Any Human Heart (2002)

I can't make the claim that this is necessarily one of the great books of modern times, and I won't, but I will say that, having just finished this, it will probably wind up on my own personal top ten books of all time. This was just one of those novels that seemed almost written for me and me alone (is that how everyone feels about their favorite books?); essentially, it hit a lot of my own personal preoccupations. The novel is in the form of a series of diaries, kept by the fictional Logan Mountstuart, a mildly successful writer who careens through the twentieth century. He spends time in Paris in the 1920s, works under Ian Fleming during the war years, runs an art gallery in New York City in the 1950s, and along the way, meets all sorts of famous (plus fictional) characters. It's ultimately a fairly tragic novel about a full life that could have been fuller. It also perfectly expresses my personal philosophy of life: that it boils down to the luck you get, the good luck, and the bad luck. Not a popular philosophy, I know, but us agnostics/atheists have to believe in something.

I read this because I had just caught the televised miniseries on Masterpiece Theater that aired last month. It was well-done, and captured a lot of the book, but somewhat paled compared to the written version. Pictured below, the lovely Matthew MacFayden and the equally lovely Hayley Atwell as Logan and Freya in the filmed version.

Another Year

I think Mike Leigh, as he ages, is exploring notions of happiness, and this film does it better than Happy Go Lucky. There is plenty of misery in this movie but the central characters are a happily married functional couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen. The film traces a year in their lives, each season marked by a dinner party that includes one or another, or several, of their unhappy friends. The acting is lived-in and remarkable, the structure almost classical, and the end-result is just about perfect.

Poetry Monday

The Explosion

by Philip Larkin

On the day of the explosion

Shadows pointed towards the pithead:

In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots

Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,

Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;

Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;

Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,

Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,

Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows

Stopped chewing for a second; sun,

Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they

Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,

We shall see them face to face –

Plain as lettering in the chapels

It was said, and for a second

Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed –

Gold as on a coin, or walking

Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

The Resident

For two thirds of its running time this is not a terrible thriller. It's actually pretty well-done with Hilary Swank decent as a heartsick doctor starting a new life in a Brooklyn apartment, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan very creepy as her over-interested landlord. The film is built along a slow accumulation of dread instead of a series of scary moments and it works, but then, in its third act, it becomes what all of these thrillers now become, a drag-out fight where we are expected to believe that plucky Swank can out-physical her psychotic landlord. Truly stupid and utterly cliched.

Film Frames Friday

Hint: That's Dame, to you.

The Hunger (1983)

A movie with a decent premise that is absolutely killed by an excess of over-the-top stylization, and one of the worst sound mixes I've ever heard. Catherine Deneuve plays an ancient Egyptian vampire (or something like a vampire--she doesn't have fangs), who employs a human partner who she keeps alive for roughly three hundred years before discarding them in her attic. David Bowie plays the partner on the outs and Susan Sarandon plays the new recruit. This should be a lot more fun than it is but it's actually a slog. Tony Scott, like he always does, overdirects this movie. A good candidate for a remake.

Poetry Monday

Richard Wilbur, one of our greatest living poets, turned 90 last week. Here is a beautiful sonnet from his first book, The Beautiful Changes, published in 1947:

Praise in Summer


Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour's in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?