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I’m sort of fascinated by how and which films and filmmakers become underground hits. That is, not mainstream movies, but indies and such that become embraced and then recommended and screened in off-beat places, say dorms and such.  For example, decades back when I was at Columbia, there was an organization that showed weekly art movies (the organization had a name that had something to do with a zoopraxiscope, but I can’t remember exactly what it was).  I recall Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s bizzare Un Chien Andalou, Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, Tod Browing’s Freaks, and Philip de Broca’s King of Hearts.  There were other cultish movies out and about at the time that I avoided because I suspected I couldn’t take their creepiness, say David Lynch’s Eraserhead, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, and Alejandro Jodorwsky’s El Topo.  It took me a while to finally attend a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Pictureshow, but I must say I had a great time when I did.

One of my personal favorites is Lindsay Anderson’s  If… (you can read a bit more about my feelings about it here) and I was thrilled to see that it seems to be a favorite of Neil Gaiman’s too as it is one of the films he has selected to screen in a brief series he and his wife Amanda Palmer are doing. And was further tickled to see that she had selected King of Hearts. I haven’t see it in years and wonder how I’d respond to it today.  I have seen If.. and still love it (partly…er…mainly…because of the young Malcolm McDowell), but do wonder how others will respond to it today what with the horror of school shootings.  Haven’t seen King of Hearts in decades and now am curious how it would hold up for me.

What  movies speak to you in somewhat cultish fashion?  I’m suspecting the films of John Hughes, perhaps?  Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings?  I’m curious.

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Where I live, it seems winter is refusing to loosen its grip, holding back a long-awaited spring. With two feet of snow still on the ground and frigid, breezy days, it’s nice to sit inside (by the fire) and lose myself in the delights of the Reader. Forget Calgon. Reader….take me away! Here’s just a few Freshly Pressed posts that gave us pause this week.

Roger Ebert, RIP

Yesterday, the world lost more than a prolific film critic when Roger Ebert died of cancer at age 70. In Roger Ebert, RIP, science fiction author John Scalzi hails Ebert as one of his most important writing teachers, a fair, incisive film critic, and above all, a man who refused to allow a devastating disease to take away his humanity:

In these later years and after everything that he’d been through with cancer and with losing the ability to physically speak, I read and was contemplative about the essays and pieces he put up on his Web site. Much of that had nothing to do with film criticism, but was a matter of him writing… well, whatever. Which meant it was something I could identify with to a significant degree, since that is what I do here. It would be foolish to say that Ebert losing his physical voice freed him to find his voice elsewhere. What I think may be more accurate was that losing his physical voice reminded Ebert that he still had things he wanted to say before he ran out of time to say them.

Lean Together

Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, Lean In, challenges ambitious women to seek leadership positions to help shake off the ever-competitive socio-political status quo and reshape the world of work for the better. At The Purpose of Work, Mike Gammage suggests Lean In‘s fatal flaw is that Sandberg should be addressing society’s “all-pervasive competition” to always be “on” and working in Lean Together:

Almost wherever we look, the workplace is becoming relentlessly competitive. It’s an assumed ‘passion’ that jeopardises family life. And as work becomes more hyper-competitive, women’s opportunities shrink. Pregnancy and maternity leave especially become huge issues. Sandberg acknowledges her own fears that – even at her level and with her talents – her job and prospects at Google would be diminished if she took ‘too much’ time off [that is more than a week or two] after her first child was born.

What if we try instead to slow down and step off this devilish hamster wheel that we’ve created?

First off, I think, we would want to reflect on the culture of contest that is embedded into our societies and so into our working lives. We have to recognise the myth of the inevitability of all–pervasive competition.

Cursi

At Vocabat, author Katie gives us a reflective Spanish lesson on the word cursi, which in English means “cheesy.” Katie transcends simple translation, meditating on the cultural nuances between Latino and American culture, finally embracing cursi as an unfettered expression of love:

In sum: What is love if not cursi? Love is supremely sentimental and gushy and ridiculous. And love means leaving your self-consciousness at the door, as well as your ego. I feel like you’re not really in love if you’re not regularly making a fool of yourself! But why hide our cheesiness within the safe confines of relationships? I admire people who can unblushingly own their feelings, hopes, and even disappointments without pussyfooting or pretending to not care all that much anyway. Although cursi people could use some work in the originality department, at least they care in the first place. There’s a lamentable epidemic of nonchalance and numbness and self-absorption these days, and cheesiness is a much better alternative to these terrible modes of subpar living.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

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I've only known of Roger Ebert's death for an hour, but I can't focus on doing anything else right now, so I might as well write this, raw and unformed and rambling as it may be. So be it.

A couple weeks ago, Ebert stuck my video essay on Clint Eastwood's endings up on his blog. The last time I felt so close to fainting was when Samuel Delany first called me on the phone. (I bet Ebert would have appreciated that. He was, after all, a science fiction fan.) I wish I'd sent him an email to thank him, to say how utterly gobsmacked I was to have somebody who'd been a constant presence in my life suddenly notice something I'd done, and approve it. I was too shy. I knew it was the right thing to do, knew he might even be pleased that his notice meant something to me, but ... I was too shy.

Roger Ebert was always there in my life. Well, not always. I suppose before the age of 10 or 11, I hadn't seen his TV show (one with various names, but I'll forever think of it as Siskel & Ebert), a show that was born the same year I was. In the days before the internet, that show was a lifeline for a kid like me, living in New Hampshire, in love with movies and yet without any easy way to get information about any but the most mainstream and blockbuster. I would watch with a pen in my hand and take notes on which ones sounded interesting. Thus I discovered so many films that I later came to love (or loathe). Often, I had to wait till they were on videotape; sometimes, I was able to see them at a Boston theatre on one of my occasional trips to the city. Who I am as a film viewer was deeply shaped by those years of watching Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel argue about movies on TV.

Truthfully, it wasn't until he lost his voice that I came to love Roger Ebert, though. As my film taste was shaped watching the TV show, I tended to side more with Gene Siskel. Then, once I was in college in New York I was reading film reviews in the Voice and some of the film journals (whichever ones the Barnes & Noble at Astor Place carried: I'd grab a pile, sit in a chair, and read them cover to cover). Siskel and especially Ebert seemed, to a callow youth rather arrogant in his opinionating, utterly mainstream and utterly bourgeois. I suppose I was trying to expel his influence, to kill a father. Such is the nature of callow youths.

Then the Sun-Times put his reviews online. He started blogging. He became Master of Twitter. He expanded his blog to include all sorts of younger critics from around the world. I learned about Ebertfest. I learned about all he had done for film culture in Chicago. I learned.

And though our taste wasn't ever exactly the same, I found I loved reading his reviews. Actually, I liked that our tastes differed, because he was so good at expressing what he appreciated or didn't appreciate, even if my response was the opposite. What I had never known from the TV show was just what a marvelous writer Ebert was. A writer who happened to be a film critic. But a writer first.

Ebert's most interesting reviews aren't just reviews. They do the job a review is supposed to — they tell us about a cultural product we probably haven't yet encountered ourselves, and they give us the writer's take on it — but they are full of tangents, side remarks, bits of fact or philosophy. They are essays in the broadest and most classical sense: moments of thought. The familiar Ebert voice is always there in the words, and it is a comforting voice, an entertaining voice, the voice of a friend or beloved family member, somebody really smart and passionate, somebody you just want to talk to — about anything, really. It's no surprise that when he wrote his memoirs, he did so masterfully. His reviews were also pieces of memoir.

Could one critic ever be so important again? Probably not. The cultural landscape has fragmented, fractured, gone all rhizomatic. Overall, I think that's a good thing. I wouldn't want to go back to those days of having to rely on Siskel & Ebert for all my movie information. I like the easy access to variety today. But still. Roger Ebert, man. We often say a particular death is the end of an era. With Ebert, it really is.

He inspired millions of people to care about movies as something more than just entertainment, but without forgetting that entertainment is central to the experience, that visual pleasure and narrative cinema are nothing to be ashamed of.

Again and again, people have spoken of his generosity, his decency, his humanism. It is remarkable that a man who published three whole books of his most negative reviews could be so beloved! But Ebert wrote wonderful negative reviews. (Even of movies I like!) His generosity of spirit comes through, even as he is saying that a film is utterly awful, a terrible waste of time or effort or talent, even immoral. And when he praised, he praised like a poet.

I learned about one of my favorite movies, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, from the Siskel & Ebert episode where Ebert lambasted it. I wouldn't get to see the film for at least a year after that episode aired, but I remembered it, and I watched the movie while trying to evaluate what I thought of Siskel and Ebert's discussion about it. I decided I completely disagreed with Ebert on it. I still do. And I am utterly grateful to him for what he said, because it provoked me and haunted me and challenged me. There are worse ways to learn about aesthetics and morality, worse ways to learn about yourself.

Neil Steinberg at the Sun-Times chose a perfect quote from Ebert's Life Itself:

“‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs,” he wrote, at the end of his memoirs. “No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

Carve those words in stone. Better yet, project them through celluloid.

Tonight, I will choose one of the movies from his most recent Sight & Sound ballot to revisit, probably The General because it would be nice to laugh, and to watch that most graceful of all screen graces, Buster Keaton, my favorite silent film actor.

Thank you, Roger Ebert. All our thumbs are raised high in your honor.

It's two hours now since I learned of Roger Ebert's death.

