REVIEW: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

From my Guardian review:—

'Working with Jane Campion’s cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh, Stiller films himself small in the frame, frequently viewed from above, more mouse than man, scurrying through the vast modernist spaces of the Time-Life building like the long lost cousin of Jacques Tati in Playtime, whose sleek, slate-grey production design this movie meticulously evokes — a haunting talisman. Playtime was Tati’s last film, a ruinously expensive bid for respectability that gave off the empty rattle of perfectionism — pratfalls echoing tinnily through lavish, empty sets. Stiller’s film is certainly a looker — there are dissolves that would make Orson Welles blush — but how good-looking does comedy need to be exactly?  As with his last film, Tropic Thunder, the production values sometimes appear to be the joke. There’s a battle on the streets of Manhattan involving man-hole covers and Stretch Armstrong — don't ask — whose special effects would be the envy of Michael Bay, but does the money make the sequence funnier? It doesn’t make it unfunnier, I suppose.  It’s just expensive. After Mitty loses one of O Connell’s negatives on the eve of a corporate takeover, and jets off to Iceland for a high seas adventure battling sharks and  volcanoes — so sudden is the pivot, in fact, that you were to take a toilet break at this point you would spend the rest of the film in a state of unending, head-scratching perplexity. There are two problems with this besides precipitousness. 1) With Mitty’s real life now as zoomily adventurous as his fantasy life, the laughs begin to dry up. In their place we get the usual rom-comish exhortations to break out of your shell, reach  out, connect and whatnot, all of which would be more convincing were it not that 2) what we get in the second hour is basically a series of solo adventures, with Mitty skateboarding through Greenland’s mountain ranges to the sound of Jose Gonzales, alone, like someone rocking out to their Walkman, or hiking up he Himalayas, and confiding in his diary, “I’m alone.” It’s very odd. This has to be one of the loneliest odes to togetherness ever made.' 

"The film was a bit of a risk for myself and more importantly for Redford, to put himself out there in the way that he did, because if it was ten degrees off in its execution, in any of its parts, the whole thing could almost have been a little boring, self important, and laughable. We both kind of knew that and almost said it to each other. Once I realized, whatever your thoughts of the film, at Cannes we got to learn that it worked. People watched it all the way through and had some sort of an emotional response. Its been a pretty fun ride since that reaction, obviously it was a little bit of a risk. Now I hope people go see it.”— J C Chandor, to this blogger, on his film All is Lost, which gets my first 'A' grade in many a year (Current top five:  All is Lost, Gravity, 12 Years A Slave, Captain Phillips, Before Midnight. Still to see: Inside Llewyn Davis, American Hustle, Wolf of Wall Street).

REVIEW: Her (dir. Spike Jonze)

From my Guardian review;—

'... It’s a pixel-era Pygmalion set in a not-too-distant Los Angeles, where everyone stalks the walkways murmuring into their earpieces, a vast solipsistic tide of humanity.   At night the city lights sparkle and blur, like distant diodes on a giant computer chip. Needless to say, the film is half in love with the loneliness it diagnoses. The whole thing looks like the most expensive ad for urban anomie ever made — Antonioni for the artisanal cheese set — and for the first hour the conceit is unveiled beautifully, via a brisk series of gags, most of them in the periphery of the main plot... The closer we draw to the central romance, the straighter grows the film’s face.  ”Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m gonna feel,” confides Theo to Samantha, finding in her precisely the sympathetic ear he failed to find in his wife. She is played by Rooney Mara thus confirming Mara’s position as the Ex most men would regret breaking up with, ideally through a Happier Times Montage involving cascades manes of hair and white sheets seen in chalky sunlight. She gets in the zingiest line in the film, delivered over an exchange of divorce papers  — “He couldn't deal with me, tried to put me on Prozac and now he’s in love with his lap-top” — but it doesn't quite land. It’s like a zinger from one of Woody Allen’s comedies that has somehow drifted into one of his alienation-and-anomie numbers. The script wants things both way  — an obvious outrage to Mara, Phoenix’s love for his computer   is seen as entirely normal by others— a penchant for blur that starts with the film’s wispy compositions and seems to spread from there. 

