blue | on being bleu

It begins simply enough – with any ordinary family leaving a busy city, which we assume in this case to be Paris - perhaps, driving through the tunnels of the peripherique that circle about Paris as they head out of town and to the country to where there home is. It’s just an ordinary day. Really, nothing extraordinary in this scene. Down to the roadside scene when they stop for their daughter who heads to the tall grass for a bathroom break where we guess she squats and pees behind the tall grass. >> more

welcome

Welcome to sotto voce film the best film reviews of sadi ranson-polizzotti on blogcritics, sotto voce and newspapers and magazines everywhere. check back often for film and book tie ins and be prepared for a generatioal and sociological analysis of all films covered here. For more work, visit our home page at www.sottovocce.blogspot.com and link to any of our other sotto voce world wide pages where you can find book reviews, writings and raves on love and lust, guidance, articles about culture and GenX, as well as poetry and just about anything that catches our fancy. We also cover television as it appeals...

please be sure to check out our most notable site that has been getting picked up a lot these days at www.tantmieux.squarespace.com and let us know what you think. We were just sampled by ZuDfunck - which makes us very happy - and chosen by SquareSpace as an outstanding site -- We hope you like it too. Visit soon, and visit often, as Tant Mieux is updated pretty much every day. Note that at Tant Mieux you will find integral to our site a whole Bob Dylan site unto itself and we do hope you'll visit.

thanks for visiting,

sadi ranson-polizzotti

ohwellwhatevernevermind; kurt cobain as seen through the lens of gus van sant

It’s interesting that no-one can ever know all the facts of ones life except for the person who lived that life, which is why biography is such hard work and why filmmakers like Gus van Sant can make films like Last Days with the caveat “a fictional story based loosely on the life of Kurt Cobain.”

The trouble is, even if you asked the persons themselves to write their autobiography, you would not get an accurate story, because they would edit and cut and paste and paint for you a pretty picture because they would show you what they wanted you to see, so the person writing the autobiography is not a reliable narrator. In this case, Kurt Cobain would not have been a reliable narrator. In fact, I’d go so far as to say he’d be among the worst narrators and would edit all over the place, portraying himself only as he wanted. >>> more>>http://www.tantmieux.squarespace.com/sadi-ranson-polizzotti-article/2006/10/28/ohwellwhatevernevermind-kurt-cobain-gus-van-sants-afterthought.html

more film reviews on BBC ~~

The whole thing is eerie and yet oddly familiar. The brutal slayings on November 15th, 1959 of the Clutter family in a Holcomb, Kansas was one of the first ‘home invasion’ stories that shook America to the core for the sheer brutality of crime. It unsettled the population not just in Holcomb, but everywhere. Of course, the book In Cold Blood written by Truman Capote is about these killings and if we are to trust he film Capote, he got the idea from the press clipping .....A review of the film Capote.

More film reviews can be found at the BBC Collective (see below)
Home page at BBC Collective can be found http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/U1636801,

including Shattered Glass (the Stephen Glass/New Republic story), The Forgotten and more...

Visit BBC Collective & h2g2,

sadi ranson-polizzotti, winter, 2005

dirty pretty things ~ what price?

If you are not an immigrant and want to know what the immigrant experience is or wereever curious, then see Dirty Pretty Things directed by Stephen Frears and starring Audrey Tautou, the dark-haired beauty and incredibly gifted girl who starred as "Amelie,” though don’t expect to see the same light –hearted, albeit melancholic girl, because Tautou is far too talented for that. She is changeable, the sort of actress directors dream of. a dream before camera;’ you can hear the words, “The lens loves her,” and indeed it does; those eyes! that mouth! Note too that this is Tautou’s first English-speaking film and she is exceptional in her language in this way and her Turkish Mulsim accent. click here for more. or cut and paste into your browser if the link does not work: http://www.tantmieux.squarespace.com/sadi-ranson-polizzotti-article/2005/7/17/dirty-pretty-things-audrey-tautou-breaks-out-a-review.html

sadi ranson-polizzotti, july, 2005

Bob's Fate | Bob Dylan & Masked & Anonymous

Starring Bob Dylan as “Jack Fate” and a whole host of other characters with so many cameos that I eventually lost count, though to note a few: Bruce Dern, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Val Kilmer (as an animal rights activist and farmer), Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, John Goodman, Christian Slater, Mickey Rourke, Penelope Cruz, and on and on…
Here is the set-up: Jack Fate, played by Bob Dylan, is in jail, though why exactly is unclear. Let’s just say it has something to do with the corrupt sort of guerilla government in the country in which the film takes place, supposedly America. But no ordinary America, this is America at some point in the future, and boy, it is a mess. It is run by corrupt officials, rebels, a sort of Sandinista government and to really top it off, the leader the entire mess, as we will find out in due course, is Jack Fate’s own less than beloved father, El Presidente, and though we never meet him directly, we see his image carried throughout the film, either directly in front of us as a frame ... select link for more


http://www.tantmieux.squarespace.com/sadi-ranson-polizzotti-article/2005/6/6/bobs-fate-bob-dylan-masked-anonymous-review-by-sadi-ranson-polizzotti.html

the edge of reason | has Bridget Jones lost the meaning?

