Domestic comedy

“Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day — I’ll have to be a gentleman all day.”

“You can start today.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Three sentences each. No spoilers.]

You Only Live Once (dir. Fritz Lang, 1937). Lang’s second American movie begins with wooden dialogue and clumsy comedy but soon turns into a couple-on-the-run story that later directors were to emulate. But like I said, no spoilers. With Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney, Barton MacLane, and a terrified Jerome Cowan. ★★★★

*

Written on the Wind (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1956). A bit of dialogue: “Are you looking for laughs, or are you soul searching?” If the answer is both, this movie is an excellent choice: an over-the-top story of alcoholism, bromance, infertility, marital discord, nymphomania (as it used to be called), and wealth. With Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, and Robert Stack. ★★★★

*

The Bookshop (dir. Isabel Coixet, 2017). Fine actors, beautifully filmed. But the story is underdeveloped, sometimes coy, sometimes deadly serious, and always — and I do mean always — predictable. With Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, and Patricia Clarkson. ★★

*

River of No Return (dir. Otto Preminger, 1954). Fear death by water: a dangerous journey by raft, with majestic scenery, macho posturing, and the deaths of ten or twelve Native people. I am astonished to learn that this film was inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves: wait, what? With Robert Mitchum, Rory Calhoun, a highly mannered Marilyn Monroe, and a surprisingly good Tommy Rettig (soon to be Jeff Miller on TV’s Lassie). ★★

*

Michael (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924). A remarkable silent about love between men, with an aging painter (Benjamin Christensen), his beautiful young model (Walter Slezak), and complicating factors. If you know Slezak from Hitchcock ’s Lifeboat (1944), this movie is bound to be a surprise. It’s not a spoiler to quote: “Now I can die in peace for I have known a great love.” ★★★★

*

Two by Paweł Pawlikowski

Ida (2013). Poland, early 1960s, a novice in a convent is directed to make a visit to her sole relation before taking final vows. An utterly compelling road movie of sorts, with deeply felt performances by Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska (who had never before acted) and bleakly brilliant silver and gray cinematography by Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski. “Why am I not here?” ★★★★

My Summer of Love (2004). A summer idyll between two young women, Mona (Natalie Press), who lives with her brother above the bar he’s turned into a religious center, and Tamsin (Emily Blunt), a child of wealth, who enters the film riding a white horse. At first I thought, Uh-oh, it’s Rochelle, Rochelle. But — again, no spoilers — I was happy to have been proven wrong. ★★★

*

The Kindergarten Teacher (dir. Sara Colangelo, 2018). A great performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal as a teacher who lives through one of her students, a boy with a gift, she believes, for poetry (prose poems, I guess, for there’s never a word about line breaks). Improbable and contrived at times, but deeply disturbing: imagine a version of Fatal Attraction set in a classroom. A remake of a 2015 film (same title) by Nadav Lapid, now in our queue. ★★★

*

Two by Alfonso Cuarón

Roma (2018). Roma is a neighborhood in Mexico City, where members of a three-generation family and two domestic workers live in a house that resembles a compound, with its own gate and an alley for cars. Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), one of the domestics, the focus of the film, is a stand-in for Liboria “Libo” Rodríguez, a domestic in Cuarón’s childhood home, a woman the director reveres and loves, the woman to whom the film is dedicated, but Cleo (like the members of the family she serves) remains (at least for me) largely unknown. What we do know of her is her selflessness and stoic courage: like Faulkner’s Dilsey, for whom a singular pronoun was inadequate, “They endured.” ★★★

Y tu mamá también (2001). An improvisational road movie, with two horny young men, one affluent, the other not, and an older (though not that much older) woman, testing the boundaries of friendship and sexuality as they travel through an often beautiful, sometimes terrifying, nearly always impoverished landscape. The most remarkable thing about the movie, I think, is that it allows the viewer at many points to forget everything except its present moment. “La vida es como la espuma, por eso hay que darse como el mar.” ★★★★

*

Lassie Come Home (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1943). A tear-smeary canine odyssey, as Lassie makes her way from Scotland to Yorkshire to be reunited with a schoolboy. With Nigel Bruce, Edmund Gwenn, Elsa Lanchester, Roddy McDowall, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dame Mae Whitty. But how did Lassie ever end up on a farm just outside Calverton? ★★★★

*

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2005). A movie about the attempt to make a movie of Laurence Sterne’s novel, with false starts, interruptions, interviews with cast members, conversations as to what scenes should be included, and negotiations with agents. The endless comic rivalry of Steve Coogan (Tristram/Walter) and Rob Brydon (Uncle Toby) will mean more to a British audience than it did to me. The film highlights both the comedy and pathos of Sterne’s world, which come together in the scene of Uncle Toby showing Mrs. Wadman where he received his wound — but again, no spoilers.

