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Word of the day : titivate : to smart or spruce up

Soul track of the day:

"Slippin' Into Darkness," by War, off their 1971 album All Day Music. War was one of the most underrated bands of its time. Started by Eric Burdon and record producer Jerry Goldstein (Burdon left after two albums with the group), the band was a fusion of rock, funk, jazz, soul, Latin, R&B, comprised of top-notch musicians culled from around southern California, notably Long Beach. Notable songs from the band include: "Why Can't We Be Friends?", "The Cisco Kid," "Spill the Wine" (with Burdon), "and "Low Rider." Their songs often held political messages but the preachiness never overwhelmed the laid-back jazziness of the music. 1972's The World is a Ghetto, featuring the blistering ten-minute title track, "The Cisco Kid" and "Where Was You At?" was listed as one of Rolling Stone's 500 greatest albums of all time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFSWW4O6QNM

I meant to post this a week or so after I had seen it.

It's Sir Anthony Hopkins as the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock in 20th Century Fox's now-filming movie about the making of Psycho. You might ask yourself, despite the cast (Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh, Jessica Biel as Vera Miles, Toni Collette, Helen Mirren...), why anyone would bother tinkering with the makings of a classic, and you'd have a point. Do we really care how great movies are made? Do we really want to know?

Regardless, my point was that Hopkins, one of the greatest actors in the history of cinema, is also filming a movie where he is playing Ernest Hemingway, and that should give us filmgoers pause. Sometimes I think we overpraise actors for playing real-life people, especially famous ones - presidents, soldiers, singers, politicians, whatever. But I don't know if Hopkins gets enough praise. How hard must it have been for Hopkins to continue prolonging his career as a character actor after Hannibal Lecter? Anyone who saw that film - even those who didn't see it - forever attached him to that one cinema's most epicurean villain, and I personally had a hard time not seeing him as Lecter in the first few movies of his that I saw after Silence of the Lambs; certainly Anthony Perkins was doomed after Psycho because he just played twitchy weirdos until his death. Nevertheless, Hopkins keeps going, keeps challenging himself, and sometimes it's hard for me to even remember his performance as Lecter, because he had so many other roles that would be definitive ones for most actors. And his skill, hid dexterity, at playing real-life figures continues to astound. Here's a list:

- Adolf Hitler (TV movie The Bunker, 1981)
- Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (TV movie, Victory at Entebbe, 1976)
- German Bruno Hauptmann, kidnapper of Lindbergh baby (TV movie, Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, 1976)
- British politician David Lloyd George (TV mini-series The Edwardians, 1973)
- Charles Dickens (TV movie The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens, 1970)
- Pablo Picasso (Surviving Picasso, 1996)
- Richard Nixon (Nixon, 1995)
- Doctor John Harvey Kellogg (The Road to Wellville, 1994)
- New Zealand motorcycle racer Burt Munro (The World's Fastest Indian, 2005)

And these are but some, and I'm not taking into account all the non-real life characters Hopkins has played so memorably. The Merchant-Ivory films, the studio actioners (The Edge is a personal fave), the plum, durable literary roles: Van Helsing, Quasimodo, Lieutenant Bligh, Claudius, Othello?

The man never stops astounding us.

Book Review

Ruth Rendell's A Sight For Sore Eyes (1998) weaves the kind of sinuous, snaky spell that only she can, with her prose as cold and well-wrought and gleaming as ever.

The novel is set in one of those cold, sinister crannies of London that Rendell evokes better than almost anyone - decrepit, once-luxurious houses full of mirrors, depressing furniture, cigar smells, unfriendly people hurrying to the tube station in the rain.