I always had a fondness for the first Bridget Jones film, Diary of Bridget Jonesliked the book by Helen Fielding and thought the film adaptation excellent and as true to the book as anyone could want. Bridget, in many ways, was every woman. She was perfect in her imperfections, slightly overweight, slightly squinty eyed, slightly neurotic, a bit man obsessed, yet expecting true love and yet at the same time, not immune to a good shag ... (select link for more...)
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/27/182710.php

collateral | tom cruise & jamie fox as modern day lone wolves

Collateral features an insecure and kind-hearted but bumbling cabbie (Jamie Fox) who is a big dreamer but not a big doer and a hit man, Tom Cruise, starring as the silver-haired “Vincent.” Vincent: the cold-hearted hit-man who is out to do his job and who, by chance, hires Jamie Fox to be his driver for the night as he makes his seven necessary stops, knocking off witnesses, lawyers and anyone else who may be of any assistance in what we assume is a big case soon to follow. (select link for more...)
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/16/144011.php

Blogcritics.org: mystic river | endless shades of grey

That old expression about the wings of a butterfly changing the world. How one thing affects another thing and so it goes. I keep thinking of this when I see the film Mystic River, a film about three boys and their childhood growing up in a town that I once lived in, in exactly that part of town, and so I watch these characters and I see my old streets and the corner market and the local liquor store and I hear the accent that is done remarkably well by the actors in this film, save for a few guffaws that make it seem that anyone from Boston must sound slightly retarded, overall, here is something perhaps too accurate for comfort, and as one who still visits the old hood, Mystic River touches home every time.
Blogcritics.org: mystic river | endless shades of grey

Blogcritics.org: is it really the end of the affair? - by sadi ranson-polizzotti

Not long ago, I read a great article on Blogcritics that was about Julianne Moore, an actress I've long admired, and though her work lately has tended to the too commercial for my tastes (the bad comedy with Pierce Brosnan that I saw on the plane on the way home from France - not my thing). But I remember Moore in The End of the Affair, and I recall too that I had read the book by Graham Greene and was curious as to how a director would handle a book that I, anyway (note, check link, and please scroll down and read the comments on this one as they really add to this piece) - sadi ranson-polizzotti
Blogcritics.org: is it really the end of the affair?

sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - shadowlands | c.s lewis, a path through suffering

There can be little doubt that Sir Anthony Hopkins is one the great actors of our time - he has proven it again and again in roles both large and small, and most particularly in those quieter, more serious films like "The Remains of the Day" and "Shadowlands" both of which I saw again recently and was again, deeply moved. Here, I'd like to talk about Shadowlands because it is likely the lesser seen of the two and most especially by younger people.
sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - shadowlands | c.s lewis, a path through suffering

sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - amelie, amelie

Maybe I shouldn't like it, but there is something about Amelie that keeps me coming back. This girl so trapped in her own world, who really wants to do some good but is for all intents and purposes, rather hermetic, reminds me too much of myself.
sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - amelie, amelie

silence of the lambs | hear the bleat

What is it that is so creepy about The Silence of the Lambs? Of course, the story or rather, multiple stories within are pretty creepy. There is our friend Hannibal the Cannibal, the famous and brilliant psychiatrist who had a penchant for eating people he didn't quite like, but had a taste for nonetheless. But Hannibal doesn't frighten us that much. Or at least, he doesn't frighten me. I wouldn't want to be on his bad side, but I'm not a rude person and I think we'd likely agree on who should be eaten and who not. They may not taste good, but ridding the world of people who leave a bad taste in your mouth in any way is not such a bad mission. The world would be a better place with fewer rude people. No, the real creep and monster of the film is Buffalo Bill. The man on the fringe in every sense, for not only is he a serial killer, he's some kind of transsexual who is just a bit too carried away. Rejected by every respectable clinic that refuses to surgically make him a woman, Bill decides to make himself a woman out of other women, skinning the bits he needs to make a kind of woman suit that he can wear to real sub-culture parties on weird summer cruises off the cape or god knows where, all decked out in his dead-girl suit. Talk about disturbing. This part is in the book, though not mentioned directly in the film. For the real skinny on Buffalo Bill, one must read the book by Thomas Harris - a quick read at that and a good one. >>>more.

the ring | can you hear me now

Maybe it was that it was raining heavily and the sky was slate grey and dark. Or maybe I just don’t like Mondays. I don't know. But once again, I found that I was compelled to watch The Ring –a film I've seen countless times, yet for every time I have seen it, "I looked but I didn’t see." That there are Easter Eggs buried in nanosecond film clips – those ghost images you can spot if you really look hard. These little blips of footage have the same staccato effect as a strobe – the way things seem to move haltingly, so in a way, though you see less, you see more.I came across a review that said, pithily, "The Ring will never be more than a pretty good movie." ... more>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/05/172056.php

sylvia; the film

It took three separate viewings before I felt I could say anything about the film “Sylvia” starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes, and it was only after reading yet more biographies, both of Plath and Hughes that I felt I could comment with any authority.