Phoenix is as sweet and soulful as we always suspected he might be. Ditching the trail of dysfunction and hiding his scarred lip behind a neat little moustache, spectacles and high-hitched pants, Theo is a portrait of the sad sack as saintly urban eunuch — a great listener and perfect empath whose less attractive attributes are discretely masked from view.  An early mention of Theo’s anger issues is never followed up on. A session of phone sex leaves him the bemused victim. Even his consummation with Samantha is discretely blacked out, to spare us the lonely, masturbatory truth. That’s quite a burden of simplicity to put on a figure who must  carry a two-hour film; you can detect the strain during some of the date scenes, where Phoenix is required to gurgle with happiness one too many times — he wears the fixed grin of a man on a visit to the dentist. Johansson has an easier time of it, having long taken over Demi Moore’s mantle as the owner of Hollywood’s Huskiest Tonsils. If anything she may pack too much punch for Theo, who remains a strangely chaste figure, too hung up on his ex-wife for sex, let alone a relationship. What he really seems to need is a therapist, and so it proves, as the script succumbs to the kind of well-intentioned maundering that ensnares the better kind of rom com: “Its in this endless space between the words that I’m trying to find myself right now,” says Samantha.   How did such a sharply conceived movie end on such a woozy note? It’s almost as if the haze above Los Angeles descends to envelop the rest of the film.'   

INTERVIEW: DONNA TARTT

From my interview with Donna Tartt in The Sunday Times:

'There’s a great description of a gun by someone who has never held one before in Donna Tartt’s new novel, The Goldfinch. They find it eerily defamiliarised, with “a smooth density that blackly distorted the space around it like a drop of motor oil in a glass of water.” I like it so much, I bring it up over   lunch with the author at Manhattan’s Union Square Café, a swanky downtown restaurant much frequent by the city’s publishers and literary types. Around us, waiters in crisp white shirts ferry plates to waiting diners, illuminated in tastefully-muted light.

“If someone put a gun on the table between us it would be very defamiliarised,” says Tartt, with undisguised glee at the thought. “Its one thing to see it on the screen but if someone really had one here” — her voice rises high with childish excitement — “ if our waiter pulled a gun on us it we would see it in an entirely different way. It’s about that tear in the fabric of reality.” For a second, the though occurs that maybe our waiter will pull a Beretta from the champagne box and, with two sharp retorts, leave small red round holes in our foreheads that leave us slumped on the table. But he doesn’t. Instead he lays our pasta dishes ceremoniously on the table, and departs without a word.

Such is lunch with Donna Tartt that one’s primary disappointment is not being shot. It has been 20 years since The Secret History, Tartt’s global  mega-bestseller about a group of classics students committing murder in the name of art in upstate Vermont. Now 49, Tartt still wears her hair in a shiny Louise Brooks bob, and buttons her shirts to the top crocheted button. Her skin is white and clear, an emerald ring picking out the green of her eyes, with which alight on you with a beady, birdlike fixity that would be unsettling were it not for the perky Mississippi twang with which she engages you in conversation. Mordant, amused, chirpy, the overall effect is part Edith Sitwell, part Wednesday Addams, or Mrs Danvers’ prettier, perkier sister.' 

NEW QUIZ: GUESS THE FILM!

 "He offers point-of-view images that are imbued with no actual point of view. The movie, with its near-absolute absence of inner life, presents a material fantasy that flatters the studious humanism of critics who honor the attention to so-called reality—which they define in terms of physical phenomena and everyday people—as an aesthetic endowed with a quasi-political virtue." — Richard Brody, The New Yorker. 

“Imitation is praise," said John Updike, "Description expresses love." So what film is being so lovingly evoked here? You get three guesses.  

Let's see. Point-of-view images. But no inner life. Hmm. Kind of 'I-am-a-camera' deadpan? It's not that Bret Easton Ellis film about pornos is it? A material fantasy. What does that mean? Not Girl in the Red Dress, not Pillow Talk — not that kind of material, dummy. He means "material" as in "material world" and "material girl." Doesn't that rather contradict "fantasy" ?  A fantasy about the material world.  Hmm. 

