9-4, Tuesday

Labor Day Weekend

We had an uneventful weekend. Hung around, Marian ran her usual 4 miles on weekday mornings and 7 miles on Sunday, I hobbled my way through 4-5 mile walks each day. There were absolutely no movies worth seeing this weekend. Halloween, Balls of Fury, Death Sentence. Yuch!

As A.O. Scott wrote recently, “Can summer please be over now?” Summer movies, that is. While Halloween set new Labor Day revenue records, I note with some elitist satisfaction that Balls of Fury and Death Sentence opened with mediocre and rotten revenue numbers, respectively.

Netflix Movies We Saw

His Kind of Woman This 1951 film noir seems a perfect example of the genre. Cynical characters, a femme fatale (Jane Russell, taking advantage of her relationship with producer Howard Hughes), flashbacks with voice-overs, sexual energy. Very dated but fascinating to watch.

Detour This looks more like a filmed play than an original movie. Very few sets, a handful of characters, action denoted more by dialogue than by bodies propelled across the screen, you hear more descriptions of murder and assault than you see. The male lead actually is more interesting off the set than on. Tom Neal was a Harvard-trained lawyer who gave up the profession to become an actor. But he had a bad temper and trouble controlling it once he was set off. Eventually he murdered a man and spent some years in prison. When he got out Hollywood had blacklisted him. He died only 8 months after his release from prison at the age of 58.

Avenue Montaigne The cast is unrecognizable to most Americans with the exception of Sydney Pollack, an American director playing the role of an, er, American director. Danièle Thompson has directed only French films so no one other than foreign film buffs would be familiar with his name. But this gentle story of a young woman who takes a job as a server in a cafe in Paris’ theater district is affecting, filled with honest and funny emotions, and entertaining.

This server has an open and generous nature that attracts a number of artists, actors, and art collectors who all empty their hearts to her about their own sense of unfulfilled dreams and feelings of loss. All of them are wildly successful, far more successful than the server yet her own equanimity despite her lowly status allows them to speak honestly to her about their own feelings. She willingly gives them her time and sympathy. Because the movie is structured as a romance and written as a comedy these feelings remain light and are all fated to be resolved by the end of the movie.

Thompson films Paris as Woody Allen used to film New York in his best comedy work: Play it Again Sam, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters. The city is a beautiful backdrop for this movie and accents the privileged lives the movie depicts.

This poem by Richard Blanco, civil engineer and poet, nicely constructs the symbol of potentialities that Paris represents, a fantasy of lights and marble. This poem’s mood certainly informs most of the characters in Avenue Montaigne.

Somewhere to Paris

The vias of Italy turn to memory with each turn
and clack of the train’s wheels, with every stitch
of track we leave behind, the duomos return again
to my imagination, already imagining Paris-
a fantasy of lights and marble that may end
when the train stops at Gare de l’Est and I step
into the daylight. In this space between cities,
between the dreamed and the dreaming, there is
no map-no legend, no ancient street names
or arrows to follow, no red dot assuring me:
you are here-and no place else. If I don’t know
where I am, then I am only these heartbeats,
my breaths, the mountains rising and falling
like a wave scrolling across the train’s window.
I am alone with the moon on its path, staring
like a blank page, shear and white as the snow
on the peaks echoing back its light. I am this
solitude, never more beautiful, the arc of space
I travel through for a few hours, touching
nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing
to deny the night, the dark pines pointing
to the stars, this life, always moving and still.

—————Somewhere to Paris. From Directions to the Beach of the Dead by Richard Blanco