The film is lukewarm at best, and though technically it gets many of the major details correct, what it lacks and what it does not show with a ny real authorative voice is the passion that existed between the two and the real despair. Paltrow is somewhat believable as Plath, though an odd choice for the role, given her build; Plath herself was a big-boned girl, not fat or overweight, but large boned, and long in the bone and rather Teutonic in some ways, a real pin-up (which she actually did for a few silly articles while at Smith for which she posed in some cheesecake shots in a bathing suit). Paltrow is too watery to thin, though her performance is what carries this film through. Perhaps because Paltrow had, so recently before shooting began, lost her own father that she was able to plumb the debths and really get to the core of Plaths serious depression and downward spirals. Her tears are convincing, and under the circumstances, one could believe, likely real. What’s more, Plath as we all know, had a real daddy thing, and that Paltrow had lost her own father would no doubt have helped her relate to such a trying role as Sylvia must have been.

As for the rest, Daniel Craig while he may look a bit like Hughes, but overall is too weak a character. His Yorkshire accent sounds authoritative enough, and perhaps in deed he is from there (this writer doesn’t know, but I was sold on that much anyway), but he lacks the physical presence that Hughes had; he is simply too small and not charismatic enough. He is dark and greasy and unkept and unwashed as Hughes himself often was, believing instead in the natural stink of his maleness to draw women to him (it seems to have worked, for Hughes could have and did have his pick, and he plucked them often, some would say too often.)

Craig is too lukewarm. Not strong or formidable. Remember, Ted was often named Ted Huge and for a reason. He was huge, in both affect and in size. Craig convinces the viewer of neither. Sylvia’s true “colossus” as she called him, was really a truly colossal man, much as her father, Otto Plath (of Bumblebees and their Ways) was also a colossal figure in Plath’s eyes; both were gods of some kind in her view.

The film moves quickly from first meeting at Cambridge where Plath was a Fullbright scholar, to the night of their consummation and confession after a night reading poetry aloud at a gathering in an all-male friend’s house of Hughes’s. That night, Plath tells Hughes of her first suicide attempt. How she crawled beneath the house after breaking into the lockbox with the sleeping pills and alsmot died. She is Lady Lazarus, she says to him, the risen dead.

As in life, the relationship between Hughes and Plath developed quickly, gathering intensity like a bonfire or fast moving storm. They speak of everything and see poems as “weapons”, like bombs they threaten to “go off at any time.” Paltrow/Plath cleverly says, “Imagine what would happen if a sonnet were to explode!” It is exactly the kind of clever banter that existed between the two in real life and has been documented by biographers time and time again, so much so ,that part of us cannot help but want a different story – the story behind the story that we know exists, because one’s life is not made up of large events. IN fact, it is usually the small stuff that counts the most and that hits us where we count.. That is what we remember of those who have passed, but not of those who we chose to mythologize as we have Plath and Hughes.

The film accurately portrays Plath subordinating herself somewhat to Ted – subordinating her work anyway – and putting her husband’s poetry ahead of her own, devoting her time to typing up manuscripts, sending them out for rejection rejection and final approval. This would be accurate for the time and one has to see this in context. It may seem mad to some women today, but back then, in the fifties and sixties, there were many women like Plath who felt that marriage necessitated the giving up of the old self to a rebirth of self that would emerge as the nurturing mother for both children and husband. It was her job to clean and cook and when possible, see to her husband’s career as well. Plath was not unusual in this and there is absolutely nothing strange about it – yet since her death, rabid groups of women have latched onto this fact as some evidence of Hughes’s awful power over Plath, and a power that he enforced at that. This is simply not true. Plath was a strong character herself and whatever she did with Ted , for the most part, she did so willingly and happily. Read Letters Home and yhou’ll see. Read her journal and you’ll see. The issue only became an issue when Hughes broke the deal that is tacit in such an arrangement and that is that he, in return, would be a good and loyal husband.