Ooh, Ooh, Mr Peabody, I got it Mr Peabody! It's One of those afterlife comedies with Ed Burns! Sorry, I mean George Burns. That's it. George Burns in Oh God! 

Or do I mean Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait?  

No?  Dagnabit. Okay two more guesses. Flatters the studious humanism of critics who honor the attention to so-called reality. Wow. We're picking a fight with "reality"? Not only that but "so-called reality"? That doesn't exactly narrow things down, fella. Can you help a brother out? studious humanism, studious humanism... Ghandi?  Richard Attenborough? Schindler's List? No? 

Fuck. This is hard. 

I'm going to get it though. One more guess. 

Let's go back to the "reality" thing. He does give us a definition: physical phenomena and everyday people. Oh for crying out loud. You cannot be serious. Really? Physical phenomena and everyday people. What does that mean when it's not frying kippers in the morning. I mean if you set aside the obvious: people and things. He can't mean that. I mean you can't hold that against a movie, can you? People and things? 'I liked your script enormously, thought your cinematography spectacular but ultimately I'm afraid to say it boiled down to just another flick about people and things.' Those old bores. I wouldn't know what to guess in that case. Lawrence of Arabia? The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer? Desperately Seeking Susan? 

Okay I give up. What is it. It's what? Gravity? Wow. Well, at least I wouldn't have got that. Not in a million years. And to think that everyone else thought "George Clooney's dialogue sucked" and left it at that.  The next time a friend says they want to see a quasi-political material fantasy which flatters the studious humanism of critics hot for pictures about people and things, though, I will know exactly where to turn. 

INTERVIEW: JENNIFER LAWRENCE

No second doubts, no hesitation — my favorite interviewee in 20 years of interviewing people (I enjoyed meeting Philip Roth, too, but Miss Lawrence is, on balance, a greater force for the common good): -

"At 22, Jennifer Lawrence is a testament to the globe-conquering power that flows from her mixture of a) fame, b) raw talent and c) not giving too much of a hoot about either a) or b).  She got $10 million to reprise the role of Katniss Everdeen in the second Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire, enough money that her lawyers got her to write out a will — it all goes to her family and favorite charities.  She hasn't had a chance to spend any of it. She used to have an apartment on Santa Monica but that got infested with paparazzi, so now it’s hotels and couch-surfing with friends. She spent last night managing to convince her  best friend, Justine, that the elevator of the Casa del Mar was haunted. That’s her biggest fear: ghosts. Not acting opposite Robert De Niro. Or tripping over her dress in front of 40 million people. The undead. “I’ll lay in bed and hear a noise and imagine the scariest possible scenario, and then my adrenaline starts going and then I tell myself that because my adrenaline is going, the spirit is feeding off my adrenaline! Or if there’s a spider. I try to kill it and I miss it. Great. Now it knows what I look like. It can’t just be ‘ Oh no the spider’s still on the loose.’ No, it’s ‘that spider knows what you look like and knows you tried to kill it.”  Psychopaths, on the other hand, not so much. “At least that makes sense. It’s here. I sleep with a bow and arrow under my bed. I have pink mace in my bag. I’m like: you just wait, you’re walking into a world of pain.”  

Actually today her handbag has no mace — she has a bodyguard these days — but it does contain a bottle of perfume, an iPhone, some multi-vitamins (unopened), a silicon falsie from a recent photo-shoot, and her diary, the first entry of which reads: “Keeping journals always makes me nervous people are going to find it so if you’re reading this just stop. Don't be a journal reader. Those people suck.”  The picture on her iPhone is of her nephew.  “Are you in for a world of cute?” she asks, “Isn't he precious. Do you want to see him count really fast?” and shows me a video of a curly-haired toddler counting from one to ten. 

 Ten seconds also happens to be the rough amount of time it takes for an average human being to fall in with Jennifer Lawrence like she’s you’re sister.  She’s very funny, with  something of the compulsive honesty and room-temperature affect of the great comedians — Louis C K only prettier. When I ask her what she most likes about her new life, she doesn't miss a beat. 