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

[Oh, the trouble with Netflix: Pawel Pawlikowski has directed six theatrical releases. Cold War (2018) has yet to be released on DVD. Ida is the only one of the other five available from Netflix. I’m already suspecting that Ida might be the best movie I see this year. “La vida es como la espuma, por eso hay que darse como el mar”: “Life is like foam, so give yourself away like the sea.” That’s the English subtitle, with a comma added. Would “surrender yourself” be better?]

Meta Trail

[Mark Trail, February 13, 2019.]

Rusty has been telling the fam about his new friend Mara’s hobbies: ”She likes reading the comics in her newspaper back home!” Mark too! Everyone’s meta these days, or trying to be.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

That word

Phillip Adamo, a professor who was leading an honors seminar at Augsburg University, is in deep trouble. The trouble involves a word that came up in class, a word that a student spoke when reading aloud a passage from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in which the word appears. Adamo asked his students to consider whether they wanted to use that word in class or replace it with a euphemism. He spoke the word himself in posing the question. And that’s how his troubles began. He has since been suspended from teaching and removed as director of his university’s honors program.

My choice in teaching, say, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, was to place that word under erasure, a notion from philosophy that I adapted for my use. I wanted the word left on the page and never spoken, with a silence taking its place. Perhaps not a courageous choice. But as I would explain, I didn’t want anyone to feel easy about the use of that word.

So unlike Adamo, I didn’t leave it up to my students. His choice was a more courageous one. That he is paying a penalty for his choice is chilling and absurd. I can only imagine what would have happened to him were he not a full professor.

Randall Kennedy, who wrote a book about the history of the word, has written a brief commentary on the Augsburg incident for The Chronicle. An excerpt, with one redaction:

This is not a case of a professor calling someone [      ]. This is a case of a professor exploring the thinking and expression of a writer who voiced the word to challenge racism. This is not a case of a professor negligently throwing about a term that’s long been deployed to terrorize, shame, and denigrate African-Americans. This is a case of a professor who, attentive to the sensibilities of his students, sought to encourage reflection about their anxieties and beliefs.

None of those distinctions require deep insight. They should be obvious. Students unable to appreciate them are students unprepared for university life.

Kennedy mentions Adamo’s invoking of the distinction between use and mention, another distinction that should be obvious.

To Vienna by train

Felix and Martha are returning to Vienna by train:


Arthur Schnitzler, Dying. 1895. In Desire and Delusion: Three Novellas, trans. Margret Schaefer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

Schnitzler does so much with a handful of details. I like the phrase “into the grey day,” with its suggestion of an observer looking into nearly impenetrable fog. I like the contrast between what‘s seen at close range — the rain, which must be trickling down the window — and things seen at a distance. I like the contrast of speed and stasis — wires dancing by, then the train stopping. I like the way we see — or don’t see — life on the platform from Felix’s perspective. I like the reminder of the noise over which one might try to speak on a train. And I like the way Schnitzler captures the quiet exhaustion that comes with the end of a long trip, even if one isn’t on the verge of death.

Reading this paragraph, I thought how little difference there is between train and plane: water on the window, fog, a landscape now and then emerging, the sense that something is happening up front, or in back, that one cannot see. And, on the way home, quiet exhaustion.

Also from Schnitzler
“Maestro!” : “A simple bourgeois home”

[I cannot read German, but I know how to figure things out. The details of this translation that I like appear to be in the German text. Search for “Er starrte durch die geschlossenen Fensterscheiben” to find this passage.]

A joke in the traditional manner

Of all the songs in the Great American Songbook, which is the favorite of pirates?

