)
Creepiest of black comedies as wisecracking opportunist from Ohio (William Holden) encounters Old Hollywood (Norma Desmond, aka Gloria Swanson) with her major-domo, Erich von Stroheim, with fatal results. This Paramount classic with a sensational script is still the very best film ever made about Hollywood.
Without Norma, there wouldn’t be Paramount studios
After this classic, the pictures got smaller.
‘We didn’t need words, we had…FACES’
From Schwabs to the golf course at Bel Air, to Norma Desmond’s crumbling palazzo, this faded Sunset grandeur is vindication alone for olden golden Hollywood…
The Insider
(dir. Michael Mann) (1999)
Cancer man and chemist Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) is shown the door but his erstwhile Big Tobacco employer strikes again when he breaches the confidentiality agreement. 60 Minutes producer and crypto-saint Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) is busy inducing that in aid of the effort to expose what everyone already knows: smoking is bad for you.
Compelling and clever; rich performances, particularly by Crowe and Christopher Plummer as the 60 Minutes host, Mike Wallace (both characters the most compelling throughout by far, because they face genuine, human, crises of conscience).
“…..mmmmmmmm”
Continue Reading →
It’s A Wonderful Life
A TVC cameo
(dir. Frank Capra) (1946)
Utopian dreamer George Bailey (James Stewart) receives a Dickensian gift as he prepares to jump off a bridge; a glimpse at local conditions if he’d never been born. Full of sentiment but not sentimental, TVC challenges you not to be reaching for your hankie by the conclusion.
Continue Reading →