 “The money,” she says in her husky, Bacall-esque voice. 

 Pause. 

 “I’m joking. The work, the work…” 

 She puts so little store by the usual pieties that prop up the celebrity interview — the love of the work, the importance of craft, the dedication to one’s art, the method behind one’s madness — that at times the whole structure threatens to come crashing down with one push. She could be the most radical talent currently working in Hollywood — a pure natural, a slob genius in the tradition of great slob geniuses that included the young Liz Taylor and Elvis, with the same plush appeal on the audience’s emotions, the same ruby-like glint of trashiness in her soul. She never even intended to be an actress but got talent spotted on the streets of New York and figured an actress was a better thing to be than a model. She’s never had an acting lesson. She doesn’t rehearse or research her roles and only commits her lines to memory the night before. Before each take, she is normally to be found, eating potato chips, joking around with the crew. 

 “It’s normally chips. My bodyguard Gilbert, right before they call action, I’m like ‘If there aren’t Cheezits here by the time they call cut, just go home.’ And he’ll start running. It cracks me up how seriously he takes it. I’m just lazy. Whenever DPs are like “I’m so sorry to do this but ‘would you mind not saying that one line’, I’m like ‘Dude, I don't want to say any of it. Whatever is easiest. Believe me. It's not my performance that is motivating me. I want to get the on set catering.” And then, just when her director is starting to sweat a little, she knocks it out of the park. “She’s one of the least neurotic people I’ve ever met,” says David O Russell, who directed her to her Oscar in Silver Linings. “She came onto the set like some gee whiz kid, ‘what’s it like to have people ask for your autograph Mr De Niro?’ And then she jumped in and took over the whole scene from every actor in the room. De Niro turned to me and nodded, like ‘wow this kid is really bringing it.’ He loved it. She’s like Michael Jordan.  Her jaw doesn't get set. That's how they can go in, under pressure and hit a 100mph fastball because they’re so loose.” 

From Harper's

REVIEW: Salinger (dir. Salerno)

My review for The Guardian:—

“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies,” declared Holden Caulfield. Not so his creator who nursed youthful dreams of being an actor and liked nothing better, later in life, than to curl up in front of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, or his personal favorite Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, in which Ronald Colman crash-lands in the Himalayas and stumbles across the secret of eternal youth. The perfect Salinger combination: enlightenment plus milk shake.  

Deciphering the famously retiring author’s lifelong pursuit of the same, in both his work and his women, is the task set by a new documentary, produced by Harvey Weinstein, and directed by Shane Salerno, the screenwriter who gave us Michael Bay’s Armageddon, Oliver Stone’s Savages, and other such Sylphine tributes to innocence lost. You don't know what would offend Salinger more, the invasion of his privacy, or the fact that he was so intruded upon by the man who authored the line,  “The United States government just asked us to save the world — anyone wanna say no?”
Salinger (PG-13) packs something of the same irresistibility. Salinger fan will see it through it through a frown of disdain, emitting occasional whimpers of protest, but see it they will for its revelations, dropped at cunningly dispersed at intervals throughout an otherwise wearying 2-hour-and-15-minute running time. This is very much Salinger in the eyes of Hollywood, with lots of ambition, demons, plushly exaggerated love interest, a portentous score that never quite dispels the suspicion that Bruce Willis will soon arrive and start blasting asteroids, plus an array of talking heads plucked from Harvey’s rolodex: Martin Sheen, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, even — God bless him — Judd Apatow, prompting the unbidden thought that Holden Caulfiled could easily have slipped into the cast-list of Freaks And Geeks, no question.

Of Salinger himself we see very little, of course, save for some re-enactments from a dynamic and swarthy young actor. See Salinger pounds away at his typewriter! Hefting logs up a mountains side! Running down a wrought-iron staircase (the same wrought-iron staircase, I believe, prowled by Jack Nicholson in Mike Nichols’s Wol)  upon being rejected by Farrar-Strauss! And then just as you’re about to pelt the screen with peanuts for sheer phoniness, we get the real thing: the only known film footage of the actual Salinger, shot during the war, when he was at his most tall, dark and Clive Owenish, doffing his hat to Parisian women offering him flowers. He takes a single flower and tucks it into his hat brim — a piece of gallantry he nonetheless performs with ineffable and beguiling shyness. 

