Today’s Nancy, by Olivia Jaimes, is exceptionally inventive.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
“How to draw a snowflake”
Hagar in the Oval Office
Joe Biden has a framed Hagar the Horrible strip in the Oval Office (America).
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Advertising 101
Here we have an effective use of analogy:
Earmuffs : spaniels :: Champion spark plugs : winter
No, that’s not it.
Earmuffs : winter :: spaniels : Champion spark plugs
No, that’s not right either.
Here we have an effective use of analogy word association:
Spaniel makes the reader think winter, which in turn suggests earmuffs, which in turn suggests — Champion spark plugs?
No, wait.
Here we have an effective use of analogy:
Spaniels : earmuffs :: advertising : Champion spark plugs
Next slide please.
Are you ready for winter?
*
December 22: It turns out that spaniels have a history in sales. A reader passed this link on: Popularity of the cocker spaniel salesman. Thanks, reader.
Q & Q & Q & A
Tove Jansson, The Summer Book. 1972. Trans. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York: New York Review Books, 2008).
It’s a wonderful book of vignettes from a summer on an island, with a six-year-old girl, her father (who’s nearly invisible), and her eighty-five-year-old grandmother. The shadow of mortality hangs over everything.
I wonder how many readers have known someone born in the eighteen-hundreds. I can count one grandparent. How about you?
[Thomas Teal is a distinguished translator of Tove Jansson’s work. I hope that NYRB will add a paragraph about him when this work is up for its next printing.]
Monday, December 20, 2021
From the department of irony
I walked into CVS this afternoon. Two employees were standing at the register, each with a mask hanging from one ear. I asked if the store had COVID rapid-test kits available. Yes, right up front, three full or nearly full boxes.
“You should really be wearing your masks,” I said. “You’re scaring me.” They put their masks on.
I bought three test kits in advance of Christmas. We are super-careful in our household and are even more so if someone is coming over.
Verizon, grr
Disappointing but not necessarily surprising: Verizon might be collecting your browsing history (The Verge). With directions for opting out.
When I checked our account tonight, I discovered that our fambly had been opted in. But now we’re out.
Bombas, 25% off
I am not ashamed to share this link: click on it, buy Bombas socks, and save 25%. And I get $20 to spend on more Bombas.
Bombas socks are great, the best socks I’ve ever worn. (Way better than Wigwam.) My only connection to the company is that of a happy customer.
Twelve movies
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, TCM, YouTube.]
Nocturne (dir. Edward L. Marin, 1946). George Raft plays Joe Warne, a LAPD detective doggedly investigating the death of a songwriter: was it really suicide? The movie flies off in many directions: it starts with Laura-like sophistication, moves to the details of police work, visits a nightclub with a pianist on wheels, adds some silly comedy with Joe’s mother and another oldster, throws in some romance and a fistfight, and briefly turns meta when Joe stumbles through a dance lesson (Raft had worked as a professional dancer). Look for Janet Shaw (Louise Finch in Shadow of Doubt) as the dance teacher. And enjoy the glimpses of Los Angeles: a Brown Derby, the Pantages. ★★★ (YT)
*
Promising Young Woman (dir. Emerald Fennell, 2020). Carey Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a woman of a thousand faces: a med-school dropout, working in a coffeeshop, living with trauma and rage, seeking revenge. I thought about the Iliad while watching this film: here, as there, exacting revenge takes a very high toll when a loss is unredeemable. It gives little away to say that the shadow of Brett Kavanaugh seems to hang over the movie. Bo Burnham is the standout among the supporting players. ★★★★ (HBO Max)
*
Two by Alfred Hitchcock
Young and Innocent (1937). Delightful early Hitchcock. Derrick De Marney is an accused murderer on the run; Nova Pilbeam (young Betty in The Man Who Knew Too Much) is the police constable’s daughter who runs with him. Echoes of The 39 Steps, and anticipations of Saboteur and North by Northwest. Wonderfully episodic, with the children’s birthday party and the hotel dance as standout moments of strangeness. ★★★★ (CC)
The Paradine Case (1947). London: Gregory Peck is a barrister, Anthony Keane, married to a beautiful woman, Gay (Ann Todd), defending another beautiful woman, Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli), who is charged with murdering her much older husband. The contrast between Gay and Maddalena anticipates the contrast between Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) and Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo — and you can already guess that Keane, like Scottie Ferguson, will be going over to the dark side (here represented by a brunette, not a blonde). Can Keane return to the daylight world? Capable acting by all, but the movie feels long and talky, talky and long. ★★★ (YT)
*
Step Down to Terror (dir. Harry Keller, 1958). A low-budget, surprisingly good remake of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The family dynamics are simpler and only slightly less creepy. Johnny Walters (Charles Drake), serial killer on the run, visits the folks, but there’s no niece in the family: here the relative who suspects something is the killer’s brother’s widow, Helen Walters (Colleen Miller), whom Johnny — eww — finds appealing. There’s nothing here to approach the strength of Thornton Wilder’s screenplay, nothing to intensify the incongruity of a psychokiller in Our Town. But it’s fascinating to see a director take up Gordon McDonnell’s short story “Uncle Charlie” and avoid mere repetition of what Hitchcock made. ★★★ (YT)
