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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting,
Visit Our Art Gallery at Lake Ketchum.com And Please Take a Look At Our Blog at BlogStudio
Summer
2004,
Volume Three, Number Three, Third Edition
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Cyclops Movie Thumbnails "Girl With a Pearl Earring" movie: Eye
Candy?
A good flick, if you're hungry for eye candy. Otherwise the plot (is there one?) drags to the inevitable conclusion that Mm. Vermeer will throw out the kitchen maid, but not before the painter has immortalized her.. Meanwhile we have Johansson's bee-stung lips to view, along with her bound-up head, and it isn't until late in the picture we get to see that she is a flaming redhead. The eye-candy aspect is what redeems the flick, and Director Peter Webber's keen perception of diffused but directional light makes nearly every frame enjoyable to watch. Johannson's pale, flawless complexion helps a lot, too. Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King
Ever see a marching army of, say, a million men? Mass and swarm on a plain? Well, if you see the third book of The Ring, you will, and many times over, thanks to the magic of digital imagery manipulation and the miniaturization studio. Absolutely incredible what they can do today and so often experienced that, now, the magic soon seems routine and, ho-hum, bor-ing. Except in The Ring (apologies to Wagner) it never does. The spectacle is too grand. Soon the eye becomes . . . drunk. I have an idea that each of the three episodes of Lord of The Rings can be associated loosely with the five senses. If so, there are now three behind us, and they correspond (again loosely) to sight, sound, and feel. What comes next? Maybe odors? For starters, try to imagine in nasal fashion what a gollum might smell like. . . . (Break for a run for the smelling salts.)
Pretty, aren't they? Liv Tyler looks all the while as though filmed through gauze. I guess it is intended to give her an unearthly look, or to make her seem angelic. Well, she doesn't need this, at 26. Also, the expression the director has her wear, makes her seem a bit feeble minded. Not so Viggo Mortensen, who appears sweatily troubled and undetermined throughout as the heir apparent to the throne of Middle Earth, as if trying to make up his mind whether he is a nice guy or a potential ruler. As for the two boys, Elijah Wood as Mr. Frodo and Sean Austin as Sam, they exchange such deep and meaningful looks that one begins to wonder about the true nature of boyhood and male sexuality, and to believe that all of the old Kraft-Ebbing stuff was true, and not twisted. One kept waiting for them to kiss. Nope. It was clearly intended and the work of the writer/director, Peter Jackson. And unnecessary. It consumes a great deal of the movie's time--201/250 minutes. But I guess there had to be something in between the massive battle scenes, with their casts of (animation studio) thousands. I have dwelt inordinately long, perhaps, on some dreamy aspects of the great film. My apologies. It is excellent and a prime example of what movie-making is today. But when epic considerations are taken into account, and exceeded, what is there to look forward to? I know, I know. Smell-a-vision.
House of Sand and Fog
The same cannot be said of Sir Ben Kingsley. He simply becomes his complex character and portrays him with great emotional and artistic depth. Remember him in Gandhi? Masterful. And masterful again as the emigrated ex-colonel from royalist Iran, who wants to become a successful American entrepreneur, and is tragically thwarted in obtaining his version of the American dream, sacrificing his family in a confused clash of value systems in which America resembles (perhaps correctly) a corrupt and violent conflict of self-interests and gangsterism. He is totally convincing in the part.
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert I had thought that Ebert hadn’t liked the film or properly assessed it, so I went to his website, intending to prove him rarely wrong, only to find that he had rated it as high as his ratings come. And the Internet Film Base gave it a full accolade of stars—ten of them. Don’t miss it!
Gwyneth Pathrow Is Sylvia! This is a fine movie, and one that seems to fit into a new genre, one of a skilled contemporary actress playing the part of a famous female writer who died a suicide: Sylvia Plath. First we had luscious Nichole Kidman doing a chilling, staid version of Virginia Woolf in which she was totally unrecognizable, but brilliantly so.
Now we have Gwyneth Paltrow doing Sylvia Plath so effectively in this beautifully filmed biography. There are some remarkable physical similarities; there are even more real-life resemblances. Paltrow's father, a well-known film director, died early (as did Plath's beekeeper father), not long ago, and her mother, Actress Blythe Danner, corresponds nicely to Plath's own domineering mother, and plays her role with delicacy and steely restraint. Roger Ebert faintly praises Paltrow and gives the picture a modest three stars. He might have been not so stingy, even though his review is admirably detailed and thorough. (Rog knows his Plath.) He read most of her and Husband Ted Hughes poetry and biographical material necessary to an informed judgment. It must be that a movie today, to rate an extra star or half-star, must be exceedingly brilliant, or else the critic's award loses significance. The movie, as was Kidman's, is virtually flawless. Depressing as its foreshadowed outcome is, in both instances, it is a joy to watch a movie so carefully detailed and executed, shot by shot, move towards its conclusion. Not quite tragedy in the classical sense of the word, the two films are a joy and a pleasure to watch and, probably, to return to. OTHER MOVIE REVIEWS
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We have a new website, Life at
the Lake.com, and it contains our daily journal, or blog, along with a lot
of new pictures Fine Arts
Section
POETRY SECTION A new poem by one of our favorites, W. S. Merwin (see more on link below) TO THE MOSS How you came to know all that you are sure of how you discovered the darkness of green uncurling into the daylight out of its origins unsounded as your own how you learned to fashion shapes of water into softness itself that stayed in place and kept some secret of caves wherever you were but with such welcome seemed to rise that in time you became as some believe a model of the cheek and then the breast the wren felt she knew most of that before there were breasts of cheeks and she made out of living bits of you the globe of her nest as though that was what you had grown there for
TO DREAMS --Charles Simic I'm still living at
all the old addresses, After midnight to
check the faucet, These small shops open
only at night The hero always full
of extravagant hope, from The New Yorker, 6/14&21,2004 ALDER Are you weary, alder
tree, From your branches like fairy lungs.