Salinger’s war years have already been comprehensively detailed in Kenneth Slawenski’s 2010 biography, but here come fleshed out with some riveting archival footage. He had the kind of war that would make even Spielberg blush: storming the beaches of Normandy with 60 pages of Catcher in the Rye tucked under his uniform, surviving the Battle of the Bulge and “meat-grinder” of Hürtgen forest — they don’t say so here, but Salinger’s unit had a survival rate of one in four — before stumbling across the ashen horror of Dachau. Afterwards, Salinger promptly hospitalized himself for what the filmmakers call a “nervous breakdown”, from which proceeds their Big Idea — that, “the second world war made Salinger,” in the words of one of their countless talking heads, “it’s the ghost in the machine of all the stories.” 

 It’s certainly true that he saw enough combat — an astonishing 299 hours — to deprive a man of his wits, or that the voice that Salinger crafted for Holden Caulfield  — marvelously intelligent, supple, quicksilver, only ever inches from a crack-up — can only have gained its fractured depth from his wartime experiences. It may even have something to do with the kamikaze arc of his work, which for all it’s pellucid brilliance and uncanny inner-ear, remains American literature’s most heartbreaking case of arrested development. He went straight from juveniles to eternal verities, without going via the thing that most of us would recognize as adulthood, both in his work and his life — stuck in a “a fantasy of innocence” in the words of Jean Miller, the 14-year-old he picked in Florida with the words “How’s Heathcliff?” when he saw what she was reading. “Troubled,” she replies. What follows is the film at its most winsomely naïve: seaside strolls, violin swells and lines like “he remained haunted by the love affair that never was.” Yeah right. Until he has sex with them, or they had babies, at which point the girls turn into women and Salinger runs for the hills.

The resulting portrait, for all Salinger’s peculiarity, seems horribly familiar. You don’t need the war to explain his relentless deforestation of friends and family. The technical term for this is “literary genius” — in Salinger’s case, a lightning strike of such force as to blacken anyone standing in the immediate vicinity — even, in the end, his readers, although Salinger’s famous retreat from the raucous din of publishing to pursue the zen-like purity of writing it’s own sake, turned out to be something of a feint. In the doc’s biggest coup, we find out that the fabled Salinger safe contains five unpublished works:  two novels, one about his counter-intelligence work, and one a “love story” based on his first marriage to a German woman, a book about Salinger’s deloved Vedanta Hinduism (yawn), a reworked Holden Caulfield story Last and Best of the Peter Pans, and some new stories about Seymour Glass. 

 Most revealingly of all, each came with little green or red dot indicating which manuscripts required further work and which were ready for publication, and on what date. Shock, horror. He needed us after all.

B-

 

First 'Under The Skin' reviews

'This first act of the picture finds Laura driving her truck around the urban areas of Scotland seducing men on the street. She coyly convinces them to come back to what they think is her apartment.  Instead, Laura hypnotizes them like a Black Widow and they strip down only to walk into a merciless fate in what can only be described as a liquid prison.... Glazer may be the visionary behind "Under the Skin"s cinematic highs, but it must be noted that this film lives and dies on Johansson's incredible turn. Johansson's dialogue is mostly limited to her pickup lines as she scours the city for new meat. Even though a majority of her scenes are silent the 28-year-old actress still finds a way to bring a distinct dramatic arc to her character.' — Hitfix 

I'm in. Glazer's Birth was one of the great films of the 2000s. 

