FILMS:The Post

LIVING BY DESIGN: Marseille

FILM/DVD: TRUMBO

DVD: Merchant Ivory

FILM: How Green Was My Valley

A tear-jerker, 

old fashioned 

(won 5 Academy Awards)

directed by John Ford – unlikely Hollywood 

sets of houses and interiors, brilliant coal mines and heart- rending actors.

FILM: America America / The Young Lions / Reflection in a Golden Eye

Brando’s Smile, the biography [see my entry 30th October 2014] led me to Tennessee Williams and hence the DVD of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Elia Kazan. 

Brando and Anna Magnani sizzle in The Fugitive Kind, directed by Sidney Lumet. From the play Orpheus Descending by Tennessee... who revered Elia Kazan, the director of some of his plays. 

This led me to Kazan’s America America – a great saga of a movie. My infatuation with Brando and his acting led to The Young Lions directed by Edward Dmytryk.

Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin are American, Brando a German. World War II told from both sides, old fashioned, black & white and great.

Reflection in a Golden Eye, Brando and Elizabeth Taylor as husband and wife, his latent homosexuality leads to suicide. Directed by John Huston [his best and last film, The Dead?]. Psychologically a bombshell when filmed, based on a Carson McCullers book. This caustic writer of febrile sensitivity links up with Tennessee Williams, their friendship described in his biography [see my entry 30^th October].

FILM: Ang Lee

Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi' (2012) was a disappointment. 

It was gratifying to find 'Lust & Caution', a 2007 espionage film, masterful.  The acting superlative in the leading roles of Mr. Yee - Tony Leung* and Tang Wei as Wong Chia Chi - wow!
Ten minutes of erotic love making took 100 hours to film. If you look up the number of scenes barred by the Chinese Censor on the Internet it is mind boggling - maddening for Ang Lee, a Taiwanese American. 

*Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi in the Wong Kar-Wai film 2046 is one of my favourite movies ever. 

FILM/DVD: Mephisto

I have rediscovered Klaus Maria Brandauer. 
I watched Mephisto - what an actor! - 1981 Movie, won an Academy Award - directed by István Szabó. 
Ordered the DVDs.. Colonel Redl, must see again - Hanussen, not seen - and La Revolution Francaise, in which Brandauer speaks in perfect French. 

MUSIC/DVD: September Song & September Affair

The end of summer, a melancholic month - September Song - comes to mind.

"Oh it's a long while from May to December.. Days grow short when you reach September" (composed by Kurt Weil, lyrics Maxwell Anderson) Check it out on YouTube from Billie Holliday, Bing Crosby, Neville Chevalier, & my favourite - Walter Huston. 

How about seeing the 1950's movie which fixed the romanticism of an Alexandrine youth. Only DVD version to be found in Spanish - never mind, Joan Fontaine's sly beauty & Joseph Cotton in 'September Affair' was worth watching after five decades. The roads devoid of traffic in Rome, Naples and Florence, so few cars and open carriages!  

Astonishing how sexy the film is without nudity, or overt bed scenes. 

Brush up on your Spanish! 

FILM: The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino

Set in Rome, the most beautiful of all cities, it was well received at the Venice Film Festival, very well received in the English press.  I ordered the DVD and waited in excited anticipation until it was released this month January 2014 and it is GARBAGE.  Federico Fellini must be revolving in his grave.

FILM: The Tourist

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - quite a mouthful - the Director of the masterpiece The Lives of Others also made The Tourist. I watched it recently - not the greatest movie but rolicking FUN!  And Venice a joy! Angelina Jolie has a perfect English accent and oddball Johnny Depp is good!

BOOKS/DRAMA: Ford Madox Ford

I recently watched a DVD of the BBC’s Parade’s End, the script by Tom Stoppard [the casting questionable] – the end of an era – based on the novel ‘The Good Soldier’ by Ford Madox Ford – a fabulist, an unattractive man.  Jungian’s belief in synchronicity.... I get Julian Barnes’ ‘Through the Window’, seventeen essays (and one short story) – and there are two essays, one of The Good Soldier, Ford and Provence intelligent and revealing – one can but like this heroic and hopeless man a little more.

  

MORE EGYPTOMANIA

Hollywood's version - Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra [1963]- a film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz - unforgettable for its grandeur and a Cleopatra WINK!

The Sphinx guarding Cleopatra's Needle, London by George J. Vuillamy [1880]

The Suicide of Cleopatra by Reginald Arthur [1892]

Cleopatra by  François-Auguste Fannière [1902]

Cleopatra by Demetre H. Chiparus [1925]

Moïse sauvé des eaux by Frederick Goodall [1885]

Cleopatra's eulogy was sung by the Roman poet Horace:

Indeed she preferred a finer style of dying;
She did not, like a woman, fear the dagger
Or seek by speed at sea
To leave her Egypt for distant shores.

But gazing on her desolate palace
With a soft smile, unflinchingly accepted
The angry asp until
Her veins had drunk the deadly poison deep;

And thus more determined, fiercer than ever,
Perished.  Was she to grace a haughty triumph,
Dethroned, paraded by 
The rude Liburnians? Not Cleopatra!    

FILM: SHOAH

The Holocaust documentary SHOAH [calamity in Hebrew] was made long ago in 1985.  It is harrowing but mandatory viewing.  It is by Claude Lauzmann - no archival records or film footage - utterly absorbing and informative. 

FILM: Tolstoy's War and Peace

One of the greatest novels of the 19th century, War and Peace was made into a film and received an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968 [during the Cold War].  Brilliant acting, stunning cinematography with epic battle scenes and spectacular, glamorous balls. Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. Natasha Rostrova is played by a delectable and heart rending Lyudmila Savelyeva.    

Salzburg Easter Festival 2012

GOODBYE to the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle who have absconded to Baden Baden.  

Glorious music at the Siftung Mozarteum Kontrapunkte 02 as a start off, Debussy and Fauré, Emanuel Ax at the piano and the most talented of flautists, Emmanuel Pahud.

At the Festspielhaus, a Beethoven piano concert and Mahler: Das lied vonder Erde with Mezzosoprano Anne Sofie von Otter and Tenor, Jonas Kaufmann; a choral concert - Schumann, Berio and Fauré with Murray Perahia at the piano - stunningly good!  Bruckner: Symphonie No.8 c-Moll conducted by Zubin Mehta..............and Bizet's Carmen with Jonas Kaufmann playing a wonderful Don José and Genia Kümeier got a standing ovation for Micaëla - the orchestra played wonderfully and the chorus sang beautifully but I thoroughly disliked the production.