Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Thursday, March 07, 2024
Wednesday, March 06, 2024
Saturday, March 02, 2024
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Monday, February 26, 2024
Friday, February 16, 2024
Darling 1965
The first time I
saw this movie I was 18 years old and went with a friend to the long
gone Art Theatre in Greenwich Villiage to see it. I had started to go
to the village at around the age of 15 mainly in the afternoons and I
had also started to see more “adult movies” usually at our local
“art” theatre The Astor which was on Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn. I
was looking for sophistication in my life and I found some of it in
this engaging film. I thought it was wonderful at the time, so adult
and knowing and I fell forward towards Julie Christie in a fantasy
sexual way.
Happily upon seeing the film again after so many
years I can raise my hand with reasonable delight over it. Sure its
dated and sometimes the director John Schlesinger uses a heavy hand
in the many instances of irony that he was known for using in his
movies. Its here in the charity ball scenes with all the opulent
wealth and privilege rubbing up against the young male “negro”
servers dressed in 18th century costumes. The irony begins
right at the start of the film when a billboard about hunger in
African is being covered up with one of Julie Christie as the most
recent cover girl of a fashion magazine and the subject of an
interview which winds its way through the movie. The contradictions
between what she says and what is shown abounds with falsehoods and
fiction.
Privilege and disgust rub up against each other in
this world of glamour and glitz in swinging London and we are viewers
and voyeurs when Christie as Diana Scott moves and shakes her way up
the image market and ladder. Diana is shameless in her need to be
known and seen and she uses her extraordinary beauty to get what she
wants and what she thinks she needs.
This was Julie
Christie's big breakthrough movie, the one that got her an Oscar and
world wide attention. No doubt about her being marvelous in the film,
and her beauty was boundless and breathtaking. She starts her climb
with her relationship with Dirk Bogarde who is a journalist and very
very serious, he is also terrific in this role. The problem with
Diana is that she is basically superficial and flighty, and easily
bored. Bogarde has weight and demand and he even leaves his wife and
children to move in with her. Doomed from the start this relationship
goes quickly down the tubes especially when Diana lands on the snake
and rake played by Laurence Harvey a public relations executive who
takes Diana on and turns her into a fashion model-star and drains her
of any humanity that she still has. But she is a willing host.
The film is far from perfect and some of the sequences are almost laughable especially the “La Dolce Vita” like party where the guests play a truth game that gets wilder as the evening progresses with some of the men getting up in drag. There is the usual cliched predatory lesbian drooling over Diana which was common in the early and mid sixties, but the gay Schlesinger evens this out with one of the best realistic depictions of a gay man seen so far at that time and was well played by Robert Curram as Diana's photographer friend who she takes a short holiday to Italy with. Both of them have a sex romp with a hot Italian bi waiter (alas not at the same time) and she also meets a prince who she will later marry and becomes a real princess which brought to mind another princess named Diana especially in the scenes of a depressed Christie wandering through her palatial palace lost but not found.
This was John Schlesinger's 3rd film, he had previously directed two lovely “kitchen sink” movies “A Kind of Loving” and “Billy Liar” which was a mini miracle film for Christie. Schlesinger received his first directing Oscar nomination for “Darling” and would win best director one at the end of the decade for “Midnight Cowboy” along with a final Oscar nomination for his masterpiece “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Besides winning Christie an Oscar the film also won the original screenplay and black and white costume Oscars. One of the ten best films of 1965.
Monday, February 05, 2024
Better Late Than Never
Just found out that two of my drawings were published in New Croton Review In the Fall?? They never notified me with a link and I had to research it on my on own, going back to old emails. Any way here is the link to the magazine and my two drawings.
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=pkvaEAAAQBAJ&pg=GBS.PA24&hl=en
Sunday, February 04, 2024
Saturday, February 03, 2024
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Monday, January 29, 2024
Sunday, January 28, 2024
It's All About The Food
Midnight Diner & Tokyo Stories
Popular and sweet series based on a Manga Comic about a 12 seat diner that is only open from 12 midnight to 7 A.M. Owned and operated by one man, “the master” who does all the cooking with ingredients he has on hand. The master is a mystery and what is that scar on his face about but he is good natured, and always ready to give advice to his steady group of customers along with his tasty dishes. Each episode runs only about 25 minutes and includes charm along with simple recipes for the dishes that are also characters in the shows.
The Makanai Cooking For The Maiko House
Two young girls leave their hometown for kyoto to become apprentices at a geisha house. Only one of them makes the grade but the other one talks her way into becoming the cook for the house. Also based on a Manga, this is another sweet series mixing pathos with food. Full of rich details on the routines of the young women including the costumes and styles of their lives along with all that cooking and food. You can almost smell the ingredients cooking and you can even get the recipes on line for all the dishes served.
Samurai Gourmet
Another short and sweet series mixing life and food. The episodes are only about 20 minutes long and are about a recently retired man played by Naoto Takenaka with a much younger wife (at first I thought it was his daughter) who needs to find something to do with all his free time. His solution is to take walks and to have lunch at various restaurants he stumbles upon. In his wanderings he images a fantasy Samurai who gives him inspiration and helpful advice on his daily journeys as Naoto remembers past events from his life brought on by what he is eating. It doesn't get more charming than this delightful series.
Kantaro The Sweet Tooth Salaryman
Maga is once again the source of a delicious Netflix series about food, this one is all on deserts. The plot is easy. A reliable and top notch salesman for a book publisher has a sweet tooth passion and is secretly the author of a popular blog on deserts and the cafes and restaurants that serve them. He rushes through his business visits to bookstores so he can get to well known and real cafes and restaurants where he can relish and sooth himself with gorgeous looking and tasting cakes, ices, and other delectables where he melts into orgasmic reactions to them. Played by the marvelous actor Matsuya Onoe who to my mind is a comic genius. His mentioned reactions reduced me to howls of laughter along with desires for what he's eating. There are also bizarre and hallucinatory fantasies in which the actors have giant cherries or melons for heads or blast off into outer-space while doing wild dance numbers. Again these are short pieces maybe 25 minutes each but brimming with pop color and images along with Onoe giving us some history about each desert and the famous cafes that serve them. It's hard to read Kantaro as a person. He has no interest in women or the female co-workers who drool after him like he drools after his beloved deserts, and his relationship with his mother in one episode is puzzling. He is gay or asexual? I do know that he loves and lusts after those deserts.