by Dean | Oct 27, 2015 | General
The “girls of slender means” in Muriel Spark‘s 1963 novel of the same name live in a London hostel during the virtual end of the Second World War. Economically poor, they are also morally unformed—wayward. But among them the Catholic Spark has fashioned a Christian character, Joanna, and a character who will become a Christian, Nicholas Farraday, a future martyr.
The two of them are self-abnegators who remove themselves, sooner or later, from the world of sex, Joanna doing so with a mild quirkiness. The young woman teaches elocution of poetry, and as Ruth Whittaker has pointed out, “poetry for Joanna . . . takes the place of sex.” For his part, Nicholas becomes acquainted with the hostel and moves from intermittently sleeping with the most beautiful of the girls of slender means—Selina—to Christian service in Haiti. Both persons end up dying: they die with sacred faith.
The girls at the hostel are superficial, except that Joanna is not a girl of slender spiritual means. Superficiality here essentially means self-seeking, seeking to satisfy the appetites for sex (Selina) and money (Jane). . . The Girls of Slender Means is another well-written, humorous success for Spark—and another short Spark novel, which is good since most of its sentences call for careful attention to determine the overtones. And hooray for the overtones.
Cover of The Girls of Slender Means
by Dean | Oct 25, 2015 | General, Movies
So far I’m indifferent to My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Jane the Virgin is crazy enough, for all its soapy conventionality. In the most recent episode, a Jane doppelganger called Bachelorette Jane shows up, pleading for our heroine to hurry up and choose which man to marry. She isn’t a shadowy doppelganger, though; she’s a lively reality-show doppelganger, and the gag is extended far enough to show Jane’s suitors, Michael and Rafael, being interviewed re the virgin miss’s response to them.
The gimmicks continue. At any rate it was a decent episode, better than the one two weeks ago. Poor Petra has to put up with men again, the caricatures Scott and Lachlan, but, well, she’s also culpable for throwing a major scare into Rafael. My crazy ex-wife!
by Dean | Oct 18, 2015 | General
The new movie, Sicario (2015), is about the labor of U.S. operatives in trying to wreck a horrifying Mexican drug cartel. I don’t entirely believe the film any more than I entirely disbelieve it: for example, is it not true that Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), an FBI agent, is a little slow in catching on to certain things the more mysterious federal operatives are doing?
The film propounds the idea that the only way the U.S. government can bring down those intractable drug lords is to use a vengeful Mexican sicario (hit man) who has personal reasons for killing Mr. Big. Nothing very sophisticated about this, yet I cannot deny that Sicario offers a certain sophisticated naturalism. It’s powerful. One wishes it were better, but it is not the “dismal thriller” I called Denis Villeneuve’s previous movie, Prisoners.
English: The Merida Initiative, a U.S. Counter-Narcotics Assistance to Mexico. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Oct 15, 2015 | General, Movies
Amateur (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1995) stars Isabelle Huppert, who wanted to work with Hartley after seeing his good film Trust, as a former nun who helps and is attracted to a man with amnesia and a very ugly criminal past which he naturally can’t remember. This ex-nun, a ridiculous character, now writes pornography (!) but at least this establishes her resemblance to another woman who, instead of writing the stuff, acts in it, in porno movies. She does this unhappily; she wants a changed life. It transpires that she is married to the man with amnesia (!), who has treated her abominably and is the cause of her becoming a porno star in the first place. Why this parallel between the actress and Huppert?
First let me comment that I do believe Hartley’s film, despite its childish and inept comedy, has something to say—namely, that outside any kind of religious milieu, redemption is very difficult, slippery, something to grope for. We’re just amateurs at it. Huppert believes she is a nymphomaniac who nevertheless sensed it was God’s will that she enter a convent. Now she thinks God’s will is that she fulfill some sort of mission apart from the convent, which mission just may be her saving the porn actress, Sofia by name, from her amnesic but formerly brutal husband. But this is amateur thinking. It is true that Sofia and her spouse do not get back together, but Huppert has nothing to do with this. Neither does she herself get together with the amnesiac even though she has fallen for him: the film, you see, ends in tragedy. God’s will is often known only imperfectly and often not at all, which is something else the movie says. Sofia, too, does some amateur thinking with respect to redemption, and she ends up getting a man tortured and herself shot! No will of God in this, is there?
Then again, perhaps we should ask whether cosmic retribution figures here. A number of characters besides Sofia get shot or fall out of high windows; could it be they all deserve it? Does Sofia get plugged (though not killed) because she is not only a porn star but also a blackmailer? True, the amnesiac, who also gets shot, is not now brutal and he tells the ex-nun, “I don’t know what I’m sorry for, but I am sorry. That’s got to mean something, right?” But it may mean nothing at all if the fellow’s memory returns and, seeing what he’s missing, he returns to a life of crime, which is surely what would happen. Hartley teases us with possibilities—doing so, I’m afraid, in a flimsy film. Trust and Surviving Desire are the successful Hartley pictures (of those I’ve seen).
by Dean | Oct 13, 2015 | General
That tour de force of commercialism, Jane the Virgin, is back for a second season. Gina Rodriguez is older (31) and looks it. Andrea Navedo, the woman who plays her mother, is only 38 (!) though she could pass for 44. Which doesn’t mean Navedo isn’t pretty; she certifiably is. Yael Grobglas (Petra) is the same age as Rodriguez but seems older, and is still lovely. Past their twenties, these women have had a lot of time to develop their acting chops, and develop them they did.
At the end of Season One, Jane’s newborn baby was kidnapped, but it’s okay. He’s back. And Jane is naturally shaken and nervous over motherhood, and given to frank talk (in last night’s show) about breastfeeding. It’s just too bad it was a rather uninteresting episode. It wasn’t scintillating or adventurous. But I believe the writers tried—-and that tour-de-force commercialism, the naked drive to entertain, won’t let us down. Hope not, anyway.