Hughes was never in many ways, cut out for marriage (though after Sylvia’s death, he married multiple times and note too, that Assia Weevill too took her life, taking with her their daughter, Shura.) But Hughes was always a flirt and somewhat of a scoundrel, but as the years went on and his star rose (with Sylvia’s help, for surely though Hughes had great talent, hhe did not have the talent of sending out the work, typing the manuscripts and getting them seen the way only Plath’s relentlessness would. She had the business savvy that he lacked and he used what she offered. His part of the deal, as noted, was to be respectful and faithful. In the film as in reality, Hughes fell fall short of this goal, and it began not long after they were married. Or perhaps continued would be a better word. On return from Benidorm, Spain, where the couple honeymooned, Hughes and Plath returned to teaching and she taught at Smith while Hughes read his poems for a few classes. During this time, we know of at least one woman of whom Plath was suspicious, though Ted could always be seen flirting with other women. AT least, it looks like flirting and whatever he may have called it, it was more than simply being “friendly.” He couldn’t help but fall to any woman who had some words of praise for him, and after he won prizes for his poetry, many women wanted to be with this colossus of a man, for his poetry was the stuff that made them swoon as he read it in his big and booming voice.

The film moves from the major events that we all know all too well; the first meeting at the St. Boltoph Party with the cheek-bite that draws blood, and Hah! I’ve got your earring blah blah scene closely followed by the two living together; the honeymoon in Benidorm; the Smith years; the return to England; the house at Court Green in Devon where the Hughes returned to after, fatefully, rented their London house to David and Assia Weevill. The real trouble began in earnest at that moment.

Things were not as they seemed when Assia and David showed up, as if by chance, to rent the couples apartment in London. Assia was already well aware of Sylvia’s work and even knew some of the same people and friends. She had read Sylvia’s first book, The Colossus, and had, by Jillian Becker’s account, even listened to their broadcasts on the BBC (which Sylvia and Ted had often done together for a Young Poets Series).

Disastrously, after renting out their London flat, Sylvia invites the Weevills to visit them in the country in Devon at Court Green and indeed, they do go. It would turn out to be the first nail in her own coffin. Hughes had already felt a visceral attraction to Assia’s darkness and foreign accent and style. She was so Other than Sylvia, the complete opposite and it is likely this that attracted Ted as much as anything.

Adding yet more to the story, Assia had set out that weekend to couple’s Devon house having told friends that she was off to “bag” Ted Hughes and went to Devon in her war paint. None of this though, is mentioned in the film. It is as if the couple meet, develop a mutual attraction (all true) but none of Assia’s intent is noted, and indeed, it is not noted in very many biographies of Plath as well. It is as if Plath had been somehow overreacting, picking up on something that didn’t exist, which isn’t true. The attraction did exist and it was strong. Nothing may have happened, but it soon would and Plath was no fool. She had seen her husband flirt and charm before, but even she knew this was different. Here was someone who spookily, wanted not only Plath’s husband, but in very many ways, was as much, if not more, obsessed with Sylvia as she was with Ted. For as much as Assia wanted to bag and bed Ted, she wanted to fuck Sylvia as well in some primal way.

To be fair, Plath had always had some fear of abandonment, since her father had passed away when she was nine and living in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Plath had already attempted suicide at least once with the sleeping pills and another time that she mentions briefly about walking out into the ocean, but it “spit her back out like a cork… I guess it didn’t want me.” A man like Hughes, already predisposed to some sort of infidelity was a poor choice. Yet it is likely that it was this very thing that attracted Plath to Hughes in the first place – his inability to be tamed, the way she had managed to tame and control. He was the only man, Aurelia, Plath’s mother played brilliantly by Blythe Danner (Paltrow’s real mother in life), was quoted as saying that “was not afraid of Sylvia.” and whom Sylvia was more afraid of.

One has seen this type of match time and time again, and if Hughes had perhaps understood his wife’s true fragility a little better, then perhaps things would have turned out differently and there would have been nothing to push her over the edge. That assumes that the affair is what pushed her over the edge. Certainly, it gave a helping hand, but it seems entirely possible that Plath may have done so anyway.

Given that the film, like most biographies, repeats the same tired events between the Plath-Hughes’s that we know all too well, this film is not a revelation or surprise. It is predictable, if reasonably well-acted, it still lacks any real insight or passion and ultimately, that is a let-down, and even our Gwyneth, who clearly put her all into the role and does succeed, cannot over a script that we are now deafened too for we’ve heard it just one too many times.

We have to ask ourselves, why is it that we are so comfortable with the myth of who Plath and Hughes were and not with the rest of the details that make up the reality. Why is that we must always punish Hughes and see Plath as the victim, or vice versa. Why is the truth not, where it usually can be found, somewhere in the middle.