The signature closing words of Siskel & Ebert are today among the saddest in our language:

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Press Play is running a series of essays on the Coen Brothers' films this week, and they very kindly asked me to contribute and let me pick the movie I wanted to write about. I chose Burn After Reading. The essay is called "They Know Not What They Do". Here's the opening:

When Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton) descends into her husband's basement office and copies financial records off of his computer, we get a glimpse of a book on the desk, a book that looks to be George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment: 1944-1946: The Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence. This should not surprise us. We have previously heard Oswald Cox (John Malkovich), while struggling to dictate his memoirs, declare: "The principles of George Kennan—a personal hero of mine—were what animated us. In fact they were what had originally inspired me to enter government service."

Burn After Reading is a film about containment and knowledge, or, to put it another way, a tale of wars against chaos. Necessarily, it is a farce.

Continue reading at Press Play. 

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I received a notice of a screenwriting contest last week that looks worthwhile and want to pass it on: The Search for America’s Newest Scriptwriter Contest. The deadline is March 21, and the prize is $5000 in each of two categories:

1. Comedy: 30-minute comedic storyline

2. Drama: 1-hour dramatic storyline

A nice touch: along with the rules you get a PDF that’s a good tutorial in script formatting for film and television—the margins to use, how to include directions, all that stuff.

Actor Will Smith is part of the organization sponsoring the contest, which includes Overbrook Entertainment/Will Smith, James Lassiter, and the ANA Alliance for Family Entertainment.

Here are some quick facts about the contest: 

• It is being judged by Overbrook Entertainment, the award-winning entertainment production company co-founded by two-time Academy Award nominee Will Smith and acclaimed film producer James Lassiter
• The contest is free to enter
• Two winners will win $5,000, a meeting with Overbrook Entertainment, an opportunity to have their TV script further developed, and an 18-month option agreement on their script
• The contest submissions end on 3/21/13 by 1 p.m. PT
• The contest has two categories: a 30-minute comedy and a 1-hour drama

There’s a short video starring Will Smith that explains the contest in more detail here. I enjoyed it. There are more videos on the website, including advice for writers. 

And there’s a story about last year’s winner here.

Good luck,

Ray

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“WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. Safety not guaranteed.”

Would you do it? Would you answer this ad? Sure, there’s a chance the guy who wrote the ad is a serial killer just shopping for victims—but what if he’s not? What if the guy is serious, and you get the chance to time travel? This is the question posed in the indie flick Safety Not Guaranteed.

The whole movie is based on an actual classified ad which first appeared in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997. The “joke” was written as last-minute filler by an employee of the magazine (Jon Silveira, who is credited in the film as “Time Travel Consultant.”) However, first-time feature film director, Colin Trevorrow, got the joke and ran with it. He says, “I have the original magazine it was printed in.”

Safety Not Guaranteed follows a Seattle journalist and his two interns as they hunt down the writer of this mysterious time travel ad to see if the guy’s for real or just a nut job.

The female lead, Darius, is played by Parks and Recreation comedienne Aubrey Plaza. Our time travel guru, Kenneth, is played by cutie patootie Mark Duplass, known as “Pete” on The League, possibly one of the funniest shows in the world.

Darius has always been an outcast; so has Kenneth. As she delves deeper into her investigation, at the coaxing of her journalist boss, Jeff (played by funny guy Jake Johnson), she builds a rapport with Kenneth. They begin to trust each other, and for the first time in both their lives, they’re actually honest with another person. Is this a love story? Not necessarily, although love is involved. Is it sci-fi? Eh. Do you laugh out loud and feel really, really great by the end? Yes. Absolutely.

Jake and I watch so many violent, dark movies; it’s nice to stumble upon a film with some joy. Just like The League (which is based almost entirely on improvisation), much of Safety Not Guaranteed earns its charm from the improvised one-liners of its comedic cast. Lines like “I have no funk. I’m totally funkless” or “What kind of lasers? I don’t know. I’m not a freakin’ storm trooper” add to the allure.

Safety Not Guaranteed is really about connections, though. For instance, Jeff only accepts the time travel assignment in an effort to get back with his high school sweetheart. Darius takes it because she’s always been alone, always been strange, so why not get stranger? And Kenneth, who is painfully alone, is just looking for a time travel pal. Of course, each character gets a lot more than he or she bargained for, which is why the title, Safety Not Guaranteed, is more than an allusion to an ad in a newspaper.

From the film:
Kenneth: To go it alone or to go with a partner. When you choose a partner you have to have compromises and sacrifices, but it’s a price you pay. Do I want to follow my every whim and desire as I make my way through time and space, absolutely. But at the end of the day do I need someone when I’m doubting myself and I’m insecure and my heart’s failing me? Do I need someone who, when the heat gets hot, has my back?
Darius: So, do you?
Kenneth: I do.

Safety Not Guaranteed is not just a movie title; the line refers to life in general. Taking chances, building relationships: these things are dangerous, because whenever we take a leap of faith, there is a chance we could fall, in love or on our faces. In the end, what happens to Darius and Kenneth? Do they really go back in time? You need to see the movie to find out, but remember, in the world of film and in day-to-day living, safety is never guaranteed.

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Just reading a piece about the release of the re-make of  the latest re-make of"The Great Gatsby." Personally, a large proporation of the film remakes that I've seen rarely matched up to the original. This leads one - me - to wonder why producers/directors/film production companies feel the necessity to update a film that on the whole, was good orginally.

In the way of background information and according to Wikipedia, the story, "narrated by Nicholas "Nick" Carraway, a 30 year old Yale graduate and WWI veteran from the midwest, who takes a job in New York as a bond salesman. He rents a small house on Long Island, in the (fictional) village of West Egg, next door to the lavish mansion of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaiare who holds extravagant parties."

Checking further with IMDB, the first film version dates back to 1926 and starred Warner Baxter as Jay Gatsby and Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan. Furthermore, much to my surprise, a stage production opened at the Ambassdor Theater on February 26, 1926, ran for 112 performances and directed by George Cukor.

The next film version in black and white, was made in 1949 starring Alan Ladd and Betty Fields. I always liked Ladd as an actor and although I never saw the film, most likely he did a decent job. The next incarnation in 1974 was the one that I saw and being an admirer/fan of Robert Redford, I thought it was...okay. Didn't particularly care for Mia Farrow as Daisy and thinking back, there was very little chemistry between the two stars.

Last but not least, it appears there was yet another version in 2000 (wasn't aware of this) with Mina Sorvino and one Toby Stephens in the lead roles.

That brings us up to the latest incarnation to be released in May 2013, starring Leonardo di Caprio and Carrie Mulligan. Somehow, di Caprio, at least in my mind, doesn't have that suave, sophisticated personna necessary to play Gatsby. Then again, who knows.

This is all leading up to the question originally posted here, as to the necessity of yet another re-make of the re-make of.... One re-make is acceptable or even two re-makes but five? The point being made here is that script writers should be searching for their own ideas, rather than turning out scripts based on the story lines and scripts created by other script writers.

In as far as the newest and hopefully the last version of this story, I'm going to pass but for people who are intrigued to know what the film is about, here is the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/?ref_=sr_1

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I have a new video essay and a new text essay up at Press Play looking at Clint Eastwood's movies, called "The Ends of Violence: The Conclusions of Clint Eastwood". The text essay also contains links to two previous video essays I made on Eastwood, "Outlaw: Josey Wales" and "Vigilante Man: Eastwood and Gran Torino".

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Filmmaker Roberta Grossman offered a work-in-progress screening of her documentary on Hava Nagila at the Association of Jewish Libraries 2012 conference in California. Here we have her introductory remarks and the Q&A that followed the screening.The film is now opening in theaters across the country!

AUDIO:

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Trailer for Hava Nagila (The Movie) from Katahdin Productions on Vimeo.


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Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel
Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries
Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band 
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We all want Wonder Woman to be in a movie. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say we want her to be in EVERY film. And every TV show. Maybe a few music videos. But for one reason or another, we’re repeatedly disappointed by a world which does not seem to share our desire for Diana to take over the entirety of culture. She can’t get a TV show off the ground, her film scripts never get put anywhere near production, and Nicki Minaj hasn’t dressed up as her ONCE.

So step-forward first-time director Jesse V. Johnson, a stunt co-ordinator who has worked on films like Lincoln, Thor, and Spider-Man, to show how it’s done. Johnson today uploaded a film trailer for Wonder Woman, to show off his ability as a director for potentially-interested parties… and it’s pretty darned good, you guys. It’s even got this poster, created by Robert Sebree.

 

Casting actress Nina Bergman as Wonder Woman and Peter-flipping-Stormare as her Nazi captor, this fan film captures basically everything William Marston could have possibly wanted to see in a Wonder Woman movie. There’s fighting, and empowerment, some light bondage, and even a touch of psychological theory. Johnson describes the project’s origins:

It was my manager / producing partner Kailey Marsh’s idea to shoot the trailer.  She really believes I should be a studio director, and thought shooting Wonder Woman would be a great way to show off my skills in a fun way that people could get excited about.

So without further ado, here’s the trailer for the movie. What do you think?

Female Super Hero Fan Film from Jesse V. Johnson on Vimeo.

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“My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way,” says screenwriter and producer Michael Hirst. With a bunch of film credits under his belt, along with the award-winning series The Tudors, Hirst talks to Mediabistro for the latest installment of So What Do You Do? Though he writes for a different medium than most of you GalleyCat readers, his advice for research and crafting characters is useful for any writer.

“The key for me with historical characters is they’re interesting because they’re human beings,” he said. “A little bit of Hemingway goes a long way here, but journalists and writers should honestly look at their material and have a real interest, a real passion in what they want to write, and they should also have a lot of knowledge, as well. You don’t write police procedural stuff unless you really know that beat, but it’s ultimately not the procedure that makes the show work — it’s the people. The more real they are, the better.”

