Is Soderbergh God or What?

Just looked at one of the trailers for Steven Soderbergh's next next film, The Girlfriend Experience, which is a masterly example of a good trailer ( see also The Shining and Raging Bull and Pablo Ferro's trailer for Dr. Strangelove). I hope it is a good film...this is a perfect time for a look at the ways in which intimacy is manufactured and our attempts to hide behind masks are foiled by our need for intimacy...etc. etc.

I thought the first Che film was a near masterpiece and I caught it after seeing the second during the London Film Festival. It made me rethink my perception of the second Che film which was odd, to say the least, and not a little enervating in places.

Personally, I think Soderbergh is near God like in stretching our notions of what a mainstream/independent director in the United States is capable...I know for a fact that he is a very nice guy and a total filmmaker in the best sense of the word...long may he run...also looking forward to The Informant and another film he has in the pipeline this year, whose title escapes me.

Eyes WIde Shut (Gay Talese Remix)

Gay Talese, one of the godfathers of New Journalism, is profiled about his marriage to literary editor, Nan Talese in New York magazine. A fascinating read and much food for thought for all of us who have wandered through the thicket of modern romance.

Talese is one of those journalists who doesn't write for the moment, but for all time...a breed very hard to find in these blog obsessed times. Regardless of the byzantine meanderings of his personal life, I have the utmost respect for his work and his working methods as a writer and also for his bravery to put his self on the line.

While My Blog Gently Weeps

January 6th already...2008 seems like a blur...of various bits of hackwork mainly...occasional, but not entirely satisfying bits of creative writing...very Endgame sometimes: "I can't go on, I must go on"...but fun...enjoyed Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, seeing Leonard Cohen at the O2 older, but better and even more relevant in these shabby times...still full of cautious hope now that regime change has come about in the form of Barack Obama...feel less stupid about my lack of financial acumen post-credit crunch, but know that such pride is as fragile as the uber-egotism that got us into this mess in the first place...baby steps now as Bill Murray said in What About Bob?...refreshed by travel to Paris, Brussels, Cambridge, Bristol, Brighton and Marrakech as well as discovering something new in London...good to make new friends and catch up with old...alas, one always makes an enemy or two over the course of the year...thinking a lot about family and the past, present and future...you don't have to live in a cork room to think of the past...but if you want to have a future, you do have to dwell on something other than madeline cake. And on that middle brow note of allusion, I shall bid you all, whoever you are, a grand 2009 and beyond. Peace in our time.

During My Absence (with apologies to JD Salinger)

During my absence, I have been thinking (but not that much really) about JD Salinger and how he appears to be outliving all the giants of American Quality Lit...and Sam Peckinpah and how he makes Quentin Tarantino look like the world's most pathetic aging teenager and how sad it was that the last thing Sam directed was a Julian Lennon video (and how sad it is that "Valotte" was Julian's best song)...I have been thinking about the way the snow smells at 11 am, say, when one is staggering back from a party or a bar perhaps en route to another party or a bar (not that I have done this very often in recent years)...and I feel sad for today's yoof...well, I would if they weren't so damn cute and bright...I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about books that I thought I was going to write at one point...a Donald Cammell bio (a really dazzling one is still needed I think, but not me), a book on a certain precocious American thirtysomething auteur with a fondness for New Yorker type introspection (fuck off if you know who I am talking about, I may still write this book) and a book about someone so big that he was a force field...I have thought a lot about Rudy Wurlitzer, who I was privileged to interview and what a nice guy he is and I have also thought about....but not too much...a certain ex-Alberta premier whose name I think can be happily interchanged with cancer a la Dennis Potter on Rupert Murdoch ("Break it to me, doc, I can take it, I've got Ralph Klein" "Don't worry, kid, it is terminal, but you will live a long time, be blind drunk and live long enough to ruin the character of all those around you in a 30,000 mile radius")...