*
Too Late for Tears (dir. Byron Haskin, 1949). A story of contingency. After Alan and Jane Palmer (Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott) make a U-turn to skip out on a party, a fellow motorist throws a bag into their convertible, and Jane insists on keeping what’s in it: $60,000. When the money’s claimant, brutal Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea), comes calling at the Palmer household, Jane’s character comes into clear focus, and a battle of criminal wits begins. With Don DeFore (Mr. B. from Hazel) being enigmatic, and Dead End Kid Billy Halop renting boats. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Strange Victory (dir. Leo Hurwitz, 1948). A post-war semi-documentary that’s disturbingly apt for our time. In the words of one of its narrators: “We live like a man holding his breath against what may happen tomorrow.” Hurwitz cuts from image to image, juxtaposing horrifying war footage with scenes from American life. At home: anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, war talk. Thank you, Criterion Channel, for bringing this neglected filmmaker into view. ★★★★ (CC)
*
Remember the Night (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1940). My idea of a Christmas film, with sharp wit and much tenderness via a Preston Sturges screenplay. You can’t go home again, at least not happily, as career shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck learns, but you can spend Christmas with your handsome, single prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) and his family. It’s always instructive to see MacMurray as a real actor and not as the pipe-smoking, sweatered zombie of My Three Sons. And Barbara Stanwyck — well, she’s Barbara Stanwyck. ★★★★ (TCM)
Listening to Kenny G (dir. Penny Lane, 2021). Kenny G(orelick) is to music what Thomas Kinkade is to painting: a brand with mass appeal and little substance. The saxophonist presents as both preposterously egomaniacal and charmingly self-effacing: see for instance his idle pronouncement that he might get into writing classical music, so that people will wonder if a piece is by Bach, Beethoven, or G. This well-made documentary is filled with clips from G’s career (gee, he can do circular breathing), lengthy monologues for the camera, and commentary from music critics who explain why G is so awful — and yet, like spoons in Uri Geller’s hands, the critics begin to bend, which I guess is the magic of Kenny G. Now it’s time for HBO to offer documentaries about, oh, say, Albert Ayler, Sidney Bechet, Benny Carter, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Steve Lacy, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Zoot Sims, Lester Young, Ben Webster — but I’m not holding my breath. ★★★★ (HBO Max)
*
Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977). I never once thought about watching, but after learning that one scene takes place a block from my child home, I had to. I loved the Brooklyn-ness of it, especially the coffeeshop conversation between dance partners Tony (John Travolta) and Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), a little like a latter-day Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. Tony’s confidence and cluelessness, the meager rewards of his work (a four-dollar raise), the boiling-over hostilities of his family life, Stephanie’s aspirations (two courses at the New School next semester): it all makes for a poignant story of limited means and long odds. Oh, and there’s also dancing. ★★★★ (H)
*
Park Row (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1952). Newspaper wars in 1880s New York, with the principled editor of an upstart paper (Gene Evans) at war with the unprincipled (yet still attractive to him) owner of an established paper (Mary Welch). The circulation war and the love-hate story are secondary here. This movie’s real appeal is in its depiction of the workings of print — paper, ink, type, and jargon (“printer’s devil,” “hellbox,” “30”). It must be the only movie in history in which Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention of the Linotype machine is fictionalized into a plot point. ★★★★ (TMC)
*
Original Cast Album: “Company” (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1970). It was supposed to be the first of a series of documentaries about the making of albums, but it turned out to be the first and last. The recording session (nearly nineteen hours, according to Criterion) runs into the early morning, and what we see is a model of intense effort and generosity among singers, musicians, the recording engineers, and the composer (Stephen Sondheim, of course). I’m not especially attuned to musical theater, so I found it instructive to see Barbara Barrie, Beth Howland, Dean Jones, and Charles Kimbrough, all of whom I know from movies and television, in the Sondheim world. The highlight is Elaine Stritch’s attempt (at least eight takes) to get “The Ladies Who Lunch” right: weariness, frustration, and then, at a later session, she nails it, and for all time. ★★★★ (CC)
Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)
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