For more, read So What Do You Do, Michael Hirst, Creator of The Tudors and Vikings?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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True love in opposition: Levin and Kitty’s match set against the triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky. How can Tolstoy’s crushing rejection scene (drawn from his own life) be portrayed on screen? The film adaptation of Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, is contending for four Oscars tonight (Production Design, Cinematography, Costume Design, and Original Score). Let’s see how they do compared to the Oxford World Classic edition before the cinematic contest this evening.

DURING the interval between dinner and the beginning of the evening party, Kitty experienced something resembling a young man’s feelings before a battle. Her heart was beating violently and she could not fix her thoughts on anything.

She felt that this evening, when those two men were to meet for the first time, would decide her fate; and she kept picturing them to herself, now individually and now together. When she thought of the past, she dwelt with pleasure and tenderness on her former relations with Levin. Memories of childhood and of Levin’s friendship with her dead brother lent a peculiar poetic charm to her relations with him. His love for her, of which she felt sure, flattered and rejoiced her, and she could think of him with a light heart. With her thought of Vronsky was mingled some uneasiness, though he was an extremely well-bred and quiet-mannered man; a sense of something false, not in him, for he was very simple and kindly, but in herself; whereas in relation to Levin she felt herself quite simple and clear. On the other hand when she pictured to herself a future with Vronsky a brilliant vision of happiness rose up before her, while a future with Levin appeared wrapped in mist.

On going upstairs to dress for the evening and looking in the glass, she noticed with pleasure that this was one of her best days, and that she was in full possession of all her forces, which would be so much wanted for what lay before her. She was conscious of external calmness and of freedom and grace in her movements.

At half-past seven, as soon as she had come down into the drawing-room, the footman announced ‘Constantine Dmitrich Levin!’ The Princess was still in her bedroom, nor had the Prince yet come down.

‘So it’s to be!’ thought Kitty and the blood rushed to her heart. Glancing at the mirror she was horrified at her pallor.

She felt sure that he had come so early on purpose to see her alone and to propose to her. And now for the first time the matter presented itself to her in a different and entirely new light. Only now did she realize that this matter (with whom she would be happy, who was the man she loved) did not concern herself alone, but that in a moment she would have to wound a man she cared for, and to wound him cruelly…. Why? Because the dear fellow was in love with her. But it could not be helped, it was necessary and had to be done.

‘Oh God, must I tell him so myself?’ she thought. ‘Must I really tell him that I don’t care for him? That would not be true. What then shall I say? Shall I say that I love another? No, that’s impossible! I’ll go away. Yes, I will.’

She was already approaching the door when she heard his step. ‘No, it would be dishonest! What have I to fear? I have done nothing wrong. I’ll tell the truth, come what may! Besides, it’s impossible to feel awkward with him. Here he is!’ she thought, as she saw his powerful diffident figure before her and his shining eyes gazing at her. She looked straight into his face as if entreating him to spare her, and gave him her hand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I don’t think I’ve come at the right time, I’m too early,’ he said gazing round the empty drawing-room. When he saw that his expectation was fulfilled and that nothing prevented his speaking to her, his face clouded over.

‘Not at all,’ said Kitty and sat down at the table.

‘But all I wanted was to find you alone,’ he began, still standing and avoiding her face so as not to lose courage.

‘Mama will be down in a minute. She was so tired yesterday …’ She spoke without knowing what she was saying, her eyes fixed on him with a caressing look full of entreaty.

He glanced at her; she blushed and was silent.

‘I told you that I did not know how long I should stay … that it depends on you.’

Her head dropped lower and lower, knowing the answer she would give to what was coming.

‘That it would depend on you,’ he repeated. ‘I want to say … I want to say … I came on purpose … that … to be my wife !’ he uttered hardly knowing what he said; but feeling that the worst was out he stopped and looked at her.

She was breathing heavily and not looking at him. She was filled with rapture. Her soul was overflowing with happiness. She had not at all expected that his declaration of love would make so strong an impression on her. But that lasted only for an instant. She remembered Vronsky, lifted her clear, truthful eyes to Levin’s face, and noticing his despair she replied quickly:

‘It cannot be … forgive me.’

How near to him she had been a minute ago, how important in his life! And how estranged and distant she seemed now!

‘Nothing else was possible,’ he said, without looking at her, and bowing he turned to go …

One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina illuminates the questions that face humanity. A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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This blog post was not inspired by Midnight in Paris, just to be clear. Instead, this blog post was inspired by San Diego and the Hotel del Coronado. I’ve decided I want to take a trip to the Roaring Twenties and live there for nine years—you know, right before everything went to hell when the market crashed in ’29.

The Hotel del Coronado (famous for the exterior beach scenes in the classic film, Some Like It Hot) was a very pleasant part of last week’s visit to San Diego and the nearby Coronado Island, where I had the chance to freeze my feet off in the ocean and see dolphins. I also admired the hotel: a 125-year-old architectural monster filled with crystal chandeliers, dark wood décor, and 1920s jazz music.

Although the hotel made me happy, it also made me sad. Let’s face it: I don’t always like Phoenix. Phoenix considers architecture from 1970 to be “historic,” and after living in Charleston, South Carolina, I have to tell you people, there is nothing historic about the 1970s. Phoenix is shiny and new, and I do have a place in my heart for skull décor and wild graffiti.

However, San Diego made me realize how much I miss walking the streets of Charleston, surrounded by flickering gas lamps, ivy that’s older than me, and houses that were around during the Civil War.

My need to time travel is more than just architectural. I did love the film Midnight in Paris, because not only did it embrace one of my favorite cities, but the movie embraced a golden culture and a specific time: the “Roaring Twenties,” what the French dubbed “The Crazy Years.” It was the era of jazz music, flappers, and the right for women to vote.

I adore jazz music. As you know, I’ve recently developed a girl-crush on Melody Gardot. Then, on the drive home from San Diego, Pandora showed me Koop and Devil Doll: two other modernized jazz/burlesque groups. Most modern music blows. The stuff you hear on the radio is crap. I’d much rather be enveloped by the trumpet of Louis Armstrong or the quavering alto of Billie Holiday.

Then, there’s the fashion. Oh, the flapper gowns! And feathers! If I lived in the Roaring 20s, I could wear feathers—feathers everywhere—and people would think I was cool, not a Big Bird wannabe.

Plus, let’s not forget: in the twenties, men used to wear suits. Sleek, stylish, expensive suits every single day. I love men in suits, but unfortunately nowadays, most men only wear suits when going to weddings or funerals. Imagine Jake in a suit every day. Glorious!

Let us also bask in the decadence. Not only would I fully be expected to swing dance and bust out the Charleston at all hours of the night, but I could get away with slurpin’ whiskey and smoking cigarettes out of a big, ivory cigarette holder. There would be no Non-Smoking sections. I wouldn’t be a pariah for the occasional coffin nail; the behavior would be expected. Okay, so this isn’t the healthiest reason to go back in time, but hell, I feel like we’re all too damn worried about vitamins and vegetables nowadays. Wouldn’t it be nice to be bad for a little while?

I guess we all have an era: a time when we believe we were supposed to be born. My brother, for instance, would have been perfect in the 60s. Jake would have been happy dancing to Hall & Oates in the 80s. I think I would have enjoyed the 1920s. I miss old things, old places, which were easy to find around every corner in Charleston. I love 20s fashion. I love jazz. Literally, of course, I can’t go back and dance with the flappers. However, maybe I’ll start wearing feathers more often. I can easily add some flapper-esque attire to my wardrobe. I can lock myself in my house and listen to the music I like. And I can visit places like Hotel del Coronado—places that make me feel like, yes, I am home.

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Until recently, I hadn't given much thought to how many interesting movies were released in (or around) the year I was born, 1975. The 1970s were a particularly good decade for cinematic innovation, so I expect you could pick just about any year and find similar quality and resonances, but I'm going to continue to pretend that 1975 was especially special. Because for me it was where it all began.

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By Jim Cullen

Today represents a red letter day — and a black mark – for US cultural history. Exactly 98 years ago, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles. American cinema has been decisively shaped, and shadowed, by the massive legacy of this film.

D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) was one of the more contradictory artists the United States has produced. Deeply Victorian in his social outlook, he was nevertheless on the leading edge of modernity in his aesthetics. A committed moralist in his cinematic ideology, he was also a shameless huckster in promoting his movies. And a self-avowed pacifist, he produced a piece of work that incited violence and celebrated the most damaging insurrection in American history.

The source material for Birth of a Nation came from two novels, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), both written by Griffith’s Johns Hopkins classmate, Thomas Dixon. Dixon drew on the common-sense version of history he imbibed from his unreconstructed Confederate forebears. According to this master narrative, the Civil War was as a gallant but failed bid for independence, followed by vindictive Yankee occupation and eventual redemption secured with the help of organizations like the Klan.

But Dixon’s fiction, and the subsequent screenplay (by Griffith and Frank E. Woods), was a literal and figurative romance of reconciliation. The movie dramatizes the relationships between two (related) families, the Camerons of South Carolina and the Stonemans of Pennsylvania. The evil patriarch of the latter is Austin Stoneman, a Congressman with a limp very obviously patterned on the real-life Thaddeus Stevens. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Stevens comes, Carpetbagger-style, and uses a brutish black minion, Silas Lynch(!), whose horrifying sexual machinations focused, ironically and naturally, on Stoneman’s own daughter are only arrested by at the last minute, thanks to the arrival of the Klan in a dramatic finale that has lost none of its excitement even in an age of computer-generated imagery.

