The latter end of this week was marked by migraine, which has finally started to lift. (I saw a doctor late on Friday and was diagnosed with a flagrant sinus infection. I am now taking antibiotics.) Today has been marked by laundry, but also by dim sum, which was a real improvement.
1. It is just as well that I am not a professional, sent-to-festivals, covering-new-releases movie reviewer because sometimes I see a movie I enjoy very much and I just don't have much to say about it. This is the case with one of the movies I saw on Saturday, Anthony Mann's Desperate (1947). It's considered the first of Mann's important noirs; it moves fast, it's not fancy—not plotwise, though it has some impressively photographed sequences, like a beatdown by swinging lamplight and a shootout in a darkened stairwell—and it features a nice wayward everyman in the person of Steve Brodie and a nice baleful heavy in the person of Raymond Burr, not yet thirty and already intricately sadistic and saturnine. Jason Robards Sr. indolently steals scenes as a police lieutenant who doesn't seem to care whether Brodie's cash-strapped trucker was framed for a fur heist or not and Douglas Fowley pockets the remainder as a crooked but very definitely not cheap private eye. Audrey Long is not wasted exactly as Brodie's wife, but most of her plot function is to be endangered and pregnant, so you can imagine how enthusiastically I feel about that. There is one wonderful passage in the second act when the protagonists take refuge with Long's elderly aunt and uncle on their farm in Minnesota; we learn that she and they are Czech immigrants—they call her "Anna" and "Anička" instead of "Anne"—and on discovering that the niece they raised as their daughter was married in a rush-job civil ceremony after the war, they insist on re-wedding the couple with full benefit of church and old-country tradition. Blonde Anna looks radiant in her folk-bridal regalia, Brodie's Steve Randall like the odd American out but sincerely happy. That stuck with me: holding to the things that make your life feel anchored and real even while the rest of it is turning to Kafka around you. It's the one respite in an otherwise one-way plot. The finale is as sharp, dark, and coldly shot as any noir could hope for, with ticking clocks and close-ups and irony in spades. (Burr, Brodie, and the dynamic shadows of George E. Diskant's cinematography really give this RKO B-picture most of the substance it has.) I just don't seem to feel compelled to write about the film in the same way I write about movies where something either resonates with me or grates or is otherwise so absorbing that I have to work it out on paper. It's a perfectly good use of 73 minutes, but mostly it left me wanting to see more of Raymond Burr.
2. The other movie I saw on Saturday was Gavin O'Connor's Jane Got a Gun (2016), starring Natalie Portman and a well-selected handful of Western tropes. I was in the mood for another genre throwback following Small Town Crime (2017) and this one was enjoyable enough that I hope to reserve a post for it, hence saying almost nothing here, but even if I don't manage it,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust wrote it up well.
3. Nan Goldin takes on the Sacklers: "To get their ear we will target their philanthropy. They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world."
4. The story of a nuclear-powered manhole cover: "While the USSR was the first to launch a satellite, [Robert] Brownlee was probably the first to launch an object into space."
5. John Greening wrote a good ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg: "Dover."
(John Whitworth wrote something that's been jingling scarily through my head since I read it: "The Examiners." I think it's a funny poem, or why else rhyme "Plotinus" with "Aquinas," but even teasingly there's a small cold touch in the line You may think the world's your oyster but it's bone, bone, bone.)
Mythic Delirium is coming up on its twentieth anniversary! Go and check out the accompanying e-book sale. I have poems in the vast majority of this magazine's back issues.
1. It is just as well that I am not a professional, sent-to-festivals, covering-new-releases movie reviewer because sometimes I see a movie I enjoy very much and I just don't have much to say about it. This is the case with one of the movies I saw on Saturday, Anthony Mann's Desperate (1947). It's considered the first of Mann's important noirs; it moves fast, it's not fancy—not plotwise, though it has some impressively photographed sequences, like a beatdown by swinging lamplight and a shootout in a darkened stairwell—and it features a nice wayward everyman in the person of Steve Brodie and a nice baleful heavy in the person of Raymond Burr, not yet thirty and already intricately sadistic and saturnine. Jason Robards Sr. indolently steals scenes as a police lieutenant who doesn't seem to care whether Brodie's cash-strapped trucker was framed for a fur heist or not and Douglas Fowley pockets the remainder as a crooked but very definitely not cheap private eye. Audrey Long is not wasted exactly as Brodie's wife, but most of her plot function is to be endangered and pregnant, so you can imagine how enthusiastically I feel about that. There is one wonderful passage in the second act when the protagonists take refuge with Long's elderly aunt and uncle on their farm in Minnesota; we learn that she and they are Czech immigrants—they call her "Anna" and "Anička" instead of "Anne"—and on discovering that the niece they raised as their daughter was married in a rush-job civil ceremony after the war, they insist on re-wedding the couple with full benefit of church and old-country tradition. Blonde Anna looks radiant in her folk-bridal regalia, Brodie's Steve Randall like the odd American out but sincerely happy. That stuck with me: holding to the things that make your life feel anchored and real even while the rest of it is turning to Kafka around you. It's the one respite in an otherwise one-way plot. The finale is as sharp, dark, and coldly shot as any noir could hope for, with ticking clocks and close-ups and irony in spades. (Burr, Brodie, and the dynamic shadows of George E. Diskant's cinematography really give this RKO B-picture most of the substance it has.) I just don't seem to feel compelled to write about the film in the same way I write about movies where something either resonates with me or grates or is otherwise so absorbing that I have to work it out on paper. It's a perfectly good use of 73 minutes, but mostly it left me wanting to see more of Raymond Burr.
2. The other movie I saw on Saturday was Gavin O'Connor's Jane Got a Gun (2016), starring Natalie Portman and a well-selected handful of Western tropes. I was in the mood for another genre throwback following Small Town Crime (2017) and this one was enjoyable enough that I hope to reserve a post for it, hence saying almost nothing here, but even if I don't manage it,
handful_ofdust wrote it up well.3. Nan Goldin takes on the Sacklers: "To get their ear we will target their philanthropy. They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world."
4. The story of a nuclear-powered manhole cover: "While the USSR was the first to launch a satellite, [Robert] Brownlee was probably the first to launch an object into space."
5. John Greening wrote a good ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg: "Dover."
(John Whitworth wrote something that's been jingling scarily through my head since I read it: "The Examiners." I think it's a funny poem, or why else rhyme "Plotinus" with "Aquinas," but even teasingly there's a small cold touch in the line You may think the world's your oyster but it's bone, bone, bone.)
Mythic Delirium is coming up on its twentieth anniversary! Go and check out the accompanying e-book sale. I have poems in the vast majority of this magazine's back issues.