At the end of the day, the real story can be found by reading Hughes’s book Birthday Letters and Plaths’s posthumously published Ariel side-by-side and page-for-page. They real like two communicating vessels, her final words, spoken before she stepped to the grave, and his response that comes too late to save her. It is a response worth hearing nonetheless and together, both tell the true tale of a couple that were always communicating, sending out signals like creates echolocating and pinging back and forth through the darkness.

on being blue: a review of the film Bleu

On Being Blue: A Review of Bleu



Who cannot feel such sorrow and empathize with or for the beautiful juliette binoche and her suffering in the film Bleu, part of the color trilogy (“Trois Coleurs”).. I can’t think of anyone who would lose both husband and child and not feel as she feels, which is so beyond depressed that she retreats deep within herself to a place that is icily cold and utterly untouchable. Here, she will sit out her deep freeze – assuming that there is an end in sight. If there is, it seems very, very far away in this film, and one wonders if anyone, anywhere, could ever recover from such an awful accident.

Julie’s grief is brutal, bashing and smashing everything around it and lacking completely in any sticky sentimentality that we would expect from a film that perhaps had been cut and made by a different director and featuring a different actress.

centered around the film is her late husbands’ work – a concert for the Unification of Europe, of which it is rumored that Julie (Binoche) writes instead of her husband. It would seem, he takes the credit and she does the work. Yet this is known, for when a reporter finds Julie in the hospital, she asks the question directly and is received with an icy stare that says Fuck the hell off (the French version, of course). “I didn’t remember you as so rude,” the reporter says, to which is replied, “perhaps you didn’t hear. I lost my husband and daughter.” Was she supposed to be all happy and light.

Julie emerges from the hospital still with her iciness intact, but with a different sort of blankness that she tries to fill in various ways; by donating the bulk of her estate to the gardener the cook, and so on, and eventually, giving over the grand country house in which they all lived to her husband’s pregnant lover (this is all very French, bien sur, but no surprises here.) In a way this is so much more civilized and respectable than some histrionic and hysterical woman on a jealous rage. After all, what emotion could Julie have left. What is jealousy over a mistress or anger compared to the incredible grief that she feels and is yet unable to express. Even halfway through the film, Julie has not cried or visibly mourned. Her mourning takes an entirely different form, and one that is not so different from a truer grief – a grief so profound that one is in a state of almost permanent shock, as if joy would never be felt again.

On return home from the hospital, Julie returns home to her country house (filled with blue things, the whole film is filled with blue things really, in particular, a blue bead mobile that is the only consistent thing that Julie seems to have in her possession; the rest of her previous life is quickly dispensed with) Julie smashes around, plays a piece of the concert on her piano, but in general, she seems mostly to just stop around a lot, crashing and bashing. This is her anger and it is righteous and loud. What’s more, one can understand as much as anyone else, unless you have had the awful misfortune (a weak word, and not strong enough I know) to experience the awfuls that have befallen her.

Without a thought, Julie picks up her husband’s concert notes from a woman who has been writing out the music and destroys them, throwing then into a rubbish truck. The unification is moot, she seems to be saying. If my life will be destroyed, then at least I can control it.

but I don’t want to give a plot summary here, because I’m trying to get at what it is that has drawn me to this film several times now. it’s not that I like it exactly, it’s more that I can relate or understand it. Perhaps anyone who has lost family in a dramatic and awful way can relate. There is a numbness and blankness that comes with grief that can only be experienced in the deepest depression. This is why some people who are grieving cause themselves physical harm: it is but a physical manifestation of an interior emotion that is safe in a lockbox. When Julie fucks her husband’s partner, summons him by telephone to her home, it is much in the same vein. It is a way of punishing herself, a sort of survivor’s guilt. It is not about sex – not in any normal or healthy way. It is more, it seems, about doing yourself some damage, about saying, I don’t care anymore. I’ll fuck until I feel something. She comes at it with him with that same iciness and coolness that in this context is almost hateful. By now, the house is stripped of furniture, leaving only the mattress, she tells him. This is why they must have sex. The mattress is all that is left.

After, she smiles, thanks him. says she is like any other woman. She spits, she coughs. she is human after all. What is interesting is what compels this. Is it that she didn’t die in the accident and this is some kind of proof to herself that she is human, fallible; she is telling us, She too could have died, but this time, did not. Julie can bleed, she wants to tell us, for immediately after, we find her running her knuckles along a rough brick wall until they bleed, as if she is humming the mantra, “I feel, I feel, I feel” expressing what she is unable to express, letting her banging and smashing and bleeding do the talking for her.

Even a necklace that is returned to her by a young boy who has witnessed the accident seems to leave her unmoved. She meets him, tells him a joke her husband was telling them the moment the car crashed, but leaves him holding the golden cross found at the scene that could be her daughter’s or her husband’s – her rejection of it is no less than a rejection of religion, it seems, of Christ. what use could God be to her now. He has failed her for the last time, she seems to be saying. If she rejects the cross, then she cannot be failed by a false god that would cause or just allow such horrors to befall anyone.