Historians agree that Griffith, a former actor who directed hundreds of short films in the years preceding Birth of a Nation, was not a cinematic pioneer along the lines of Edwin S. Porter, whose 1903 proto-Western The Great Train Robbery virtually invented modern visual grammar. Instead, Griffith’s genius was three-fold. First, he absorbed and codified a series of techniques, among them close-ups, fadeouts, and long shots, into a distinctive visual signature. Second, he boldly made Birth of a Nation on an unprecedented scale in terms of length, the size of the production, and his ambition to re-create past events (“history with lightning,” in the words of another classmate, Woodrow Wilson, who screened the film at the White House). Finally, in the way the movie was financed, released and promoted, Griffith transformed what had been a disreputable working-class medium and staked its power as a source of genuine artistic achievement. Even now, it’s hard not to be awed by the intensity of Griffith’s recreation of Civil War battles or his re-enactments of events like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

But Birth of a Nation was a source of instant controversy. Griffith may have thought he was simply projecting common sense, but a broad national audience, some of which had lived through the Civil War, did not necessarily agree. The film’s release also coincided with the beginnings of African American political mobilization. As Melvyn Stokes shows in his elegant 2009 book D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the film’s promoters and its critics alike found the controversy surrounding it curiously symbiotic, as moviegoers flocked to see what the fuss was about and the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People used the film’s notoriety to build its membership ranks.

Birth of a Nation never escaped from the original shadows that clouded its reception. Later films like Gone with the Wind (1939), which shared much of its political outlook, nevertheless went to great lengths to sidestep controversy. (The Klan is only alluded to as “a political meeting” rather than depicted the way it was in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel.) Today Birth is largely an academic curio, typically viewed in settings where its racism looms over any aesthetic or other assessment.

In a number of respects, Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln is a repudiation of Griffith. In Birth, Lincoln is a martyr whose gentle approach to his adversaries is tragically severed with his death. But in Lincoln he’s the determined champion of emancipation, willing to prosecute the war fully until freedom is secure. The Stevens character of Lincoln, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is not quite the hero. But his radical abolitionism is at least respected, and the very thing that tarred him in Birth — having a secret black mistress — here becomes a badge of honor. Rarely do the rhythms of history oscillate so sharply. Griffith would no doubt be bemused. But he could take such satisfaction in the way his work has reverberated across time.

For Jim Cullen’s selection of films all history and film buffs should see, watch his video syllabus.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. He is the author of  Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (December 2012), The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, and other books. Cullen is also a book review editor at the History News Network. Read his previous OUPblog posts.

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Image credit: Birth of a Nation film poster, 1915, public domain in Wikimedia Commons.

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The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012. The longlisted entries are now available for the public vote which will produce four finalists. After a live final in March, the winner will receive £9000 towards their university education.

By Chloe Foster

After more than three months of students carefully planning and creating their entries, the Very Short Film competition has closed and the longlisted submissions have been announced.

The competition asked entrants to create a short film which would inform and inspire us. Students were free to base their entry on any subject they were passionate about. There was just one rule: films could be no longer than 60 seconds in length.

We certainly had many who managed to do this. The standard of films was impressive. How were we to whittle down the entries and choose just 12 for the longlist?

We received a real range of films from a variety of ages, characters and subjects — everything from scuba diving to the economic state of the housing market. It was great to see a mixture of academic subjects and topics of personal interest.

It must be said that the quality of the filmmaking itself was very high in some entries. However not all of these could be put through to the longlist; although artistic and clever, they didn’t inform us in the way our criteria specified.

When choosing the longlisted entries, judges looked for students who were clearly on top of their subject. We were most impressed by films that conveyed a topic’s key information in a concise way, were delivered with passion and verve, and left us wanting to find out more. By the end of our selection process, we felt that each of the films had taught us something new or made us think about a subject in a way we hadn’t before.

The sheer amount of information filmmakers managed to convey was astounding. As the Very Short Introductions editor Andrea Keegan says: “I thought condensing a large topic into 35,000 words, as we do in the Very Short Introductions books was difficult enough, but I think that this challenge was even harder. I was very impressed with the quality and variety of videos which were submitted.

“Ranging from artistic to zany, I learned a lot, and had lots of fun watching them. The longlist represents both a wide range of subjects — from the history of film to quantum locking — and a huge range in the approaches taken to get the subjects across in just one minute.”

We hope the entrants enjoyed thinking about and creating their films as much as we enjoyed watching them. We asked a few of the longlisted students what they made of the experience. Mahshad Torkan, studying at the London School of Film, tackled the political power of film: “I am very thankful for this amazing opportunity that has allowed me to reflect my values and beliefs and share my dreams with other people.  I believe that the future is not something we enter, the future is something we create.”

Maia Krall Fry is reading geology at St Andrews: “It seemed highly important to discuss a topic that has really captured my curiosity and sense of adventure. I strongly believe that knowledge of the history of the earth should be accessible to everyone.”

Matt Burnett, who is studying for an MSc in biological and bioprocess engineering at Sheffield, used his film to explore the challenges of creating cost-effective therapeutic drugs: “I felt that in a minute it would be very hard to explain my research in enough detail just using speech, and it would be difficult to demonstrate or act out. I simplify difficult concepts for myself by drawing diagrams, often spending a lot of time on them. For me it is the most enjoyable part of learning, and so I thought it would be fun to draw an animated video. If I get the chance to do it again I think I’d use lots of colours.”

So, what are you waiting for? Take a look at the 12 films and pick your favourite of these amazingly creative and intelligent entries.

Chloe Foster is from the Very Short Introductions team at Oxford University Press. This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk.

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part of Jacques Derrida's last library

Various items...

I recently saw two of the more controversial movies of last year, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty. I don't feel compelled to say much about the former — it's fine for a Steven Spielberg movie, and wanting it to be more than a Steven Spielberg movie seems to me to be an error. Yes, I would have preferred, say, Charles Burnett's Lincoln or Alex Cox's Lincoln or Cheryl Dunye's Lincoln or even Guillermo del Toro's Lincoln, but what we got is Spielberg's Lincoln, and so we should not be surprised that every moment of possible emotion is squeezed through John Williams's typically John Williams score, or that there are lots of faces making faces, or that it is a white savior movie, or that it exemplifies the tradition of quality in Hollywood cinema. What we should be surprised by is that it is not worse — it is easily, to my eyes, Spielberg's most interesting and least annoying historical film. That may have something to do with Tony Kushner's script (PDF) ... but then, Kushner wrote the execrable Munich, so who knows. In any case, the performances are generally compelling, and it's nice to see the great Thaddeus Stevens get some acknowledgement after more than a century of general abuse; Tommy Lee Jones's performance as Stevens is a hoot, and yet not a caricature. On the film's fetishization of compromise and its hatred of radicalism, I'm with Aaron Bady ("It is, in short, a barely veiled argument that radicals should get in line, be patient, be realistic"), although I also wonder what we would make of the film had it been released ten years ago in exactly the same form. An impossible question, of course, but perhaps an interesting thought experiment, given how Lincoln wrestles with the idea of "war powers".

War Powers could be an alternate title for Zero Dark Thirty. I have nothing to say right now except that I found the film fascinating and deeply unsettling, but to be able to show why I think it is a devastating and subversive movie I have to wait till I can dig into its details on DVD, because so much of its meaning and effect for me came from specific shots and cuts. Some excellent writing has already been done about it, though — here are the essays that have most fit with my experience of the film:

• "Zero Dark Thirty: Perception, Reality, Perception Again, and 'The Art Defense'" by Glenn Kenny, which masterfully demonstrates why Glenn Greenwald's attack on the film as pro-torture is inaccurate and deceptive. Arguments about how all sorts of things are represented in the film can be legitimately made, I think, but Greenwald seriously distorts what is on screen to fit his thesis (which he had to do, because by the point where he actually saw the movie, he had too much of an emotional stake in the film being what he wanted it to be for him to ever say it was not what he wanted it to be).
• Manohla Dargis's review for The New York Times is a model of intelligent newspaper writing.
• "The Monitor Mentality, or A Means to an End Becomes an End in Itself: Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty" by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is a fine beginning to understanding what is actually on screen and the implications.
• "A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty" by Steven Shaviro is as insightful as we've come to expect from Shaviro. He's been writing about Kathryn Bigelow's work for many years, and his perspective is helpful. I anxiously look forward to his further writings on the film, because even with this "brief remark" he's delved more meaningfully into it than most other writers.
• Most recently, Nicholas Rombes has published "Zero Dark Thirty and the New History", which looks at the relationship between the film and concepts of history: " Zero Dark Thirty is about how some historical events remain so hot and dangerous that they cannot be treated directly; it would be like staring into the sun. Instead, such histories can only be approached in an administrative, almost bureaucratic fashion, and in such a way that suggests history remains, at the end of the day, a tangle of zero-sum stories, usually competing with each other for legitimacy."

I also recently saw Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and Detention, two interesting films that make a mess of genre expectations. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is as much a horror movie as an action movie, but a horror movie more akin to the works of David Lynch than the average splatter film. (I could have lived without all the fight scenes being sped up, however.) Detention is even better, a mad mishmash of teen comedy, absurd sci-fi, and slasher movie. For me, it was the second most consistently delightful film of last year, after Moonrise Kingdom.

I don't have much to report for recent reading here, mostly because I've been reading books such as Change and Continuity in the 1984 Elections, which is marvelous, but, well, nothing I'd recommend to get you through the long winter months. I've also just begun reading Derrida: A Biography by Benoit Peeters (god bless interlibrary loan!), which is thrilling and revelatory so far (100 pages in). I had long believed Derrida made a living well into his twenties as a construction worker, but it turns out this is just another example of one of the many mistaken beliefs I have clung to.