No spoilers. The punchline, such as it is, is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : How do worms get to the supermarket? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What was the shepherd doing in the garden? : Where do amoebas golf? : Where does Paul Drake keep his hot tips? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why is the Fonz so cool? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the produce clerk, the amoebas, the worms, the toy, the shepherd, Paul Drake, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, the Fonz, Santa Claus, and this one. My dad was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.”]

The age of Nancy

[Zippy, February 11, 2019.]

In previous panels: Griffy notes that he and Zippy never look older. Zippy notes that Nancy and Sluggo have never aged. Griffy notes that the characters in Gasoline Alley aged. Why don’t all comics characters age? Zippy says that the answer lies in his attic.

Ivan Albright’s painting Picture of Dorian Gray, created for the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray, hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

You can read Zippy every day at Comics Kingdom.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Jackie Wilson and milk

It’s nice to hear a few seconds of Jackie Wilson on TV, even if it’s in a milk commercial. He’s singing “To Be Loved.” But I wonder, in 2019, how many viewers know whose voice they’re hearing.

Jackie Wilson is one of my favorite singers. “Reet Petite,” “Lonely Teardrops,” “Higher and Higher,” “Am I the Man”? Of course. (And yes, you’re the man.) But my favorite Wilson recording is “Comin’ On Back to You.” If you click on even one of these links, you’ll know why Jackie Wilson was called Mr. Excitement.

[Our complicated culture: Al Jolson — yes, that Al Jolson, the blackface performer — was one of Wilson’s great inspirations. In the liner notes for a 1961 tribute album, Wilson called him “the greatest entertainer of this or any other era.” Here’s Wilson singing “My Yiddishe Momme.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, made me think I WNF (would not finish). But the puzzle began to open up when I guessed at 25-Down, six letters, “Top-selling aircraft brand of the 1970s.” Then I got 28-Down, six letters, “Grasping,” and 34-Down, five letters, “Some Southwestern ceramics,” and I was (slowly) on my way. Thank you, top-selling aircraft brand of the 1970s. And thank you, Frank Longo, for a challenging puzzle.

The clues that yielded my favorite answers: 1-Across, ten letters, “‘Busted!’” 17-Across, ten letters, “Girls’ new goal, as of 2019.” 51-Across, three letters, “High grade for a vineyard” — whose answer I know from a certain Van Dyke Parks song. 8-Down, fifteen letters, “Haunts.”

And 23-Down, six letters, “Legendary ‘Grail Maiden.’”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

From John Dingell’s last words

From John Dingell’s last words for his country, dictated yesterday, the day of his death, to Debbie Dingell, his wife, who holds the seat her husband held in the House of Representatives:

My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.

Think about it:

Impoverishment of the elderly because of medical expenses was a common and often accepted occurrence. Opponents of the Medicare program that saved the elderly from that cruel fate called it “socialized medicine.” Remember that slander if there’s a sustained revival of silly red-baiting today.

Not five decades ago, much of the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth — our own Great Lakes — were closed to swimming and fishing and other recreational pursuits because of chemical and bacteriological contamination from untreated industrial and wastewater disposal. Today the Great Lakes are so hospitable to marine life that one of our biggest challenges is controlling the invasive species that have made them their new home.

We regularly used and consumed foods, drugs, chemicals and other things (cigarettes) that were legal, promoted and actively harmful. Hazardous wastes were dumped on empty plots in the dead of night. There were few if any restrictions on industrial emissions. We had only the barest scientific knowledge of the long-term consequences of any of this.

And there was a great stain on America, in the form of our legacy of racial discrimination. There were good people of all colors who banded together, risking and even losing their lives to erase the legal and other barriers that held Americans down. In their time they were often demonized and targeted, much like other vulnerable men and women today.

Please note: All of these challenges were addressed by Congress. Maybe not as fast as we wanted, or as perfectly as hoped. The work is certainly not finished. But we’ve made progress — and in every case, from the passage of Medicare through the passage of civil rights, we did it with the support of Democrats and Republicans who considered themselves first and foremost to be Americans.

And:

In my life and career I have often heard it said that so-and-so has real power — as in, “the powerful Wile E. Coyote, chairman of the Capture the Road Runner Committee.”

It’s an expression that has always grated on me. In democratic government, elected officials do not have power. They hold power — in trust for the people who elected them. If they misuse or abuse that public trust, it is quite properly revoked (the quicker the better).

The quicker the better.