Julie & Julia (2009)

      Julie & Julia (2009) [D:Nora Ephron. Amy Adams, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci]
     A mostly pleasant account of how Julie Powell cooks and blogs her way through Julia Child’s book over one year, alternating with Child’s career as cook and author.
     In 2002, Julie Powell decided to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blog about it over 365 days. Her story is alternates with Julia Child’s, beginning with a posting to Paris with her foreign service husband Paul, attending a Cordon Blue cooking school, and so on. Powell later wrote a book about her year of cooking, Child wrote an autobiography, these form the basis for the screenplay.
     The food was gorgeous, I wanted to eat it. The story unfolds slowly, the cross-cutting between Powell’s and Child’s lives works. We need to know something about the history of the 1950s to fully understand Child’s story; the movie makes me want to read her book. Powell’s story has an oddly 60's feel to it, even though it’s set in early 2000s New York.
     Adams as Julie Powell is appealing, even though her marriage to Eric (Chris Messina) is a little too good to be true. Tucci as Paul Child is cool, calm, and collected, and very supportive of Julia, not surprising considering the fabulous food she cooks for him. Meryl Streep as Julia Child is irritating. She’s not acting, she’s impersonating, and the result is a caricature. At one point, Julie and Eric watch a Saturday Night Live parody of Julia’s cooking show, and there’s really not much difference between that Julia and Streep’s version.
     There’s no question that Julia was one of the people who moved food from being a more or less inoffensive fuel to a central pleasure of life. She was a larger than life figure, but the nuances of her character and her relationships with friends and family are barely hinted at here. We need a well-done biopic of this amazing woman. I liked Powell’s decision to straighten herself out by assigning herself a year-long task, but I don’t feel any desire to know more about her. I would like to enjoy some of Julia’s dishes. **½

Murder on the Orient Express (2001, TV)

     Murder on the Orient Express (2001, TV) A modernised version, with cell-phones even, and the current touristy Venice-Simplon Orient Express, which in fact no longer runs to Istanbul. The Poirot here is laid back and almost sleepy, he lacks that rage to know that is Poirot’s essence, and even more he lacks the ruthless conviction that murderers must be brought to justice. The result is a vaguely pleasant way to pass a couple of hours. The movie doesn’t demand much of the viewer. Poirot’s sleepiness is matched by the almost soporific pace of the narrative, the sloppy placing of the red herrings, the almost complete lack of urgency, the perfunctory cross-cutting between scenes that are supposed to reveal important clues or misdirections. A couple of the usual mistakes in depicting railways don’t help: one stock scene of a passing train shows an American locomotive. *

And Then There Were None (1945)

      And Then There Were None (1945) [D: Rene Clair. Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston] This movie is based on Christie’s stage-play, not the book, which explains that I didn’t recognise all the plot points. It’s also a typical Hollywood adaptation, well done photography, ominous music signalling that it’s time to watch the screen instead of munching popcorn, and so on. I can’t tell how much the script departs from Christie’s, the rather static blocking of the characters and surprisingly clunky narrative pace feels like a holdover from the stage. The story itself is typical Christie, with red herrings well placed. The unravelling of the group of guests as they realise that the murderer must be one of them doesn’t feel quite right. However, the mix of distrust and wary trust is difficult to make plausible, and this was not intended as an Oscar contender. An OK 80-odd minutes of entertainment. **

Johnny Hart. B.C.: Great Zot, I’m Beautiful (1971)

     Johnny Hart. B.C.: Great Zot, I’m Beautiful (1971) A dinosaur gazing at its reflection in a stream does the Narcissus thing. That’s one sign that Hart is a literate and witty comic strip author. Most of the strips collected here rely on visual, verbal, and conceptual puns, one sometimes gets the point only on a double take. Other strips rely on bizarre logic: “How do go about sell underarm deodorant without getting too offensive?” asks Wiley. “Try keeping your elbows close to you sides,” answers Peter.  And that sample will have to do. You may find a copy of a B.C. collection in a yard sale, if you do, snap it up. ***

Dishonored Lady (1947)

