"i only married him"

I don't write about lit enough ... actually, seeing as this is my second post this month, I'd say I don't write enough period. Things are busy, what can I say. And my computer has been down. I came home one night and it sounded like Mothra was battling Godzilla in there. Needless to say, getting and keeping an appointment at a Genius Bar in New York is not an easy thing. Hopefully I will have some clarity after tomorrow.

I have, though, been reading with satisfying regularity. I think it's the daily Park Slope to Manhattan subway routine, which allows me to plow through novels and actually stay current with the New Yorker. I recently finished Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, her thinly veiled biography of soon-to-be-former First Lady Laura Bush.

I'm generally not a fan of Sittenfeld. The buzz around Prep still mystifies me; I thought the book was glorified chick lit. Yeah, it's readable, but there's no substance. American Wife has a similar, Lifetime-ready feel (she has sex with her dead boyfriend's brother, she has an abortion, the future president goes down on her). Here, at least, we get a mildly amusing heroine. It's fun to see Sittenfeld attempt to understand and rationalize Laura Bush, a woman who still appeals to the American people, even those who find her husband utterly toxic. Sittenfeld paints Bush (oh, excuse me, Alice Blackwell, as she's known here) as a bookish, sensible librarian who is never the same after she accidentally kills her high school beau in a car accident. She ends up with George W. (oh, excuse me, Charles), a boorish, dimwitted politico's son who downs booze, does lines, and runs companies into the ground before an inexplicable rise to the presidency.

Sittenfeld aptly handles Alice's inner turmoil, and the first two thirds of the book, which cover her childhood and the rocky early does of her marriage to Charles, are fairly intriguing. But she loses us when the Blackwells make it to the White House. It's a jarring temporal shift - we go from Charlie hitting his political stride on the state level straight to being a lame duck in the White House. We're spared the gory details of the campaign, and that's a shame. Sittenfeld is noticeably uncomfortable talking politics, what we get is the AOL home page version of the 2000 election and the war in Iraq. It's ham-fisted, sloppy, and anti-climactic (though I did like the moment when the Karl Rove stand-in manipulates Alice into getting a face lift and follow-up botox procedures. That was a hoot).

Vicky Christina Penelope

I had time to write another review!

Even a seasoned Woody Allen fan might mistake the auteur’s latest film, Vicky Christina Barcelona, for the work of another filmmaker. That is, until the characters open their mouths.
Allen’s latest sparkles with sumptuous, sure-footed visuals as few of his previous films have. While nothing can be compared to Manhattan’s arresting black and white cinematography, this is his most compelling work in color. He captures Barcelona in all its sun-soaked glory. But when his characters begin talking, and falling in and out of love, it’s unmistakably an Allen film.
The film follows two Americans, the engaged, sensible Vicky (The Prestige’s Rebecca Hall) and the impulsive, unmoored Christina (Match Point’s Scarlett Johansson), as they spend a summer vacationing in Barcelona. Their reasons for traveling are dubious at best (Vicky is getting her doctorate in Catalan studies, but inexplicably speaks not a word of Spanish), but that’s not the point. It becomes achingly clear that they are in Spain to fall in love, whether they like it or not.
Seduction comes in the form of the painter Juan Antonio (No Country for Old Men’s Javier Bardem). The girls don’t get through their first day in Spain before being whisked off to a rural village with Juan Antonio, where he attempts to seduce them both. As he pursues both women, and they pursue him to a sometimes surprising effect, Allen explores the various maddening effects of attraction.
Madness and love become inseparable when Maria Elena (Volver’s Penelope Cruz), Juan Antonio’s ex-wife, joins the film. Cruz blasts in and out of scenes with a primal voracity, brimming with unstable passion and jolting the sleepy film into something that demands attention. Every time she leaves a scene I wanted to follow.
Cruz turns out to be the film’s most apt performer. Johansson has never looked so uncomfortable on screen, and it’s impossible to know why Allen keeps on casting her in his films. She’s awkward and clumsy, and can’t seem to convey any of Christina’s restlessness or terminal dissatisfaction. Conveying emotion can be difficult, I suppose, when one’s lips and bust line are doing the heavy lifting.
Hall fairs better. Vicky is the type of role Diane Keaton would have played for Allen in the ’70s, a sophisticated, sometimes brash know-it-all who projects superiority to mask crippling insecurity. Hall has great comic timing and imbues the character with relatable false confidence and vulnerability.
Bardem’s role plays up his screen idol appeal, and completely wipes away of his creepy psycho-killer from No Country for Old Men.
While Allen has fun exploiting some of the romantic entanglements, the film ultimately becomes too convoluted to be worth the trouble. Allen gets this, too, as the many bizarre revelations and outlandish plot elements in the third act scream desperation.

prada

For some reason, Jossip ran this little piece about the Prada store in Marfa. It's a tad funny to read, as they act as if it's new to the desert landscape and that nobody's heard of it. This photo is of me milling around outside the store in the Summer of 2006.
That's pretty much my only Prada connection. Oh, and my glasses are Prada. Oh, and I did date someone who designed for Coach, but was interviewing to design at Prada. And then I dated someone else who worked at a small boutique but who had a long-term goal of becoming a salesperson at the Prada store (the Soho, not Marfa, location). Eeep.