I very much enjoyed Adam Green's profile, "A Pickpocket's Tale: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins" at The New Yorker recently.

Also, two poems by Suzanne Buffam: "The New Experience" at The Poetry Foundation and "Ruined Interior" at Boston Review.

Finally, a new term has started at the university, so I'm back to teaching. Here are the syllabi for my classes, if you're curious: Murder, Madness, Mayhem (English Department course that I'm making into a course on dystopia and fascism this term) and Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society (Communications & Media Studies course that I've making into ... well ... something).

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More Austenland movie news: Sundance announced the Austenland screenings, and Entertainment Weekly posted a darling First Look photo.

Both Austenland and Midnight in Austenland will be published in the UK in March and available as well in New Zealand, Australia, and all world English markets. What do you think of the UK covers?

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I was at the Rivoli in Camberwell last night waiting for my daughter, and spying on folks as Helen Garner has trained us all to do.

I saw three young fellows meeting up, and overheard them picking their film. One said, "I can't bear to sit through that musical again." The other said, "The Hobbit, then?" and when the reply was affirmative, said, "for the second time!" 

(I went to Les Miz, came home and googled this fellow. Goodness, he was fabulous!)

But in the meantime, since Christmas and a massive relocation of our books around a larger family of shelves, a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien that I forgot I had made its casual reappearance on my occasional table. So I have just completed Humphrey Carpenter's concise and gentle 1976 appraisal of Tolkien's life and his rise to fame. (There are of course many other things I could have read, if I'd had the inclination.)

There were many chuckles: there are some hilarious moments in this book. Just as a taste, here's Tolkien on the letter he received from a real Sam Gamgee while he was still attending to fan mail himself:
"For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed "S. Gollum". That would have been more difficult to deal with." 

The Carpenter bio is the only one I've ever read, and only now. For some reason Tolkien's life never interested me before. But in these pages I learned about another astonishing person, one whom Carpenter calls 'extraordinary' for good reason. The philologist Joseph Wright apparently went to work as a mill hand in Yorkshire aged six - taught himself to read at fifteen, and rose through his own night-school and a walking study tour of Germany to a doctorate, and from there  to becoming a professor at Oxford, where he trained Tolkien, one of the most brilliant, if dilatory, philologists at the university. 'Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor....'

I think reading this readable, dare I say personable biography, which was reissued in 2000, is a great antidote to escaping the monster truck that The Hobbit films seem to have turned into. Though it is sobering to research collectible copies of Tolkien's works. And Les Miserables was fine, though I did struggle with the vertiginous camera work. (Would it have really hurt to have a few more shots of FX-ed Paris, the barricades and the people, instead of chasing the leads around like Lars von Trier?)

I have a niece who is apparently spending her holidays reading Les Miserables. I'll be content to reread some snippets in the introduction to my undergrad collection of Hugo's poetry, which I never read properly when I was her age anyhow. Like Boaz, I was asleep then.

Happy New Year, everyone.

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A timely reminder to act while you still can for New Year’s Eve… A new film adaptation of Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, has opened worldwide, so we wanted to put it to the test. How faithful is the script to the novel? We’ve paired a scene from the film with an excerpt of the work below. One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina sets the impossible and destructive triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky against the marriage of Levin and Kitty, thus illuminating the most important questions that face humanity.

LEVIN emptied his glass and they were silent for a while.

‘There is one thing more that I must tell you,’ began Oblonsky. ‘You know Vronsky?’

‘No, I don’t. Why do you ask?’

‘Another bottle,’ said Oblonsky, turning to the Tartar, who was filling their glasses and hovering round them just when he was not wanted.

‘The reason you ought to know Vronsky is this: he is one of your rivals.’

‘What is he?’ asked Levin, the expression of childlike rapture which Oblonsky had been admiring suddenly changing into an angry and unpleasant one.

‘Vronsky is one of Count Ivanovich Vronsky’s sons, and a very fine sample of the gilded youth of Petersburg. I met him in Tver when I was in the Service there and he came on conscription duty. Awfully rich, handsome, with influential connections, an aide-decamp to the Emperor, and at the same time very good-natured — a first-rate fellow. And he’s even more than a first-rate fellow. As I have got to know him now, he turns out to be both educated and very clever — a man who will go far.’

Levin frowned and was silent.

‘Well, so he came here soon after you left, and as far as I can make out is head over ears in love with Kitty; and you understand that her mother …’

‘Pardon me, but I understand nothing,’ said Levin, dismally knitting his brows. And at once he thought of his brother Nicholas and how mean he was to forget him.

‘You just wait a bit, wait !’ said Oblonsky, smiling and touching Levin’s arm. ‘I have told you what I know, and I repeat that, as far as anyone can judge in so delicate and subtle a matter, I believe the chances are all on your side.’

Levin leant back in his chair. His face was pale.

‘But I should advise you to settle the question as soon as possible,’ Oblonsky continued, filling Levin’s glass.

‘No, thanks! I can’t drink any more,’ said Levin pushing his glass aside, ‘or I shall be tipsy…. Well, and how are you getting on?’ he continued, evidently wishing to change the subject.

‘One word more! In any case, I advise you to decide the question quickly, but I shouldn’t speak to-day,’ said Oblonsky. ‘Go to-morrow morning and propose in the classic manner, and may heaven bless you!’

‘You have so often promised to come and shoot with me — why not come this spring?’ said Levin.

He now repented with his whole heart of having begun this conversation with Oblonsky. His personal feelings had been desecrated by the mention of some Petersburg officer as his rival, and by Oblonsky’s conjectures and advice.

Oblonsky smiled. He understood what was going on in Levin’s soul.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I’ll come some day,’ he said. ‘Ah, old chap, women are the pivot on which everything turns! Things are in a bad way with me too, very bad and all on account of women. Tell me quite frankly …’

He took out a cigar, and with one hand on his glass he continued:

‘Give me some advice.’

‘Why? What is the matter?’

‘Well, it’s this. Supposing you were married and loved your wife, but had been fascinated by another woman …’

‘Excuse me, but really I … it’s quite incomprehensible to me. It’s as if … just as incomprehensible as if I, after eating my fill here, went into a baker’s shop and stole a roll.’

Oblonsky’s eyes glittered more than usual.

‘Why not? Rolls sometimes smell so that one can’t resist them!’

‘Himmlisch ist’s, wenn ich bezwungen
Meine irdische Begier;
Aber doch wenn’s nicht gelungen
Hatt’ ich auch recht hübsch Plaisir!’

Oblonsky repeated these lines with a subtle smile and Levin himself could not help smiling.

‘No, but joking apart,’ continued Oblonsky, ‘just consider. A woman, a dear, gentle, affectionate creature, poor and lonely, sacrifices everything. Now when the thing is done … just consider, should one forsake her? Granted that one ought to part with her so as not to destroy one’s family life, but oughtn’t one to pity her and provide for her and make things easier?’

‘As to that, you must pardon me. You know that for me there are two kinds of women … or rather, no! There are women, and there are … I have never seen any charming fallen creatures, and never shall see any; and people like that painted Frenchwoman with her curls out there by the counter, are an abomination to me, and all these fallen ones are like her.’

‘And the one in the Gospels?’

‘Oh, don’t! Christ would never have spoken those words, had he known how they would be misused! They are the only words in the Gospels that seem to be remembered. However, I am not saying what I think, but what I feel. I have a horror of fallen women. You are repelled by spiders and I by those creatures. Probably you never studied spiders and know nothing of their morals; and it’s the same in my case!’

‘It’s all very well for you to talk like that—it’s like that gentleman in Dickens who with his left hand threw all difficult questions over his right shoulder. But denying a fact is no answer. What am I to do? Tell me, what am I to do? My wife is getting old, and I am full of vitality. A man hardly has time to turn round, before he feels that he can no longer love his wife in that way, whatever his regard for her may be. And then all of a sudden love crosses your path, and you’re lost, lost,’ said Oblonsky with despair.

Levin smiled.

‘Yes, I am lost,’ continued Oblonsky. ‘But what am I to do?

‘Don’t steal rolls.’

Oblonsky burst out laughing.

‘Oh, you moralist! But just consider, here are two women: one insists only on her rights, and her rights are your love, which you cannot give her; and the other sacrifices herself and demands nothing. What are you to do? How are you to act? It is a terrible tragedy.’

‘If you want me to say what I think of it, I can only tell you that I don’t believe in the tragedy. And the reason is this: I think love, both kinds of love, which you remember Plato defines in his “Symposium” — both kinds of love serve as a touchstone for men. Some men understand only the one, some only the other. Those who understand only the non-platonic love need not speak of tragedy. For such love there can be no tragedy. “Thank you kindly for the pleasure, good-bye,” and that’s the whole tragedy. And for the platonic love there can be no tragedy either, because there everything is clear and pure, because …’ Here Levin recollecting his own sins and the inner struggle he had lived through added unexpectedly, ‘However, maybe you are right. It may very well be. But I don’t know, I really don’t know.’

‘Well, you see you are very consistent,’ said Oblonsky. ‘It is both a virtue and a fault in you. You have a consistent character yourself and you wish all the facts of life to be consistent, but they never are. For instance you despise public service because you want work always to correspond to its aims, and that never happens. You also want the activity of each separate man to have an aim, and love and family life always to coincide — and that doesn’t happen either. All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade.’

Levin sighed and did not answer. He was thinking of his own affairs and not listening to Oblonsky.