     Dishonored Lady (1947) [D: Robert Stevenson. Hedy Lamarr, Dennis O’Keefe, John Loder] A soaper, as these movies came to be known. Lamarr plays a playgirl fashion magazine art-editor whose empty life leads to a nervous breakdown. A psychiatrist suggests complete withdrawal from the glitzy life in order to rediscover her true womanhood (although it’s not put as bluntly as that). She does so, takes up painting again, meets a young post-doc (O’Keefe) doing research on blood, does the illustrations for him, and of course they fall in love.
     A lecherous old flame (Loder) picks her up when she returns to New York to help out her successor, and takes her to his place. But before any further compromising behavior can occur, the lecher’s associate arrives, there’s a dispute about missing jewelry, and Loder is murdered. But Lamarr has already left. Of course she is wrongfully arrested and tried, which puts the kibosh on her romance with O’Keefe, but he figures out the truth and gets the bad guy. Lamarr, still feeling guilty over her hoydenish past, flees, but O’Keefe catches up to her at the airport, clinch, and fade-out to happily ever after.
     The plot is not quite as ludicrous as this summary might imply, both the writing and the acting make the characters plausible enough, and with the exception of the murderer, they are nice enough. What 70-odd years have done is change the both the psychological theory and the mores that explain and govern our lives. It’s in the light of those explicit and implicit assumptions about human nature that we read this as a thoroughly dated movie. But we’d better not feel too superior about it. In every age popular fiction rests on the world-view of the day, and the 2010s will no doubt seem just as ludicrous to our descendants as the 1940s seem to us.
     A workmanlike piece of film making, worth a look, especially if you like Lamarr.  **

Simon Schama. History of Britain II: The Wars of the British 1603-1776 (2001)

     Simon Schama. History of Britain II: The Wars of the British 1603-1776 (2001) A shorter time-span, a fatter book. Schama has lots more sources to work with than for Volume I, and here and there yields to the temptation to pile on the details. This makes the arc of the plot harder to follow. Schama shows that the civil wars of the 1600s led fairly directly to the constitutional reforms that gave us a monarch subject to law, and a sovereign Parliament.
     The British Parliamentary system separates the roles and powers of Head of State and the Head of Government. It took three centuries for that system to reach its present form, Schama interrupts his story at the beginning of the American Revolution, when Americans still insisted that they were British, and so were entitled to all the rights and privileges of the British in the home-country. It was this demand for political and economic equality with Britain that was refused by Westminster (with a strong support from the King, who still had an active role in government). It’s interesting to speculate on the consequences of that equality being recognised. Would we now have a Queen residing in Baltimore, perhaps?
     As in Volume 1, Schama shows that whatever the social and economic pressures on the decision makers, they did have decisions to make, and those decisions did determine the next round of problems to solve. I think he could have contrasted the paths taken more strongly with the alternatives and analysed why they weren’t taken. We do, after all, make choices according to the values we take for granted. It’s those values, and even more the assumptions about human (and non-human) nature that guide the evaluation of choices, and it’s in that sense that “historical currents” determine history. But the results always include the unpredictable. Understanding where decisions went wrong comes slowly, sometimes two or three generations later, by which time a new set of unconscious assumptions guide the new decision makers.
     In short, we can’t win. But we can muddle through, as Schama’s tale shows. The Cromwellian revolution, the Stuart Restoration, the installation of  the houses of Orange and Hanover, were reactions to immediate problems seen in the light (or rather, shadows) cast by the past, made more complex and contingent by the personal desires and feuds of the actors. They were not actions taken as part of a long-range program of liberalisation, although that was, in the end, their main effect. The Whigs’ reading of British history as steady progress towards personal and economic freedom was right after all, albeit as often despite the actors' explicit wishes as because of them.
     A good read. ***

Gordon Snell & Aislin. Yes! Even More Canadians (2000)

     Gordon Snell & Aislin. Yes! Even More Canadians (2000) Snell writes the verse, Aislin does the portraits, the result is a mildly amusing collection.  I nibbled at it over a couple of days, recommended for anyone who wants a painless intro the list of the good, great and scoundrels of our history. But this is a “gift book”, the kind of confection put together for Christmas and birthdays. What do you give to the one  who, you know well enough to give gift, but not well enough? This is book is safe, it’s educational, patriotic, amusing, and doesn’t give offense to anyone. It’s nicely made, too. **