I think a lot about John Cale, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, David Bowie, how great The Talking Heads were...how ordinary, but extraordinary Naomi Watts and Isabelle Huppert are..I think about my friends...see my friends...there across the river...I think about what I am going to write now that I am going to try this blog thing again...for awhile at any rate...I love ellipses, don't you.

I remember Alfred Bester, probably the greatest science fiction writer of all time...certainly the most urbane...an editor of Holiday in the 60s, commissioning the likes of Michael Herr...I remember the faces of friends and lovers (not as many as one would like...what was the tag line for Heaven's Gate "What matters most are the things that fade" or some such thing)... I must go now...I have things to do, but not, alas, people to see. Which is better....the inner or the outer life...or neither. Over and out.

Why I Don't Blog Much...

I got tired...I got tired of the sound of my voice blogging. I had nothing to say. I got depressed about writing about yet another hero dying while the likes of Ralph Klein, George Bush Jr or Simon Cowell were lionised. I got tired of reading other blogs and wishing mine were as good as theirs or not prone to the same reactive tendencies.

I just got tired. Didn't Samuel Johnson say that a man who is tired of blogging is...well, tired of blogging. No, he was talking about London. And they didn't have blogs in his day. Enough said.

Sydney Pollack

Sydney Pollack died...depressing...Pollack was a class act...a Hollywood craftsman of intelligent entertainments and an extremely underrated character actor...he was also a producer, along with the late Anthony Minghella, of the kind of films old style Hollywood should be producing.

Castle Keep, They Shoot Horses Don't They, Three Days of The Condor, The Yakuza, Tootsie, Bobby Deerfield, parts of The Way They Were (Streisand is pretty hard to take in almost everything except maybe What's Up Doc), Out of Africa and then some...his last film, a documentary on Frank Gehry, was a labour of love as well as friendship.

Superb as an actor in Husbands and Wives, The Player and Eyes Wide Shut...the funniest thing in the otherwise moribund Death Becomes Her...terrifying in films like Michael Clayton and Changing Lanes...the go to guy for WASPish villains, which must have been pretty funny for him considering he was good Jewish kid from Indiana.

A class act...the kind of director mainstream Hollywood needs more of...alas, he won't be seen for awhile. Like Mike Nichols, a director of incredible gifts and generosity.

Isabelle Huppert

The Film Society of Lincoln Centre recently saluted Meryl Streep. Streep is a great actress and her work in The Deer Hunter, Manhattan, Silkwood, Sophie's Choice and even a slick entertainment like The River Wild is consistently good. I used to find her mannered especially in things like Out of Africa and The French Lieutenant's Woman, but I guess I have gotten over that reservation. Still she does bring one quality, in common with most American film stars, that takes getting used to. You have to get used to seeing her disappear into a character or forgetting it is Streep, America's A-Lister, on screen.

By contrast, Isabelle Huppert may not display the same fondness for accents, costume changes and make-up to aid the transformation, but she has raw naturalism down pat. In one of latest films, Private Property, Huppert plays a fiftysomething divorcee trying to win her independence from her ex-husband and two sons still living at home even though they appear to be in their early to mid twenties. Throughout the film she sustains a quality of fatigue and resignation limmed with the kind of restless sexuality people wrestle with as they get older. It is probably one of Huppert's less baroque characters in recent years, but she captures all the nuances of someone trapped in an impossible legal and financial situation with forensic detail. In The Piano Teacher and Ma Mere, she played extremist characters preprogammed for self-destruction, but it was the same ability to bring the viewer into these transgressive types through the simplest of gestures and expressions that makes those films respectively great and watchable.

Huppert is a constant champion of French cinema and theatre working with both veteran auteurs and unknown first timers. She has worked with English speaking directors such as Hal Hartley and David O Russell, but they don't really seem to know how to use her sublime talent. Huppert would be great playing a transplanted Francophone of some sort...perhaps a visiting academic or a journalist, but not simply used as an exotic character, but the main attraction.

In the meantime I think she is the greatest actress in European film right now and long may she disappear into the centre of the films she stars in.