'Gravity' first reviews

"At once the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space, Gravity is a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise. Not at all a science fiction film in the conventional sense, Alfonso Cuaron's first feature in seven years has no aliens, space ship battles or dystopian societies, just the intimate spectacle of a man and a woman trying to cope in the most hostile possible environment across a very tight 90 minutes.... It's as if Max Ophuls were let loose in outer space, so elegant is the visual continuity, making for a film that will have buffs and casual fans alike gaping and wondering, “How did they do that?” and returning for multiple viewings just to imbibe the sheer virtuosity of it all." — Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter 

"In Alfonso Cuaron’s astonishing Gravity, Sandra Bullock, playing a lost astronaut stranded 375 miles above Earth, seeks refuge in an abandoned spacecraft and curls into a floating fetal position, savoring a brief respite from her harrowing journey. Of the many sights to behold in this white-knuckle space odyssey, a work of great narrative simplicity and visual complexity, it’s this image that speaks most eloquently to Cuaron’s gifts as a filmmaker: He’s the rare virtuoso capable of steering us through vividly imagined worlds and into deep recesses of human feeling. Suspending viewers alongside Bullock for a taut, transporting 91 minutes (with George Clooney in a sly supporting turn), the director’s long-overdue follow-up to “Children of Men” is at once a nervy experiment in blockbuster minimalism and a film of robust movie-movie thrills, restoring a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide." — Justin Chang, Variety 

Going Dutch

Sad news. From Anthony Lane's appreciation:—

'... I recall being given a copy of “The Sea, the Sea,” the Iris Murdoch novel that won the Booker Prize in 1978. It came heartily recommended, so I wasted no time in laying it side by side with “The Switch,” which had been published in the same year. A random sample, from Dame Iris:

Oh, he was slippery, slippery, touchy, proud. I must hold him, I must be tactful, careful, gentle, firm, I must understand how. Everything, everything, I felt, now depended on Titus, he was the centre of the world, he was the KEY. I was filled with painful and joyful emotions and the absolute need to conceal them. I could so easily, here, alarm, offend, disgust.

Huh? It’s like being swallowed alive by a giant thesaurus. How are we supposed to work out, with any precision, what these fellows actually mean, through veils of verbal blubber such as that? Meanwhile, over in Detroit:

“You notice in the drive?” Ordell said to Louis. “He’s got an AMC Hornet, man, pure black, no shit on the outside at all, your plain unmarked car. But inside—tell him, Richard.”

Richard said, “Well, I got a rollbar. I got heavy-duty Gabriel Striders. I got a shotgun mount in front.”

“He’s got one of those flashers,” Ordell said. “Kojak reaches out, puts up on his roof?”

“Super Fireball with a magnetic bottom. Let’s see,” Richard said, “I got a Federal PA one-seventy electronic siren, you can work it wail, yelp, or hi-lo. Well, in the trunk I keep a Schermuly gas grenade gun, some other equipment. Night-chuk riot baton. An M-17 gas mask.” He thought a moment. “I got a Legster leg holster. You ever see one?”

Be honest, now: Which is better, Dame or Dutch? That is to say, leaving aside both snobbery and its inverse (for no fictional setting, genteel or rough, is intrinsically superior to any other), who is more alert to the life of an English sentence—its rises, failings, falls, and emergency stops? You know the answer. It certainly saved me from spending too much time on Booker Prize novels, whether winners or nominees, then as now. Decades on, I still laugh at the Kojak line, and it’s easy to imagine how a clumsier or less adventurous writer might have handled the same idea: “It’s the kind that Kojak has on TV. He reaches out and puts it up on the roof.” See? Dead on arrival. But technique is not all; more mysterious is what radiates out from such technical command, amid the speeches, and lends dramatic energy to the owners of the mouths. The Murdoch paragraph has a lot to say, but it leaves us utterly clueless as to what either Titus or the narrator is like; they earn no place in our mind’s eye. Whereas Ordell is right there in a couple of deft strokes, egging Richard on, and Richard himself, well, even the words “he thought a moment” put us instantly in the presence of a major blockhead—a wannabe cop, who, it transpires, collects Nazi memorabilia. Character is language in action.'