Teddy is a bizarre, affectless young interior designer, the unloved son of unfeeling parents. He meets Francine and is smitten with her. Francine is also the product of a troubled childhood, one in which she heard her mother being murdered by a strange man. Years later, her father has remarried Julia, an abhorrent Wicked Stepmother who feels it his her duty to protect Francine from the evils of the world, charting and tracking Francine's every move and friendship, even going so far as to lock the girl in her room. Harriet, the long-ago subject of a major modernist portrait painting, is a bored, lonely housewife living in the house that was featured in the painting that made her somewhat of a celebrity. She hires handymen to work on the house and sleep with when her ghastly husband is out of the town for business. She doesn't think much when she inquires Teddy for his services...

It's a chilly book, with almost every character unlikable, but Rendell has the gift for making the reader interested in them, compelled by them, not turned off - which is the case with every book I've ever read by her. A lesser writer would make you feel that he or she was manipulating the characters, hemming them into the plot machinations, but it's not so with Rendell: the characters are fully realized (glum, nasty, unobservant as they may be) and you begin to think that Rendell sees the world like this - a fatalistic, circuitous trip towards death, in whic everything eventually trudges around full-circle. It's a frightening, stifling vision, but the author's writing certainly doesn't feel closed-off; she can be funny and ruthless, ironic, with sly social commentary. (She's sort of the heir to Highsmith.) At least four characters meet untimely ends in the fast-moving plot and there is a dollop of a twist at the end - characteristic of the author.

(****)

Watching Peter Jackson's The Frighteners for the first time in fifteen years last night, I was reminded of how much I liked, the gruesome, effects-heavy horror comedy. I certainly enjoyed it more than any of Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.

Here are twenty other overlooked, underseen films by great working directors most recognized for other movies:

- After Hours, a bizarre, loopy comic nightmare; Martin Scorsese, 1985.
- The Sugarland Express, a rollicking film about a woman (Goldie Hawn) who tries to reunite her family; Steven Spielberg, 1974.
- Manhattan Murder Mystery, a comic Nick-and-Nora mystery; Woody Allen, 1993
- The Game, a mind-screw starring Michael Douglas; David Fincher, 1997.
- A Perfect World, a long face-off between robber Kevin Costner and cop Clint Eastwood; Eastwood, 1993.
- In Her Shoes, an enjoyable character study masking itself as a rom-com; Curtis Hanson, 2005.
- Fast Food Nation, an adaptation of Eric Schlosser's non-fiction must-read; Richard Linklater, 2006.
- The Ghost Writer, something of a perfectly-realized masterpiece; Roman Polanski, 2010.
- Mimic, an exciting giant bug movie; Guillermo del Toro, 1997.
- Drag Me to Hell, a splattery, nasty, gross delight; Sam Raimi, 2009.
- Tamara Drewe, a fun, surprisingly foul-mouthed comedy about a shook-up English countryside; Stephen Frears, 2010.
- The Straight Story, an unusual story about a man and a riding mower; David Lynch, 1999.
- Out of Sight, a funny, chemistry-heaven Elmore Leonard caper; Steven Soderbergh, 1998.
- Finding Forrester, unfairly seen as a Good Will Hunting rip-off; Gus Van Sant, 2000.
- The Rainmaker, John Grisham done very well; Francis Ford Coppola, 1997.
- The Insider, a tense, thrilling, well-cast story of Big Tobacco; Michael Mann, 1999.
- The Faculty, Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Dawson's Creek; Robert Rodriguez, 1998.
- Matchstick Men, a con men movie full of unexpected twists; Ridley Scott, 2003.
- Ed Wood, a loving ode to the ear of schlock movies; Tim Burton, 1994.
- Death Becomes Her, a wacky, creative comedy; Robert Zemeckis, 1992.

Finally, today would be the birthday of Carl Bloch (1834-1890), the Danish painter who is best remembered for his work The Sermon on the Mount.

Bloch was a genre painter who was inspired by the Old Masters during his years in Rome. He became one of Europe's finest portrait painters and was commissioned by Danish patrons (maecenas) to paint 23 images for the Chapel at Frederiksborg Castle illustrating the life of Christ. He was a master etcher too, and excellent at capturing light. But, of course, he is best known as one of the finest artists ever to portray Christ. He was well-respected during his lifetime.