This land has got some shallow graves with deep divides and subtle shades

[sovay]

I really want to live in the kind of economy where I could afford vacations.

I would also like to live in the kind of economy where Diane Duane doesn't need to crowdfund in order not to be evicted and homeless, but here we are, so follow the link. [edit] She has now successfully done so, and along with her husband sends profound thanks to everyone who purchased or donated, but I still do not find it reasonable that she had to.

Last night I watched Winter's Bone (2010), directed by Debra Granik. It looked essential to women in noir, its cast included John Hawkes, I had been meaning to see it for years. It is the kind of film I will have trouble talking about even when I get the time for it, because of how much I loved it: a spare murder ballad of a movie, neither condescending nor romantic, and further proof that neo-noir doesn't need to be defined by a retro style in order to qualify for the genre; it cracks its protagonist's world open, sets her hunting for truth like the title, the cold, intimate, irreducible common denominator beneath debatable flesh and blood. It's about what can and can't be said, by individuals, by families, what can and can't be known. It's not sociological, but it is political in the way that being alive in a society is political. It's beautifully shot. I'd much rather have seen it win Best Picture than The King's Speech, a film I liked very much. The fact that Granik was nominated for co-adapting the screenplay but not for directing the picture demonstrates the depth to which the Academy must have had its head up its ass that year. Looking at Jennifer Lawrence's filmography, I'm not sure anyone has ever again asked her to play as tough and ordinary and original a part as the protagonist of this film; I understand how The Hunger Games happened, but she could have gone from Ree Dolly to Antigone. You can think of Winter's Bone as Sophokles for twenty-first-century America, honestly, and not pretentiously at all. What can you know and live with? What's forgivable and how far should a family carry the weight of what's not? What will you risk your life to see done for the ones you love? The film suggests answers, but it's noir: asking the questions is more important. They change the shape of the world, even when holding it together is all you have ever set out to do.

Comments

[kore]

Yeah, the rule of thumb I've always heard is that in a screenplay you get one page to a MINUTE of screentime, which seems nuts. And I say that as someone who loves the Lean Great Expectations.

Adaptations are weird. Every Austen adaptation, no matter how warm or gorgeous, falls a little flat for me without that ironic narration through which we see everything -- there's a glaze of sentimentality. But how would you get it in a film? It can't all be voiceovers. If it were a play, the narrator could maybe be an onstage character commenting. The Great Gatsby doesn't work for a similar reason -- without that narrator, the events just fall flat. (Every adaptation I've seen has voiceovers, and oh, they don't work.) (Altho apparently there is a production where a guy in an office just reads Gatsby aloud to the audience, and slowly his coworkers begin enacting the events until it's like the book is drawing all of them in, and I am REALLY FUCKING SAD I will never see that live.) The voiceovers do work in, say, old PI movies, but that's because we see everything from the PI's viewpoint -- the cliched wry narration is part of the landscape.

OTOH, they made To Kill a Mockingbird into a stunning film, and that is certainly a first-person child's-eye view. ....stupid migraine, I'm just dully rambling at this point.

[sovay]

Every Austen adaptation, no matter how warm or gorgeous, falls a little flat for me without that ironic narration through which we see everything -- there's a glaze of sentimentality. But how would you get it in a film?

I thought the 1995 Persuasion did, partly because—while emotionally acute and acted everywhere from very well to very entertainingly—it was neither warm nor gorgeous in the sense I think you mean; the fashions are period-accurate, which means sometimes they look terrible, and the weather is equally un-made-over, which means that sometimes everyone looks rather cold and pinched. It keeps a sharp eye on class as well as gender and it knows how money and professions work. It says more out loud than the book does, but not in ways that I thought turned any of it to mush. I should rewatch this movie; I remember it very fondly and I recognize much more of the cast now.

(I love the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, but it's almost a 180° approach. That's what happens when you cast Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon.)

(Altho apparently there is a production where a guy in an office just reads Gatsby aloud to the audience, and slowly his coworkers begin enacting the events until it's like the book is drawing all of them in, and I am REALLY FUCKING SAD I will never see that live.)

I don't see why, unless it's a production performed by only one company. That sounds like a really good way to do it.

The voiceovers do work in, say, old PI movies, but that's because we see everything from the PI's viewpoint -- the cliched wry narration is part of the landscape.

It works in some of them! I've seen at least two noirs—Force of Evil (1948) and Side Street (1949)—where I wanted to extract the voiceover with a grapefruit spoon.

OTOH, they made To Kill a Mockingbird into a stunning film, and that is certainly a first-person child's-eye view. ....stupid migraine, I'm just dully rambling at this point.

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule. It's the thing about art where you can do almost anything if you do it well. Only most people don't, and then we get bad voiceovers.

[thomasyan]

a guy in an office just reads Gatsby aloud to the audience, and slowly his coworkers begin enacting the events until it's like the book is drawing all of them in

Oh, have you seen Millennium Actress? I liked the drawing-in done in there.

[sovay]

Oh, have you seen Millennium Actress? I liked the drawing-in done in there.

I have not. What is it?