INTERVIEW: BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

'With his piercing blue-green eyes, set high like an otter’s, cheekbones like car bumpers, and unruly mop of chestnut hair, Cumberbatch has the kind of looks that seem to call out across alpine mountain-tops for the adjective “Byronic”. But his energy levels are more Tigger.  Offsetting the tousled, raffish, slightly boyish air is that rich Burtonesque baritone of his, last heard terrorizing the crew of the Starship enterprise in this summer’s blockbuster, Star Trek Into Darkness. Bill Condon calls it “a cello,” in which case, conversation with him can resemble a Haydn concerto, allegro con brio. The boy can talk. When I ask him a question about whether he asked Streep about the niceties of playing a real-life person, he delivers a ten-minute answer (10:32 seconds to be precise), brilliantly digressive, touching on a conversation they had about process, and music and notes, but to which actual answer, strictly speaking, is: no. “I’m sorry did I get off track?” he says blinking innocently, as if abashed by his own brilliance. He says his mother always knows he’s about to start another season of Sherlock because he starts talking double speed. “His voicemail messages are one of the great highlights of our friendship,” says Rebecca Hall who has known him since she was 13 saw him acting in a school stage production of The Taming of the shrew at harrow. “They contain whole conversations. They’re just joyous.”' — from my Vogue profile     

OSCAR PREDICTIONS: August 2013

BEST FILM: August: Osage County, 12 Years A Slave, The Butler, Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Saving Mr Banks, American Hustle, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

BEST DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuaron, John Wells, Steve McQueen, Joel Coen, David O. Russell

BEST ACTOR: Forest Whitaker, Leonardo Di Caprio, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Idris Elba, Robert Redford

BEST ACTRESS: Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Emma Thompson,  Julia Roberts

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: John Goodman, Tom Hanks, Michael Fassbender, Matthew McConnaughey

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Oprah Winfrey, Carey Mulligan, Lupita Nyong'o, Amy Adams, Juliette Lewis

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Tom Hanks

'Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece. The sound of typing is one reason to own a vintage manual typewriter — alas, there are only three reasons, and none of them are ease or speed. In addition to sound, there is the sheer physical pleasure of typing; it feels just as good as it sounds, the muscles in your hands control the volume and cadence of the aural assault so that the room echoes with the staccato beat of your synapses. You can choose the typewriter to match your sound signature. Remingtons from the 1930s go THICK THICK. Midcentury Royals sound like a voice repeating the word CHALK. CHALK. CHALK CHALK. Even the typewriters made for the dawning jet age (small enough to fit on the fold-down trays of the first 707s), like the Smith Corona Skyriter and the design masterpieces by Olivetti, go FITT FITT FITT like bullets from James Bond’s silenced Walther PPK. Composing on a Groma, exported to the West from a Communist country that no longer exists, is the sound of work, hard work. Close your eyes as you touch-type and you are a blacksmith shaping sentences hot out of the forge of your mind.' — Tom Hanks, New York Times 

Mad men and the single girl

My Guardian column this week finds me in a testy mood. 

'The testosterone comes off Bret Martin’s new book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution like wafts of Brut. A short, stocky account of the rise of such shows as The Sopranos, The Wire, The Breaking Bad, Mad Men, it comes with the muscular thesis   that cable TV has “become the significant American art form of the first decade of the 21st century, the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, and others had been to the 1970s or the novels of Updike, Roth. And Mailer had been to the 1960s.” You see? Now that’s what I call a thesis: beefy with name-drops, and a cultural frame of reference that could stun a herd of bison at 30 paces.

Martin corrals as hairy a group of alpha-males as have graced the pages of a book since Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders’ Raging Bulls. Here is David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, Eeyorish grump and attacker of desks, determined to “stick it to the bastards in their own house, right under their noses, and make them thank-you you for it,” in Martin’s words. Here is David Milch, veteran of NYPD Blue and creator of Deadwood, peeing out of a second-floor window onto flowers, showing off his drawer full of money, and — his party piece — whipping out his dick. Here is David Simon, future creator of The Wire, wearing ponytail and ripped jeans, thrusting his crotch into the face of colleagues at the Baltimore Sun. And here is his Wire star, Dominic West, working his way through his female fans. “A man could live off his leftovers” said Wendell Pierce. As  Andre Royo, who played Bubbles put it, “I look at Idris? Nothing but bitches outside his trailer. Dom West? Nothing but Bitches. Sonja? Dudes and bitches. Me? I’d have junkies out there. They fell in love with Bubbles.”