She is told by a neighbor who finds out that she lives alone that Julie is “not the type anyone would dump” which is both true and not true. First, she has been left but by death that nobody could have prevented, and more, in time she will find out about her husband’s affair; which is to say that wasn’t dumped, but she was rejected in some way. The affair, while in reality it likely says more about the husband, no doubt to Julie is yet another way in which she is less human not only to herself, but in the eyes of her husband when he was alive. She wasn’t even the type to fuck and have fun with; he had to get a mistress for that. Julie is too holy, too pure, in everyone else’s eyes and for the bulk of the film, she sets about proving everyone wrong; she bleeds, she feels, she too can kill (as she shows by killing some mice in her new and spare apartment). She is a murderess, she tell us, as if she is taking responsibility for killing her own husband.

Of course, this is just one interpretation and it may be dead wrong. But her murderess rage toward the mice and the small mouse newborns that are blind and helpless as her own little girl was at one time is telling. She will first close the door on them, pretend them do not exist. But cats eat mice, and Julie will find a cat or some other remedy for the constant reminder that the mice provide – of the life, of death, of nurturing and being a mother.

There’s a great deal to blue, and more than meets the eye. its not what anyone would call the usual French film if such a thing exists if one can stereotype so greatly. There are many who really hate this film, noting it is “too French” but I’m not sure what that even means. I’ve seen many French films and while I think they are no doubt different in style and tone from the work of say, America, I wouldn’t say they are better or worse. Bleu is different, no doubt, and parts of it, the close-ups on objects, the blackouts between shots make this an art-film in many ways and may grate on the nerves of some viewers. That said, it’s a film worth seeing, and there could be no better title for it than Blue, save perhaps Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s “Mean Reds” which are, she tells us, far worse than the blues.

the dreamchild: in shadow of nabokov & carroll's elusive nymphet

I have long loved the work of Nabokov. I remember reading Pale Fire and then Ada or Ardour when more>>>>>> http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/07/123047.php

The new film art | worlds within worlds

Over the past several years, I’ve started to notice this trend in films that features objects that could surely be called art. They are the journals of Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon, the journals and pictures drawn by witnesses in The Mothman Prophecy, the journals and notebooks of children and teen girls in The Ring and the film footage that will kill you that is inside the film in The Ring, and the sheer madness of the wall and window art created by John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Those just off the top of my head. In each case, the journals, writings, films and other images add another dimension to the film – one that takes us deeper and more inside, revealing to us the soul of the desperate as it journeys its private and dark night.. Each object goes to creating an aura on which the rest of the film will hang. Such journals and films are at the very core of each film – they are the key, the answer, the door waiting to be flung open to reveal that deeper understanding.

What is it about any film that one finds truly terrifying. We may be terrified as viewers, but imagine being a victim and not just a witness. How much more frightening is that? Directors and authors have found a device, a trick, that brings us deeper into any horror film; help us see behind the eyes of both killer and victim. What is it to be in the head of a person when they are about to die? Don’t we all wonder, at some point, what happens then? Using a journal or film as a device, directors and writers offer an opportunity, an advance viewing of how the mind churns dark and confusing thoughts, how we process our fear so different, yet in so many ways, remarkably alike.


Who can forget the fat and fabulous journals of Frances Dolarhyde, bound in thick leather and bearing oversized 9 x 11 velum pages onto which Frances has pasted what seems to be essentially an entire inner world, beginning in early childhood through the present. Inside you find pictures of grandmother D, an abusive woman who raised him and is always threatening to “cut it off” because he’s a “filthy little beast” bed-wetter. Mostly though, because he’s just a little boy and one gets the sense that she didn’t sign up for this. Where his parents are remains a mystery, all we know is that it is she who raised him and it wasn’t good.

Dolarhyde’s journal bears old photographs of his deceased and wicked grandmother, her face scribbled out, cut-up rearranged, her eyes replaced with repeating butterfly wing spots, her teeth emphasized for we know that it is biting that really gets Dolarhyde off. . There are photographs of Frances as a young boy, his face overdrawn, his cleft-palette mouth especially darkened by black pen, and news clippings that detail his own killings in which he is dubbedc “The Tooth Fairy” by the soon to be dead Freddie Lounds at Tattler magazine. More, clippings of our old friend Hannibal Lecter, fellow serial –killer and inspector Will Graham (Ed Norton), laid up in the hospital after Hannibal tried to kill him. And in between all of this is page upon page of text, in it’s rather interesting handwriting – legible and definite This journal is nothing less than a work of art. It is life, bound.