All week, alder, who unfolded first one leaf then
another, a way to live The rain showers but when the sun
blinks, as it must, like a fountain in a
wood also from The New Yorker, [both used without permission]
Poets highlighted in past issues of Kingfisher Journal
The Three Ms: Merwin, Heather McHugh [pictured], and Paul Muldoon
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NEW STUFF Edna Brien
The Nobel Prize is a highly prestigious award, and several mediocre writers have received it, while a surprising number of great artists have not--Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov among them. Three of today's best writers have achieved a sustained and impressive body of work, and are highly deserving. They are John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Edna O'Brien. In this issue of Kingfisher Journal we look at Edna O'Brien's last four novels, three of them forming a trilogy that is united more in time and place than in any interweaving of character and situation. The Last Four House of Splendid Isolation (1994)
Perhaps the best of the group, this is the story of Josie O'Meara and Irish Freedom Fighter McGreavy, who takes up hiding in this invalided, aging woman's house and becomes her tormentor and ally, surrogate lover and friend. He goes unnamed: "'Call me Pat or John or Mick, or whatever you like,' he says overcalmly." (Page 80.) "'Pup,'" she responds, "but not loudly." He is on the run, followed by his reputation, some of which is mythical. But it is clear, unmythical, that the guards will kill him on sight. It is a taut book, and O'Brien's language by itself is rich and evocative, as the story speeds along towards its tragic conclusion. The writer is saying that life in a nation cruelly divided against itself is grim, unpleasant, and fully of daily deaths. The men are drunks, brutal, uncaring; the women are disadvantaged, helpless, usually victims, or if not, barely escaping such status. These are archetypes that reappear throughout her novels usually, especially the three she has linked and refers to as a trilogy. Down By The River (1997) Another grim story from the West coast of Ireland, this one involving a girl, Mary MacNamara and her brutal father. We needn't guess what happened to her, "down by the river." It is a country environment, the people poor and uneducated, and the Church rules, the politicians vie, the press exploits, and the people gossip venomously. It is just the kind of place an intelligent writer would like to escape from, and revisit only in memory, and this is what O'Brien has done. She lives now in London. Wild Decembers (1999) I do most things in life backwards, that is, in reverse order, so it is only natural that I began this trilogy, not knowing it was one, with the third book in the series. And I didn't ever quite know it. Which brings up an important point. All books in trilogies can be read separately and will stand alone. In this case, the trilogy is not named as such, only referred to afterwards as one. And the unities of time and place are mainly what holds it together, if only in the novelist's mind. The people are all of a time and a place--almost contemporary, yet ancient-seeming and archetypal of Ireland and Irish history. This unites them. The fact that people feud and vie comes as no surprise to us. The extent to which men will dedicate themselves to hatred and revenge, well, produces a sad but true view of the world, whether it be in Russia, Ireland, Bosnia, or Iraq. Religion surely plays a part and confirms, or reaffirms, such hatreds, or so experience tells us, and O'Brien does, too. A tractor coming to rural West Ireland incites a brutal rivalry between Joseph Brennan and Michael Bugler, the tractor's owner. Brennan has a sister, Breege, and this sets the stage for a powerful revenge story, complicated by love and betrayal. These are the elements of tragedy on a micro, yet everyday, scale, and O'Brien doesn't disappoint. The men end up either in prison or dead; the women live out lonely, spent lives in decaying houses or cottages, gardening, shopping, cooking, grieving. One wishes life wasn't like this but, alas, it is. In The Forest (2002) Not part of the trilogy, it might well be. To me it seems the weakest of the recent novels, perhaps because it is impossible for a woman (let alone a man) to enter into the mind of a demonic male killer. Nobody, including trained psychologist, are truly able to understand the motivation and minute-to-minute thinking of a man so demented, so out of touch with ordinary reality. And she fails, of course. We would all fail in such an endeavor. So, admitting to an impossible success, she has written a deeply troubled and troubling novel of the sort we talent less people might imagine, as we read the daily papers in whatever country in which we live about the latest unfathomable murder by the roadside, or in some desolated house or isolated countryside. For such small-scale tragedies happen daily.
Also recommended: Charles D'Ambrosio, The Point and Other Stories, Little Brown, 1995 George Saunders, Pastoralia, RiverHead Books, 2000 Note: All three of these writers regularly appear in the New Yorker. BACK
ISSUES Kingfisher
Journal, Vol. 2, No Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue Robert C. Arnold
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