Movie recommendation: Stories We Tell

                            What happened?

                            Gilbert Sorrentino, Aberration of
                            Starlight

In my family, we’ve been fans of Sarah Polley since Ramona, the ten-episode CBC series that aired on PBS when our children were tykes. In the documentary Stories We Tell (2013), Polley seeks out a crucial truth of her family’s history, interviewing her father, her siblings, and family friends and relations, all of whom tell their stories — what they know, and what they don’t know. As you might suspect from the list of interviewees, the crucial truth concerns Polley’s mother Diane, an actress and casting director who died in 1990, when Polley was eleven.

Stories We Tell has been described as a matter of mystery and contradiction, but there’s really very little of Rashomon here: what happened becomes clear early on. The real strength of the film is its presentation of love and marriage and family life as the work of fallible people who make difficult choices and must learn to live with the consequences. Or to rewrite Tolstoy: All families are imperfect, but each is imperfect in its own way. A second strength is the film’s foregrounding of the work of storytelling. In one of my favorite scenes, Polley’s actor father reads in a recording studio his own written account of his marriage as Polley directs, asking him to reread here, slow down there. What becomes clearer as the film goes on is that Polley is telling a story, one that not only explores but also imagines and recreates the past.

Stories We Tell has some flaws. The film runs a little long, seeming to wrap up at about the ninety-minute mark before continuing for another eighteen minutes. Greater variety in the circumstances of interviewing would lend the film greater visual interest. (I’m thinking, of all things, of the variety of interview settings in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah: a barber shop, a café, an open field.) But these are minor complaints. Stories We Tell is unusual, inventive, and filled with humanity. Perhaps it will arrive at a theater near you.

You can read more about Stories We Tell at the film’s website. Careful: the trailer gives away more than you might want to know.

Thanks to Mike Brown for putting this film into my front brain.

[In Sorrentino’s novel, the repeated question What happened? is Marie Recco’s way of asking what went wrong in her marriage.]

The Fourth of July

[“Fourth Of July Celebrations Wantagh, Li”. Photograph by Leonard McCombe. Wantagh, New York. No date. From the Life Photo Archive.]

If I were the photographer, the description would read: “Youngsters engage in frenzied bidding war for meat, meat by-products.”

Happy Fourth of July.

Related reading
Another Leonard McCombe photograph

[“Li” = Long Island.]

Joad’s Corollary

A corollary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s principle of eternal return:

Time is infinite. Imagination is not. Thus there are remakes.

See also Stubbs’s Corollary.

[Inspired by the news that Steven Spielberg is planning to remake The Grapes of Wrath. Yes, there are good reasons to retell stories. But here I say hands off.]

Dale Irby, man of fashion

Newly retired teacher Dale Irby wore the same shirt and sweater-vest for forty years of school pictures. There’s proof online: a slideshow and a video montage (The Dallas Morning News).

Thanks, Rachel, for sharing this story.

Advice from Sydney Smith

At Letters of Note, the cleric Sydney Smith writes to a friend with advice for overcoming “low spirits.” It is poignant reading.

I should like to have known Sydney Smith and shared a cup of tea or coffee with him.

Marco Arment on RSS

Marco Arment on RSS and and the end of Google Reader:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. . . .

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

[RSS is what creates a website’s feed.]

Go Read, a Google Reader alternative

I’m not sure where I read about this one, but I’m glad that I did: Go Read. Its creator Matt Jibson describes it as “fast, snappy, and clean.” I like that he uses a serial comma in that description. I like Go Read. It has no “features” to speak of — just a bright, minimal layout. (Much nicer than The Old Reader.) And from what I’ve seen, Go Read, unlike Feedly, places images where they belong.

Go Read isn’t perfect: it lacks search (“will take some time”); post chronology is sometimes off; and post titles (to my eye) are much too large. All of which is to say that it’s not Google Reader. How could it be? It’s one guy.

Jibson’s plans include “non-annoying ads,” removable with a small fee. I think that I’ll be paying that fee in the near future.

*

July 3: In iOS, Go Read shows only unread posts. And it misses posts that The Old Reader picks up. Sigh.

*

July 3: Yes, it’s a work in progress, whose developer is on the ball, on the case, responsive to user inquiries, and working to get things right. I have high hopes for Go Read.

Misadventures in feedworld
Feedly it ain’t
Feedly v. Feedly

[I’m done with Feedly.]

Drudge Report reportage

The Drudge Report is making merry with an offhand, joking comment that Michelle Obama made in an interview with NPR’s Cokie Roberts. Drudge links to this article, which quotes Mrs. Obama on life in the White House: “‘There are some prison elements to it,’ she joked. ‘But it’s a really nice prison.’”

See? It’s a joke.

The context, as given in the above article: “Roberts noted that Martha Washington, the first First Lady, also described living in the role as akin to being a state prisoner.” So the current First Lady wasn’t complaining: she was offering mild agreement, followed by a reminder that to live in the White House is to enjoy great privilege.

Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, seems to have agree with Martha Washington, calling the White House “that dull and stately prison in which the sounds of mirth are seldom heard.” Harry Truman wrote of the White House that “This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone.” There is nothing new about occupants of the White House thinking of the building as a prison — and with far greater seriousness than Mrs. Obama’s comment allows. You’d never know any of that from the Drudge Report, whose sole purpose is to suggest (as Drudge headlines often do) that Michelle Obama is an unhappy and ungrateful camper, or perhaps an Angry Black Woman.

[I still marvel that I got to meet Barack and Michelle Obama, back in 2004.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[Alice Reed’s address book. I wish she’d written out the exchange names. Click for a larger view.]

The Woman in the Window (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944) stars Edward G. Robinson as Richard Wanley, a mild-mannered assistant professor of psychology. Feeling solidity and stodginess setting in (“Life ends at forty?” a fellow clubman wonders), Wanley steps beyond the limits of his routine and finds himself in suddenly desperate circumstances. Yes, that step involves a woman, the beautiful artist’s model Alice Reed (Joan Bennett). The Woman in the Window resonates with two other great 1944 films: Laura (dir. Otto Preminger) and Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder). As in Laura, a man is captivated by a painting of a beautiful woman. As in Double Indemnity, a killer tracks a murder investigation as it tracks him. But Robinson, who played the ace investigator Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity, here takes the Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) role, not the pursuer but the pursued.

A twist in the film’s plot, which I won’t reveal here, suggests to me that The Woman in the Window is very much about “the movies” — about the kinds of things people say and do in the world on screen.

Here, for Matt Thomas, is a shot of Professor Wanley in his study, writing a letter to his wife.


[Click for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station

Dark Punctuation

“What the punctuational physicists at Cerne Abbas did was to shoot colons directly through the midpoint of the space between two words. Exactly as predicted, this not only split the colon into two semi-colons, but caused the words to collapse into one another”: Dark Punctuation revealed.

[Psst: It’s semicolon not semi-colon. I added the hyphen for years before discovering my mistake.]