Think of the journal drawn by Mary Klein in Mothman Prophecy before she dies. Using only what she has with her in the hospital after her car accident, Mary (played by Debra Messing), uses the tools she had – her eyeliner and lipstick – to draw the winged figure that she sees and that causes such fear and caused the accident in the first place. The creature of which she says to her husband (Richard Gere), “You didn’t see it, did you.” She draw the figure over and over again. It is a moth-man, with heavily darkened wings or a dark cape, colored in with her dark kohl eyeliner, with eyes red as her blood-orange colored Shisheido, colored over and over again so heavily that it almost looks as though it were drawn with oil paint.

Like Dolarhyde’s fat and huge journal, and Mary Klein’s heavily drawn lipstick-red eyes and the images drawn by the young victims in The Ring, each of these characters reveals some turmoil of their inner world – the dark journey of the soul as it begins a slow descent into madness or a journey of extreme horror and fear.

John Klein (Richard Gere) is initially so blind to Mothman that he may never have found his wife’s hospital journal were it not for the distant figure of the attendant who informs him that before Mary died she had been “drawing angels” as if “she knew,” the attendant says.

Yes, Mary Klein did in fact know, but it had little to do with angels by any standard definition. Yes, Mothman is the harbinger of death, the symbolic manifestation of the soul’s winged flight and journey to the after world. More, it seems that he is often or maybe only seen by those who have some prescience, just like our young friends in The Ring. You have to know you are going to die, or at least, the process must be started, otherwise, you do not see the way John Klein is in the same car with Mary when it crashes, but doesn’t see the winged Mothman.

You are either sensitive or not sensitive, as Annie (Cate Blanchett) would say in The Gift (anyone else noticing these two word titles: the briefer the better. Concept based horror, and simplified.) One cannot draw what one have not seen, and in these films anyway, the very fact of seeing has rendered you in deep doo doo. If you see it – and the it will change from film to film - you will die.

Fear.com had the same premise, though it wasn’t done well enough to succeed and instead, fell flat on it’s face. It could have been a great film. After all, it shared the same conceit as these others noted here - all of which I think are excellent films. Yet Fear.com didn’t get into our heads the same way. Maybe if they had made the Web site weirder or shown us more of the victims inner world we would have believed. As it stands, the site wasn’t intricate enough, it wasn’t, and I hate to say it, artistic enough. Only a work and I’m convinced of this, great art, would be so terrifying. It has be done or drawn, compiled, painted, filmed, directed whatever – by someone who, like the victims in these films, is sensitive.

How very effective are the journals and the actual video (the film inside the film) in The Ring. We see the first victim’s journal with images of her teen idols and her dreams of one day being a being a bride, all pasted so neatly into her binder. Within time, as each day passes bringing her closer to her fate, they are beings transformed with dark veils scratched over their face and the sun blotted out with a heavy black pen that seems to scratch off the face. Or, as the seven days progress, we begin to see images of dying horses washed ashore by the tide, beneath each picture are the words “Why is this in my head?” written in chicken scratch beneath the images. Even Naomi Watt’s prescient son, who for the record is the only one who knows this Samora chick in the well is bad news, maintains a gallery of what he sees. Who among us can forget the maddening sound of his pencil scratching broad and deep circles on the desk as he draws the same dark ring over and over and over and over again and with such a dark fury. It’s so intense, so deep, that you just might fall into the blackness of this dark, spinning well that he is so compelled to draw.

Perhaps we have developed a whole new category of art – that of horror movie films, or perhaps we are moving closer and backward again to films like Chien Andalou, the famous surrealist film that very much touches on the same themes as the clip in The Ring – themes of rot and decay, rebirth, nothing less than life – from it’s first and primal state of maggot or egg, all the way through rot and decay.

John Nash’s office as displayed in A Beautiful Mind (a flawed film in many ways, and one in which I think the real John Nash is somewhat degraded, and note that he did not work with the biographer on the book; this was unauthorized, but that’s a whole other piece). The offices though, go a long way to illustrating the inner-world of the schizophrenic,.the walls used like a bulletin board, completely covered from floor to ceiling with news clippings circled and patterns found in magazines. It’s easy to see how certain things jumped out at him.

When I worked at The Atlantic Monthly we had several people who would send us back our magazine, only they had, like Nash, circled certain words and headlines, phrases, and found what they believed to be code. I suppose you could review any magazine and newspaper and if you circle the right words, you could decipher a whole new meaning than what was intended. Like Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, you make it your job to reveal the secrets that you are so sure are hidden in the text. It’s not so crazy: certain books and journals did contain code, and newspapers, personals, even literary fiction has been used by various governments and groups to convey secret messages that are two way blind.

All of the devices noted here, the rooms, the journals, the film footage, remind me of the famous cabinets of Joseph Cornell or Rosamund Purcell, two artists capable of creating a whole atmosphere within a single piece of art. A richly layered and textured realm where we see what they want us to see. Check the credits for these films and you’ll most often find that design firms had been hired, along with special stylists, to create these devices. What a job, I think as one who even now creates cabinets and has worked with Purcell and others on such projects. Imagine the films without these devices; they would be dull and void and not quite as scary. They would lose the spectacular affect of what it is to be completely mad.