And suddenly both felt that though they were friends, and had dined and drunk wine together which should have drawn them yet closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs and was not concerned with the other.

Oblonsky had more than once experienced this kind of acute estrangement instead of union following a dinner with a friend, and knew what to do in such a case.

‘The bill!’ he shouted and went out into the dining-hall, where he immediately saw an aide-de-camp of his acquaintance, and entered into conversation with him about an actress and her protector. And immediately in conversation with the aide-de-camp Oblonsky felt relief and rest after the talk with Levin, who always demanded of him too great a mental and spiritual strain.

When the Tartar returned with a bill for twenty-six roubles odd, Levin, quite unconcernedly paid his share, which with the tip came to fourteen roubles, a sum that usually would have horrified his rustic conscience, and went home to dress and go on to the Shcherbatskys’ where his fate was to be decided.

‘It is heavenly when I have mastered my earthly desires; but even when I have not succeeded, I have also had right good pleasure!’

A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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I haven't had a chance to write about many movies over the past few months, so here are some stray, incomplete thoughts and blazingly subjective opinions on various films, before I completely forget my first impressions...

The Amazing Spider-Man. I've come to the conclusion that I don't much like super-hero movies, and my love of The Amazing Spider-Man, which most people seem to feel at best lukewarm about, is probably because it's not much of a super-hero movie. I didn't care for Sam Raimi's three Spider-Man movies much — indeed, I thought number 2, which some people I know consider the greatest super-hero movie of all time, worked vastly better when played at 1.5 speed, and probably would have been even better played faster, if the voices didn't sound like The Chipmunks. I went into The Amazing Spider-Man with very low expectations, then, and those expectations were exceeded all around. The casting is ultimately the film's greatest strength, because Andrew Garfield (who I've been fascinated by since Boy A) has a wonderful mix of insouciance, nerdiness, and intelligence that plays charmingly off of Emma Stone's typically bouncy/breathy Emma Stone performance. Denis Leary, Sally Field, Martin Sheen, and Campbell Scott are all delights, as well. The story really isn't much, Rhys Ifans doesn't have a whole lot to work with as the villain, and the special effects, while fine, are nothing particularly special for a film of this budget and type. But I never cared, because I loved hanging out with these characters.

Argo. A fun thriller with a surprisingly low body count. We're used to thrillers in which lots of people die, and yet this is in more than one way an old-school movie, a movie that is optimistic about the world-changing power of cinema, and nostalgic for a time when people thought movies could be a force for good in the world. At its core, it's a true story, but the liberties taken with the more mundane truths of the tale are all ones that fit the story into a conventional Hollywood mode. (More unfortunately conventional is its marginalizing of women.) And that's the point, as Jim Emerson has astutely written. It's enjoyable enough as a thriller, but it's more interesting as an exploration of audience expectations, genre conventions, and what we desire from our "true stories".

Beasts of the Southern Wild. I've been arguing with myself about this movie for a month now, which means I need to watch it a few more times. On the one hand, I was completely taken in by the performance of Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy, I found some of the cinematography lovely, and I found the ending moving. (The music totally got me.) On the other hand, it felt at times a bit too close to "noble savage" myths for comfort. What I want to look more closely at with a later viewing is the way the film uses Hushpuppy's point of view — as a child, she does her best to make sense of events and circumstances through her own perception, and because the movie is told through her eyes, her perception becomes ours (hence, the aurochs, which I also loved). While the surface of the film may seem to celebrate the self-reliance of the denizens of the Bathtub, and while Hushpuppy's abusive, alcoholic father Wink is celebrated with a lovely funeral at the end ... I didn't come away feeling that the movie itself was unambiguously celebrating all this. I was not left with an uplifting sense of the wondrous potential of human ingenuity in the face of disaster; instead, I left the film feeling overwhelmed by how limited the characters' choices were, how much they had been abandoned by the world beyond them, how much they had been forced to make do by a country that ultimately didn't really care that much if they washed away into the ocean. On the other hand, while I don't agree with the perspective of the Beasts-haters in this discussion at Slate, and even less so with the perspective of bell hooks, their points are worth considering, and I don't have good answers to some of them. On the other hand, there was a lot I enjoyed in the movie, a lot it made me think about, good and bad. (For other views, see Matt Denault at Strange Horizons and N.K. Jemison.)


The Cabin in the Woods. Maybe I'm just impervious to the charms of Joss Whedon (not maybe: I am), but I got to the end of this film, which Whedon co-wrote and produced, and was stuck thinking, "Really? That's all you've got?" I know lots of people find the movie clever, amusing, and innovative, but for me Mark Olsen at The Village Voice summed it up well: "A horror comedy with a structural twist intended to emit an air of being something more, Cabin has an off-putting vibe of cocky self-confidence, a 'don't you get it' conviction that it's something special. As with people, it's not a charming quality in a movie."

The Dark Knight Rises. Ugh. The Honest Trailer got it right. There were moments in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight that I enjoyed well enough, despite the terrible scripts and plodding direction, but The Dark Knight Rises was just atrocious, the ungainly love child of Cecil B. DeMille and Leni Riefenstahl. It's time for me to give up on Christopher Nolan; the only one of his movies I've completely enjoyed was The Prestige, and both Inception and The Dark Knight Rises were for me symphonies of boredom and annoyance.

Django Unchained. I never really liked a Quentin Tarantino movie until Inglorious Basterds. There were things I admired in his earlier work, particularly his ability to fill banal moments with tension, but I just didn't care much about whatever it was he cared about. And then came Inglorious Basterds, where suddenly so many of Tarantino's influences were ones I knew well, having grown up with the World War II movies beloved of my father (the Hollywood movies mostly, but also plenty of German ones — I remember falling asleep while he watched an unsubtitled videotape of Kolberg). For once, a Tarantino movie felt vaguely morally complex, as if he'd reached a point in his life when he not only wanted to celebrate the movies he loved and revel in the pleasures of a revenge narrative, but to wonder what those movies and pleasures had done to him. Django Unchained lacks some of the complexities and ambiguities of Basterds, but it's a different beast. Where World War II and the Holocaust have been subject to every sort of cinematic representation from The Great Dictator to Night and Fog to Schindler's List to Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS; American slavery has been narrower in its representations, more fraught. As Steven Barnes points out in an excellent piece on Django Unchained, popular culture (for better or worse) thrives on revenge narratives, but there has never been a movie about slavery that ends with unambiguously successful revenge by a slave. And that's what Django Unchained gives us. Its ending images are thrilling in a way no movie (to my knowledge) has ever been allowed to be thrilling before. While Inglorious Basterds is more morally complex because it provides moments suggesting we might not want to be so proud of ourselves for our revenge fantasies, Django Unchained just says: "You've never really been able to indulge in this fantasy before. Here you go. If you can't have fun fantasizing brutal deaths for slavers, when can you have fun fantasizing brutal deaths?" Interestingly, Tarantino doesn't merely let us fantasize brutal deaths for the slave-owners and -sellers themselves. He flips the normal racial hierarchy of black/white buddy stories, where we all know that the black guy's got to die so the white guy can live on and tell the tale. Not here. While much of the movie is dominated by Christoph Waltz's charmingly brutal Dr. King Schultz, the emotional force is all on Django's side, and he's the one who gets to finish the work. The effect is like taking a pile of nitrate-based prints of Gone with the Wind and setting them on fire.

I had some reservations about the movie — it's very male, for one thing, and if we're indulging in fantasies, I don't see why Tarantino couldn't have had more female characters contributing to the mayhem. Kerry Washington as Broomhilde especially gets short-changed. Django should have tossed her a shotgun and let her rip. (A note on the name Broomhilde: while the spelling is amusing, it makes sense that all the non-German-speaking characters would spell it that way. Christoph Waltz always seemed to pronounce it correctly as Brunhilde, as he should, since he's the one who explains the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde to Django. See also, as I'm sure Tarantino has, Fritz Lang's magnificent Die Nibelungen.)

What are we to make of Samuel L. Jackson's character, Stephen? It's the most flagrantly racist portrait in the movie, and the flagrancy is clearly intentional, because neither Tarantino nor Jackson are complete idiots. As always with Tarantino, there are no answers except in movies past, and Stephen seemed to me an embodiment of the "uncle Tom" figure common to so many old films, the kind of character many black actors were forced to spend a career playing. This makes me want to revisit Donald Bogle's classic Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks before seeing Django Unchained again, because Bogle's description of the "tom" character type sums up much of Stephen's character:

Always as toms are chased, harassed, hounded, flogged, enslaved, and insulted, they keep the faith, n'er turn against their white massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind. Thus they endear themselves to white audiences and emerge as heroes of sorts.

The name of course comes from Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the effect of the 1927 silent film adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel did much to perpetuate the most pernicious elements of the stereotype, as Bogle documents:

Tom still came off as a genial darky, furnished with new color but no new sentiments. Yet to [actor James B.] Lowe's credit, he did his tomming with such an arresting effectiveness that he was sent to England on a promotional tour to ballyhoo the picture, thus becoming the first black actor to be publicized by his studio. The film also introduced the massive baptism scene, which later became a Hollywood favorite. Curiously, in 1958 this version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, although silent, was reissued with an added prologue by Raymond Massey. Because it arrived just when the sit-ins were erupting in the South, many wondered if by reissuing the film Universal Studios hoped to remind the restless black masses of an earlier, less turbulent period, when obeying one's master was the answer to every black man's problems.

