Dear M----,
Nothing new, or anyway NOT MUCH. Saw 'A Single Man' and 'The Last Station', both seriously bad films though extremely well-acted in the first case, Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, and tritely in the second, except, of course, Helen Mirren, who does what she can to save it but doesn't manage to. 'A Single Man' is like some bizarre reversion to the 1940s and 50s code that any story involving homosexual anything has to end in the protagonist's death, which is completely not what the Isherwood novel is about; also, it was directed by some fashion designer and the characters all live in places that look like they were designed by Rem Koolhaus, when the book's set in the old crappy Santa Monica bohemian colony of 'Inside Daisy Clover' as it's being overrun by returning GIs, their wives and ghastly children. 'The Last Station' a long-winded bore about Tolstoy's groupies. An extremely hammy performance by Christopher Plummer and it also has that really annoying actor who played in "The Last King of Scotland," the one with the big cow eyes. He's getting fat like a cow, also. I've soured on Paul Giamatti, who plays Tolstoy's evil sycophant, being bald and unattractive just isn't enough. He was just ghastly in this patriotic mini-series about John Adams a couple years ago, and then as a villain in a piece of shit starring Clive Owen called "Shoot 'Em Up," now they just cast him as villains I guess. Based on some "novel" by Jay Parini, who should really know everything about being a sycophant and I suppose really "wrote what he knew" with all his heart and drippy sentiment, still it doesn't quite come off. The New York Review ran a long pointless diatribe against Céline, by some academic wastebasket, which George Steiner somewhat redressed this week in the TLS. The NYR has some continuing campaign going against the Warhol Foundation, supposedly based on its de-authentication of a painting, or a series of paintings; it's peculiar to me how this dreary dishrag of the NY intelligenCIA, which doesn't know arsefuck about Warhol and hates most contemporary art, unless it's some bore like Howard Hodgkins, has been keeping this particular "scandal" churning away in its letters pages. If they didn't run such a good book publishing outfit I would say this whole New York Review enterprise has become totally superannuated. This week they've got this interminable blowjob to Isaiah Berlin, perhaps the most superfluous intellectual of the 20th century...oh, PLUS letters about the Google Settlement, which nobody can make heads or tails of. Google earned a lot of brownie points a few weeks ago over the Chinese cyberattacks and then lost them again with its ongoing attempts to violate everybody's privacy, first with that face recognition technology they were planning to put in people's cellphones and now with some sort of info-sharing mechanism that slices all the way across the internet. "Do no evil" my arse...Google IS evil with a human oogle in it...
xxoo
G.
Nothing new, or anyway NOT MUCH. Saw 'A Single Man' and 'The Last Station', both seriously bad films though extremely well-acted in the first case, Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, and tritely in the second, except, of course, Helen Mirren, who does what she can to save it but doesn't manage to. 'A Single Man' is like some bizarre reversion to the 1940s and 50s code that any story involving homosexual anything has to end in the protagonist's death, which is completely not what the Isherwood novel is about; also, it was directed by some fashion designer and the characters all live in places that look like they were designed by Rem Koolhaus, when the book's set in the old crappy Santa Monica bohemian colony of 'Inside Daisy Clover' as it's being overrun by returning GIs, their wives and ghastly children. 'The Last Station' a long-winded bore about Tolstoy's groupies. An extremely hammy performance by Christopher Plummer and it also has that really annoying actor who played in "The Last King of Scotland," the one with the big cow eyes. He's getting fat like a cow, also. I've soured on Paul Giamatti, who plays Tolstoy's evil sycophant, being bald and unattractive just isn't enough. He was just ghastly in this patriotic mini-series about John Adams a couple years ago, and then as a villain in a piece of shit starring Clive Owen called "Shoot 'Em Up," now they just cast him as villains I guess. Based on some "novel" by Jay Parini, who should really know everything about being a sycophant and I suppose really "wrote what he knew" with all his heart and drippy sentiment, still it doesn't quite come off. The New York Review ran a long pointless diatribe against Céline, by some academic wastebasket, which George Steiner somewhat redressed this week in the TLS. The NYR has some continuing campaign going against the Warhol Foundation, supposedly based on its de-authentication of a painting, or a series of paintings; it's peculiar to me how this dreary dishrag of the NY intelligenCIA, which doesn't know arsefuck about Warhol and hates most contemporary art, unless it's some bore like Howard Hodgkins, has been keeping this particular "scandal" churning away in its letters pages. If they didn't run such a good book publishing outfit I would say this whole New York Review enterprise has become totally superannuated. This week they've got this interminable blowjob to Isaiah Berlin, perhaps the most superfluous intellectual of the 20th century...oh, PLUS letters about the Google Settlement, which nobody can make heads or tails of. Google earned a lot of brownie points a few weeks ago over the Chinese cyberattacks and then lost them again with its ongoing attempts to violate everybody's privacy, first with that face recognition technology they were planning to put in people's cellphones and now with some sort of info-sharing mechanism that slices all the way across the internet. "Do no evil" my arse...Google IS evil with a human oogle in it...
xxoo
G.