Brideshead

I moved to Connecticut the summer before my freshman year of high school. I was appalled with, among other things, the lack of film criticism in the local newspaper. So, by the time I was a sophomore, I had the idea for a column. My father, who is responsible for my borderline obsession with movies, and I started to write a father-and-son movie review column that fall. It was great, and lasted through high school and into college. He still maintains it, though now (after a few relatively unsuccessful guest spots by my little brothers) it's strictly a paternal affair. I still get the opportunity to help out in a pinch, though. So this week I contributed my take on Brideshead Revisted, the utterly lackluster adaptation of the beloved Evelyn Waugh novel. I'm running it below in its entirety. Enjoy.

I can't be the only one a little surprised to see a new version of Brideshead Revisited hit screens. Most agree that Evelyn Waugh's melodramatic saga received the definitive transfer in 1981 when BBC mounted an epic miniseries adaptation that featured Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom, and launched the career of a budding Jeremy Irons.
That version meticulously captured Waugh's nuance and subtlety over 11 hours, so it's no surprise that the new film can't match its depth in under two. It's still the story of Charles Ryder (Match Point's Matthew Goode), a young man of earnest means who befriends the eccentric Sebastian Flyte (I'm Not There's Ben Whishaw) at a posh boarding school. Sebastian introduces Charles to the world of British nobility, which includes a killer spread (the titular Brideshead), a frigid mother (Howard's End's Emma Thompson), and a conveniently single sister (Cassandra's Dream's Hayley Atwell). Almost immediately after the Flytes accept Charles as one of their own, he realizes that their pristine image masks deep dysfunction. There's greed, jealously, class snobbery, religious fanaticism, and latent desire. You know, the storied terrain of the English class melodrama.
Unfortunately, for all the promise of suds and juicy subplots, director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) has too much of a stiff upper lip to have any fun. The plot pivots on passion, desire, and betrayal, but Jarrold's morose, self-serious approach douses all of Waugh's flames. As such, watching Brideshead Revisited is the cinematic equivalent of nibbling on a soggy cucumber sandwich.
The actors, too, are mostly unable to convey the difficult emotional terrain their characters must traverse. Though effective as Jonathan Rhys-Meyer's smarmy brother-in-law in Match Point, Goode loses his footing here. He is either unable or unwilling to let us see Charles’ inner turmoil. Instead, he glides through scenes as if lost on the way to a photo shoot.
Whishaw and Atwell, as the spoiled, tragic Flyte siblings, are similarly underwhelming. Whishaw camps up Sebastian’s flamboyance to the point of caricature, and it’s hard to understand how Atwell could be anyone’s hotly contested object of desire.
Thankfully Thompson is on hand to class up the proceedings. Though it’s a little disarming to accept her as a graying matriarch (it’s the kind of role Judi Dench and Maggie Smith have been playing for years), there are few actresses who can convey so much by doing so little. When Thompson is on screen, the film really moves.
The production values, so often the saving grace for a film like this, fall short as well. It made me fondly recall Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, a jaunty, raucous take on Waugh’s Vile Bodies, and even the otherwise leaden Atonement, two films that presented great costume and set eye candy.
Video Pick: Howards End
The filmmaking team of director James Ivory and producer Ismael Merchant set the gold standard of British period films with this adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel. Thompson stars here in her best role (which also won her an Oscar).

mr. ripley, i presume?

I have an undying love for New York City local news. This one's a doozy, way better than the easily-solved Linda Stein murder.
It seems a recently nabbed con artist (who had been masquerading as a Rockefeller in New York and Boston high society) may also have been responsible for the death of a pair of California newlyweds in th 1970s.
It's a sordid tale of multiple identities, kidnapping, murder, and social climbing. The story's on-the-run and assume-yet-another-alias nature reminds me, of course, of The Talented Mr. Ripley. That film found Matt Damon romping around Italy, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Murderous jealousy, latent desire, and upper-class aspirations make for a bitter cocktail, I suppose. If you haven't seen the movie, well, what's wrong with you? It's Damon's best work, and features sly supporting turns from Jude Law (pre-Sienna Miller and with hair), Gwyneth Paltrow (good here, but, generally, the less said the better), and Cate Blanchett (she can do anything).
Click here to read the Post's requisite tabloid take on the matter.