Perhaps we should all put up a bulletin board or buy a blank journal; paste whatever we want or write every day – in a way, we do this when we blog. Ask of yourself, how much of your inner-world do you reveal and what are you bringing forward to show us. The whole lot like Frances Dolarhyde or is your world one of butterflies and Easter bunnies.. If you’re mad enough, perhaps your work could be featured next. There’s a Samora in all of us – it just depends on what we do with it that helps determine how affecting it could be. Maybe we have found, after all, a new venue for our psyche. You never know.


sadi ranson-polizzotti

37.2 le matin | why is betty blue

Yes, you got it. Tonight it is 37.2 le matin, or Betty Blue, among the best French films and certainly with the most realistic sex scenes and a highly compelling story of a woman's descent into madness that is realistic, involving, and incredibly sad. One of the great love stories of all time if you ask me... review to follow soon. When I first saw Betty Blue, or as it was originally known, 37.2 le matin in French, I was so moved by Beatrice Dalle’s performance. It seemed to me that either she was one incredibly good actress to pull of such an incredibly diverse and complicated role, or that perhaps a part of her went into the performance. Whatever the case, I spent many months afterward thinking about the film and having to endure friends in college tell me how much I reminded them of Betty, which wasn’t an entirely good thing, but then, wasn’t an entirely bad thing.
I mean, let’s face it, she was incredibly beautiful, I reasoned, incredibly sexy and here’s my boyfriend saying I remind him of her, but at the same time, I knew that she was incredibly nuts. Maybe nuts isn’t a fair word, though throughout the film she is told “vous etes fou”. How else would one respond, after all, to the many things that Betty does that are just not done.more>>>> blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/21/122901.php">http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/21/122901.php

a beautiful mind | sparks of genius

The real John Nash, from the Nobel Museum Web site.
I keep watching the film A Beautiful Mind because I have this idea that to see it only once is to miss a great deal and would prevent any real understanding of The Great John Nash! It’s a phrase that is repeated often in the film – a film adapted from Nasar’s unauthorized biography, and it’s a phrase used by persons real and unreal and always mockingly.
The truth, the truth that would finally be acknowledged a great many years later in 1994, was that, in fact, John Nash is indeed great and a true genius. Winning the Noble Prize was simply the public acknowledgement of this and by then, no one was mocking John Nash anymore. It's hard to imagine though that anyone who took the time to know John Nash, could not see his brilliance, the beauty in the very way in which he thought. The film does convey this - that much one can say, but still, there is that underlying mockery and although this supposed to be, one gather's a "sympathetic" portrait, that's just it; it seems to look down on Nash, as though he were a child, incapable of taking care of himself and oh, gosh, thank god for Alicia, were it not for her, he'd never have achieved greatness. There's a real martyr thing going on here and at a price to John Nash.

I have to confess too, that part of my atttraction to the film is that all too often i've felt as i imagine Nash must have felt at times, because although the origin and cause are different, temporal lobe epilepsy can often make you "different" in ways that others cannot quite pinpoint. And although epilepsy is a neurological illness often caused by mesial lesions in the brain (such as I have), the effects are similar. More - when researching Nash for another article, I found a relation between Nash and my friend Ian, also a mathematician and also with roots in the South (suffice to say he not only resembles Nash, particularly in the ears, which i happen to like, but also in the way he thinks,) and so here I am, drawn in. More>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/19/165922.php

love & lust on film | bridge jones and scarface and lessons learned

Tony Montana has taken just so much shit his whole life. He’s been oppressed and repressed and mocked and called a spic and turned on by his own country (Cuba) that he’s just not going to take any shit anymore. He’ll shoot someone just for pissing him off, which is almost admirable, or at the very least understandable. I’m not advocating violence; all I’m saying is that we all have our limits and if someone treated me the way Tony Montana had been treated his whole life – if they spit on me, and degraded me, and mocked me and doubted any power I might have, I might want to prove them wrong...more..>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/05/27/124625.php

Mothman | Prophesize This

If you weren’t paying attention, you could easily have seen The Mothman Prophecies, and thought “interesting” and never thought about it again because you were expecting a more traditional “horror movie” or some such nonsense where a winged guy comes out of the woods all deranged and starts hacking up the locals. But that is not, anyway, what “Mothman” is about. It’s a film that on the surface anyway, doesn’t entirely bend to genre. Or you could have missed it entirely because a film about a moth, you thought, sounded really dull and boring. But it wasn’t about a moth per se either. So what is Mothman about? Ahhh, that’s where it gets interesting…more>>>http://grandmal.blogspot.com/2004/08/mothman-prophesize-this.html or >>>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/22/145141.php