All this horse-play was, says Martin, par for the course for a creative revolution so fragrant with male pheromones you could float a jock-strap down the corridor on the thermals. “Not only were the most important shows of the era run by men, they were also largely about manhood,” he writes, “ in particular the contours of male power and the infinite varieties of male combat”, an unpersuasive bit of bluster the first time we come across it — really? infinite? — but by the time we read that Mad Men, too, is about the “infinite varieties” of male combat, you get a little impatient for specifics. There’s “bald stocky, flawed but charismatic” Tony Soprano; also   The Shield’s bald, stocky, flawed but charismatic Vic Mackey. We have The Wire’s alcoholic, self-destructive cops; or Rescue Me’s alcoholic, self-destructive firefighters; and so many “dark,” “flawed”, “morally compromised” anti-heroes that shades of grey begin to seem merely the new black — spray-on cynicism, a fake tattoo of cosmetic morbidity. All belong “to a species you might call Man Beset or Man Harried — badgered and bothered and thwarted by the modern world,” writes Marti, for whom  “men alternately setting loose and struggling to cage their wildest natures has always been the great American story.”

Doubtless, this sort of flattery slips down a treat at GQ, where Martin is correspondent, but it will come as news to anyone who thought Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, or Bette Davis’s Margo Channing, or Joni Mitchell’s Blue, or Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping told American stories.  You could argue that they’re not great American stories, of course, and Martin gives every impression of a man ready for the challenge. There is a consistent denigration of female achievement throughout Difficult Men, and only the skimpiest mentions of Homeland, Nurse Jackie, Sex and the City and Girls. As Emily Nussbaum noted in The New Yorker, Martin gives Sex and the City “credit for jump-starting HBO, but the condescension is palpable, and the grudging praise is reserved for only one aspect of the series—the rawness of its subject matter,” but his condescension swells even more ostentatiously for Girls, which garnered attention, he says, “because a) it was good — though not hefty enough to support the weight of all the Rorschach-like baggage commentators bring to it b) it was created by a woman”. The chauvinism aside, you’d think that someone who refers to The Rockford Files as  being “post-Watergate, post-Vietnam” in sensibility, and spritzes every room with the word “auteur” as if laying rose petals for the Queen of France, would think a little more carefully before skewering others for “Rorschach-like baggage.”

In it’s own way, Martin’s book reminded me of all that I don’t like about many cable shows. There’s certainly an off-putting sweat stain of machismo at HBO; poor Kelly McDonald cannot open her mouth on Boardwalk Empire without channelling the writer’s-room funk of men stymied for the sort of thing woman are rumored to say. The Emmies distract themselves with rewarding every performance on Mad Men except the one that really counts — Christrina’s Hendrick’s Joan Harris, an extraordinary alloy of bombshell armor-plating and plush Monroe-like vulnerability.  (“Of course Joan is the bitchiest character,” one of Matthew Weiner’s colleagues tells Martin. “ And Matt is a quintessential Queen bitch. He could write that character for days and days.”) It’s no accident that Hendricks is one of few Mad Men cast members, other than Hamm, to enjoy a successful transition to the big screen; or that cable has provided a platform for such actresses as Claire Danes, Glenn Close and Edie Falco to deliver career-defining performances, while David Chase’s determination to swing his Sopranos gravitas into a movie-directing career faltered with last year’s Not Fade Away. Even Chase still wanted into the movies.

Cable TV is going enjoying an uptick in quality at the moment, but I wouldn't exchange the entire 5 seasons of  The Sopranos for a single reel of Goodfellas, which it cribbed so mercilessly (and which is mentioned only once in Martin’s book). Of the rest, only The Wire really stands out, a masterpiece of flinty, impassioned journalistic fabulism in the vein of Dickens and Orwell, but — and this feels almost like it goes without saying — there is no visual stylist to be found amongst Martin’s show-runners to match Scorsese or Coppola or Malick, no visual storyteller to match Spielberg or James Cameron or Ang Lee. Hollywood can breathe easy.'