This, it seems to me, is the character Jackson is portraying, and the loathing we are meant to feel for him is, then, not a loathing for any real person or historical character, but for the one "good Negro" type allowed over decades of popular American cinema. His fate in Django Unchained is one many black viewers must have yearned for, secretly, for a long time.

Headhunters. An entertaining and often surprising Norwegian thriller that does a marvelous job of starting out as a slow-paced, ostentatiously "realistic" movie and then metamorphosing into a fast-paced twist-upon-twist grand guignol. I've seen few thriller that so well make their form an essential part of their thrills. Just as we're beginning to get a bit bored, just as we're beginning to wonder if this movie will ever actually go anywhere, just when we think we've figured it out all — bang. The story is pure hokum and all the better for it. The realism of the first part of the film prepares us to accept all the absurdities of the later part of the story, and thus our pleasure (and terror) is ramped up in a way a more conventional movie could never achieve.

How to Survive a Plague. A powerful, important documentary about ACT-UP's quest to get the world to care about AIDS deaths and treatment. For people who don't remember life before effective AIDS drugs existed, this is essential viewing. I found it wrenching, because my first awareness of what life as a gay man means was formed during the years ACT-UP was most active, and I remember watching a 60 Minutes report about them that terrified and exhilarated me. It wasn't until my junior year of college that the cocktail of effective drugs was declared effective — I remember reading an article by, I think, Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times declaring that AIDS could now become a manageable chronic illness, and I thought he was being hyperbolic and ridiculous, and yet I also hoped he was, even to a small extent, correct. I'd been to some ACT-UP events myself at that point (nearly got arrested at a protest against the Pope). Seeing the footage of the assembly room at the Community Center brought back memories I didn't even realize I had. The story is told well, though inevitably by focusing on the treatment group, various other aspects and offshoots of ACT-UP are left out. I'll be curious to compare it to another new documentary on ACT-UP, United in Anger, which I haven't yet been able to see.

The Innkeepers. Writer-director Ti West has been getting lots of press as a low-budget horror movie wunderkind, but so far, I'm a skeptic. The Innkeepers in particular seems to me to be horror for people who don't want things to be particularly horrifying, but prefer to have a tedious story and shallow characters moving through the familiar turns and motifs of a million other horror movies. If you thought the one thing horror really lacked was a mumblecore sensibility, then this is the movie for you. (At least it's not as self-satisfied as Cabin in the Woods, or quite so tedious as West's earlier Trigger Man.)

Killer Joe. Worth seeing for the performances, maybe, but pretty noxious overall. Apparently, some people find the film to be darkly humorous, but I just couldn't access the humor here. It's ultimately a movie about stupid people getting brutally punished for their stupidity, and it climaxes (literally) with a scene where the audience is encouraged to be thrilled by the beating and obscene degradation of Gina Gershon's character, Sharla. It's well made, but a perfect example of a film that does well that which is not worth doing at all.

The Life of Pi. Not as bad as it could have been. I found the first half hour a bit slow and the imagery in the central part of the film schlocky in an unappealing way, like a Hallmark card come to life. That said, I loved the final monologue by Irrfan Khan, and the twist at the end (preserved from the book) in some ways thematically justifies the Hallmarkyness of what has gone before. The film does a good job of raising the question of what we desire from stories and life, but that wasn't really enough to make it a particularly memorable or visceral experience.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. I'd been meaning to get around to this classic of New German Cinema, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, for years, but didn't until recently. It's a perfect complement to more expansive, wild portraits of terrorism and Germany in the 1970s such as Baader Meinhof Complex and Fassbinder's Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven and The Third Generation. (It actually has a lot in common with Mother Kusters, which was released just a few months earlier in 1975.) It also seems to me to be a particularly fine example of how a style of objective, unemotional realism can be used to foster real emotion in an audience and also to suggest depths of history and psychology that would feel forced, obvious, or too convenient if presented through more obvious exposition. We don't really know much for sure about Katharina, especially in the first half of the film. We learn along with everyone else what has happened, and the truth of it all, while apparently present, is nearly lost amid the accusations. We as the audience have to do some work, and there are some things we'll never know. While very much a film of its time and place, it also very much transcends those particularities, as Amy Taubin points out in her Criterion essay on the film. For America in the Age of the War on Terror, it is a cautionary tale, indeed.

The Master. A movie I very much need to see again before I can decide quite how I felt about it, because the only feeling I had after a first viewing was indifference. I left with admiration for some of the cinematography and performances, and a complete inability to emotionally connect with any of it. I didn't care about the characters in any way, couldn't have cared less if they all died in a nuclear holocaust or suddenly created peace on earth. If the movie had ended after half an hour, I would have felt about what I felt about it after 144 minutes, and if it had lasted for 444 minutes I probably would have started moaning and writhing in my seat, but been no more or less enlightened than I was. Some viewers and critics I generally respect feel passionately about this movie, and I hope with a second viewing I can begin to access some of what might cause someone to feel passion one way or the other about it.

Melancholia. In the first half hour, I thought I would hate this film. Stupid rich people at a stupid wedding being stupid. I was about to turn it off when something clicked. And then it really clicked. And I was entranced. Moved. Astounded. Shocked. Perplexed. Blown away. A perfect complement to another movie from 2011, The Tree of Life (a movie I continue to think about, wrestle with, and about which I am somewhat more ambiguous in my love for than Melancholia, although it is still love). Melancholia seems at times to be about nothing, and that may partly be some of the point, but to really get at all the somethings within its apparent nothingness, check out Steven Shaviro's extraordinary exploration of it.

Moonrise Kingdom. Easily my favorite movie of 2012. I love Wes Anderson's movies, but I've now watched Moonrise Kingdom three times and been entranced even beyond his other films. It's a marvelous synergy of casting, writing, design, and filming. I haven't come up with any good explanations or interpretations of its wonder; all I know is that it is delightful in every way.

Oslo, August 31st. I adored director/writer Joachim Trier's first feature, Reprise, which also starred Anders Danielsen Lie as a troubled young man. Oslo, August 31st is a less jaunty, more focused movie than Reprise, but each film's style fits the tale it has to tell. Lie's performance is so captivating, so perfectly modulated that it doesn't really matter if, in the end, we say, "So what?" The so what is that we've spent time with someone struggling against his addictions, struggling to connect to other people, struggling to feel something, struggling to find meaning in his life. The first hour or so of the film is absolutely perfect, because it makes us care about someone who is easy to write off, and it makes us want for him to succeed. When he slips into a party and takes his first drink in ten months, the effect is overwhelming. We know how this will end. He's told us. We keep hoping he will change, that a great light of illumination will suddenly move him away from self-destruction, but this story has no interest in fantasy, it has no interest in being feel-good entertainment. The ending is not satisfying. It shouldn't be. It's important that we end with the question, "So what?" in our heads, because that is the question Anders himself never escapes. His answer is unsatisfying. We are left to each find our own ways to answer it differently.

Sleep Dealer. A little science fiction movie about the U.S/Mexico border, drone attacks, guilt, and hope. There's nothing particularly innovative or subtle here, but the story is told well, and it's a story eminently worth telling. It was not a big-budget film, so some of the special effects are a bit clumsy when compared to $200-million blockbusters, but it doesn't matter, because it's not primarily a movie about its effects. The plot turns are mostly predictable, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. The familiarity of some of the plotting allows us to think about other things that few more surprisingly-plotted films do: questions of identity, militarism, class. Sleep Dealer is hardly perfect, but it's more interesting and engaging than at least half of what's slithering through the multiplexes right now.

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By Arthur P. Shimamura

Is it the sense of experiencing reality that makes movies so compelling? Technological advances in film, such as sound, color, widescreen, 3-D, and now high frame rate (HFR), have offered ever increasing semblances of realism on the screen. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we are introduced to the world of 48 frames per second (fps), which presents much sharper moving images than what we’ve seen in movies produced at the standard 24 fps. Yet many viewers, including myself, have come away with a less-than-satisfying experience as the sharp rendering of the characters portrayed is reminiscent of either old videotaped TV programs (soap operas, BBC productions) or recent CGI video games. What features of HFR create this new sensory experience and why does it appear so unsettlingly similar to the experience of watching a low budget TV program?

One factor that can be ruled out is the potential difference in flicker rate. Moving images are of course created by the rapid succession of still frames, and thus the flicker or on-and-off rate must be fast enough so that we do not perceive any change in illumination between frames. With early silent films, the flicker rate was less than 16 fps, and a noticeable flashing or flickering was apparent (hence the term “flicks” to refer to these early movies). Since the advent of sound, the standard has been 24 fps, though the flicker rate is increased with the use of a propeller-like shutter that spins rapidly in a movie projector so that a movie running at 24 fps actually presents each frame two or three times, thereby increasing the flicker rate to 48 or 72 fps. Thus, with respect to flicker rate we have always watched movies at HFR.

Two factors have motivated the current interest in HFR. The obvious one is that actions recorded at more rapid frame rates, such as a car chase shot at 48 fps vs 24 fps, would reduce by half the distance objects move across successive frames. With HFR we are presented shorter increments of movement, and our brains need not work as hard to extrapolate apparent motion across frames, which may result in a smoother sense of motion. I, however, do not think that it is this between-frame difference that is driving our sensory experience as we watch The Hobbit. A second, less known factor, is that the movie was shot at a faster shutter speed than movies shot at 24 fps. Filmmakers have a rule that states that the shutter speed at which each frame is shot should be half as long as the frame duration. Thus, most movies we’ve seen have been shot at 24 fps with a shutter speed of 1/48 sec for each frame. Those of you who have played with photography know that this shutter speed would produce rather blurry images when the camera is hand held. On a tripod, a movie filmed with this shutter speed would show fast moving objects (e.g., cars) with a noticeable blur. When movies filmed at 24 fps are shot with a faster shutter speed and less motion blur, actions appear jerky and unnatural.

The Hobbit was filmed with a shutter speed of 1/64 sec, which produced less motion blur and thus sharper images compared to movies shot at 24 fps. At the faster frame rate, the jerkiness associated with presenting sharp images at 24 fps is largely reduced, though I did notice that on some occasions large camera movements and fast movements of actors appeared stilted and unnatural. A psychological study by Kuroki and colleagues showed that in order to perceive naturalistic movements with sharp moving images (i.e., no motion blur) it is necessary to use frame rates of 250 fps or faster. Interestingly, the shutter speed used for The Hobbit closely matches that used for old videotaped TV programs, which were filmed at 30 fps with a shutter speed of 1/60 sec. I suspect that it is this close match in shutter speed (and thus similarity in image sharpness) that creates the impression of viewing a soap opera when we watch Bilbo Baggins and company.

In the future, after years of experiencing HFR movies, will we be able to appreciate the more realistic renderings garnered by this new technology? Will a younger generation without prior associations to videotaped TV programs be enamored by the sharper images? Time will tell, though I’m skeptical. HFR does offer a more realistic rendering than what we’ve previously encountered at the movies, and further advances may help to refine its use. Yet do we really want to have an entirely realistic portrayal? In most cases that would mean having the experience of sitting next to the director watching actors on a sound stage with artificial lighting, which is exactly the impression I had while watching Bilbo backlit by what was supposed to be moonlight. Instead, we may end up preferring a softer image which maintains the illusion of being engaged in an adventure with our favorite fictional characters and partaking in a wonderfully unexpected journey.

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He studies the psychological and biological underpinnings of memory and movies. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to study links between art, mind, and brain. He is co-editor of Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (Shimamura & Palmer, ed., OUP, 2012), editor of the forthcoming Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies (ed., OUP, March 2013), and author of the forthcoming book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (May 2013). Further musings can be found on his blog, http://psychocinematics.blogspot.com.

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The post HFR and The Hobbit: There and Back Again appeared first on OUPblog.

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Stuart absolutely loves-loves-loves the soundtrack to the London Les Misérables musical, so we trotted off through the snow to the cinema to watch the new film version. He loved it so much that he came back and put the soundtrack back on, then played it again this morning and was swooning so romantically around the house that I ditched the work plan and went on a winter wonderland walk to Greenwich with him to run around the film set. SO much of the film was shot here at the Royal Naval College, it almost made me laugh how many different angles they used to make the same courtyard look like different locations. Here we are, demonstrating about where the barricade stood:



We had way too much fun taking these Les Miz photos. But what did I think of the film? I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to see it, and writer-illustrator Liz Pichon tweeted back, See my review if you want to save yourself TWO HOURS of your life! Here it is:



Some similar comments:



They were SO right about the crying; I didn't just cry once at the end, I cried about SIX TIMES, and I could hear people all around me sniffling and sobbing. But then, right at the end, the audience let out an almighty cheer.




**Warning: contains film spoilers if you don't know the story**

The cheer was rather moving, because they'd sounded like noisy yobs when the film started, and as soon as it began, they settled right down. In fact, no one could have heard ANYTHING over the booming opening music. I actually had to cover my ears as it was rather painful. But it was such a different experience to watching the musical at the theatre. I'd seen it twice: once at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in Seattle when I was a teenager, and about ten years ago in London. The Seattle version was energetic, but the London cast looked like they'd done it a thousand times (which they had) and they flopped tiredly about the stage. But the worst thing was that, both times, I had affordable tickets and was sitting high up in the nosebleed section, so the whole thing looked like a flea circus way down there below. This time it was SUCH a relief to be able to see people's faces, subtleties of expression, and man, that huge, listing ship coming into the dock was an impressive start.


(Oh, hold on, it was much bigger than this ship. They didn't film the dock parts in Greenwich; I think those were shot at Chatham Dockyard.

Because of this, I found the film so much more of an involving, enjoyable experience than going to the theatre. And while I know it was long - 158 minutes - I liked not having the story broken up by an interval. (I realise this appreciation may change as I age and grow weak-bladdered.) At the theatre, it's so tedious having the lights come up, then deal with mundane little thoughts such as, Can I leave my scarf on the seat? Are they going to have plastic spoons or those horrible little wooden paddles that feel like they'll leave splinters on my tongue? And if the show's any good, I don't feel like making pointless chit-chat for twenty minutes, I want to KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.



The actors' voices weren't perfect. I missed Javert's booming bass; Russell Crowe can sing low, but he can't do that trick where the singer holds the note and then lets it grow richer with a bit of vibrato at the end. His notes just end. (And as my studio mate mentioned, he's always standing on a ledge when he delivers them, which I couldn't help but constantly notice after she pointed it out.) But I found being able to see him up close and relate to his character made up for him not being a top-notch singer. Even better, the singers were able to act and sing together, they weren't bound to miming something they'd had to record months earlier in the studio. That gave them freedom to give their singing lots of nuances, and boy, could that Jean Valjean be INTENSE. At the moment he's ripped up his parole papers and he's coming straight at you with Rasputin-like bloodshot eyes and a scraggly beard, singing for all he's worth, it's quite terrifying, in a good way. I'd never seen the guy who plays him - Hugh Jackman - which I really liked, because he came to me purely as Jean Valjean, no one else. (I recently saw Cloud Atlas and loved it, but having Tom Hanks play the lead was very distracting for awhile.) And Jackman could sing very well. He was all-around brilliant, actually.


One of the courtyard angles you'll have seen A LOT of in the film

It's funny, when I was a teenager and transfixed by seemingly endless unrequited love, I liked those forlorn songs by Fantine and Eponine. I'm not so wild about them now, and I find Cosette's love songs even more syrupy. But they have their place. My favourite song now is The Confrontation, just after Fantine dies and Javert thinks he's captured Valjean. I love the intensity of it, and the way both blokes are arguing hard for their cases but totally not listening to each other. Javert's part is unrelenting, the voice of law and justice, and Valjean provides a great counterpoint with his passionate protestations for mercy, so he can find Fantine's child and prevent her from dying in a gutter somewhere. I just listened to a recording of the film soundtrack, and to be honest, it doesn't sound that great, not half as good as the Original London Cast musical recording. But I thought it sounded good during the film because I was so caught up in the drama of the confrontation. So I guess the film tricked me a bit, but I don't mind that.


Stuart's confrontation with the stern face of the law

Even though I was slightly distracted by Anne Hathaway playing Fantine, she did a great job, and it was unusual to hear a song done in one take. In the musical, the Lovely Ladies prostitute scene is quite comedic, whereas in the film, it's so gritty that it actually does make you think about how few choices people had back then.

I loved Eddie Redmayne playing Marius; he had an appropriately Toby-Stephens-style public schoolboy look, and while he and Cosette (played by Amanda Seyfried) were both young and silly, it was rather charming on him. Some rather nasty reviewer called Seyfried 'a hankerchief with eyes', which was unfortunately rather true, but I guess that's her role; she's supposed to be a completely sheltered, naive girl. But I liked Redmayne's version of Empty Chairs and Empty Tables, I really did get the sense of someone who's suddenly forced to become an adult by having tragedy thrust on him. The bit I liked with Éponine (played by Samantha Barks) was when she knew she'd lost any chance with Marius and had deciced to go, suicidally, into battle. Watching her bind her chest to look like a boy was quite moving, saying goodbye to her femininity.



The Thénardiers were funny, I didn't mind recognising them as actors because they're the pantomime dames, the farcical elements. I got a giggle from watching Sacha Baron Cohen be very silly, and Helena Bonham-Carter was the obvious choice for the Sweeney Todd role. (They even had a tribute meat grinder! And was there a Fargo reference in there, too?) Oh, and I loved Aaron Tveit playing Enjolras, the lead student in the uprising. Partly because he looked an awful lot like my writer-illustrator friend Alex Milway, even his way of talking and cajoling people into getting excited about something. So I couldn't help but being agitated, knowing that he'd be soon shot, thinking Please don't die, Alex! Please don't die!



But my absolute favourite part of the film was getting to see Greenwich ('my' Greenwich) used as the set piece. The place where I take my coffee and draw. (In fact, I notice I've tagged Greenwich in 69 blog posts and I don't always remember to tag.) It's like seeing a friend in a big Hollywood film, you can't help but squee.



I can see why a lot of people wouldn't like the film, or be bored by it; it's terribly earnest, and full of Christian ideals, and very traditional as a musical. If you're looking for highbrow, postmodern sophistication, don't bother. But if you can sit back and just go with it, I'd say it's three hours well spent. The final scene is wonderfully moving, it's hard not to get caught up in watching Valjean leave behind his body and step out into the new light of day. Go ahead, have a good therapeutic sob.



Oh gosh, Stuart's playing the soundtrack AGAIN. And he's announced that he's going to go back to the cinema and see it a second time this week. There are very few films I see twice at the cinema, and I don't think I would have made two trips to this one my own... but I don't mind going along with him. It's nice when he gets excited about stuff.



Here's a video if you want to find out more about how the film was made:


Direct YouTube link

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A couple of Austenland clips have been released. The first one you can view at mtv.com. This scene Jerusha and I wrote just for the screenplay. While the ladies don't go shooting in the book, we wanted another activity that they do at Austenland, and hunting on a country estate seemed perfect. So we expanded the horseback riding scene into this. I love the visuals of it!

The second scene was in the book, though it might be a bit different than you imagined. What do you think?

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