Film: American Hustle. Directed by David O'Russel

“The Fighter” is David O’Russell’s best film so far. He has been trying hard to emulate his past success but in  vain.”Silver Linings Playbook” was a sugar coated interpretation of a not so bad debut novel by Matthew Quick. The book had more dramatic potential than the film could make use of. It threw out the drama and stayed on the level of  kitschy romance drama cliches.

“American Hustle” is another disappointment. It is not an important film, it is just another (among many) genre picture. It does not rise above the level of a con-scheme film and there are far better con films than this one. And no matter how big and powerful its PR campaign is and how many awards the film will win — this is not going to change. 
The story is contrived and the characters are contrived – hence the stress on physical disguise – the actors have nothing to play, at least they have to look different… Their performance is hinged on physical things – they are trying hard to impersonate some psychological types or to mask the lack of drama or psychological motivation using superficial trickery. They are trying to conjure up the psychological via the mechanical. In the case of Ms Lawrence it works -she is playing the trashy nagging wife cliche after all. Amy Adams’ character presence on the screen most of the time is dramatically and logically not justified. Her character’s relationship to the over-zealous FBI agent is illogical to the point of puzzling and mired in tasteless erotics. 
The film’s anti-corruption political pathos is so tired and unoriginal. 
There are films like that – all the components of good film-making are there but the aftertaste of having watched something futile and phony remains. 
The hype about “American Hustle” — inexplicable!

By the way, “The Fighter” was not co-written by D. O’Russell while for both “Silver Linings” and “American Hustle” – he co-wrote the screenplay. May be he should stop doing that.

Film: Frances Ha, Directed by Noah Baumbach, Producer: Scott Rudin

Of course, I would never expect a bad film from producer Scott Rudin…

And “Frances Ha” is a nice film. A black-and-white independent, a Nouvelle Vague impersonator, it is a small, cheerful but also sad movie, which does not deserve to be called “charming” as it would be an offensive epithet for this kind of an honest unassuming film. It is a movie about love but without the sex part — which makes it really original. Frances never quite adapts, she is not too smart or too talented but too good, naive, silly, delusional, inept, spirited, “undate-able,” and unselfish to be able to shape her life into something standard. Sophie is her opposite. Frances loves Sophie and this love is not shared, nor is it consummable. Frances just loves this other person but would never be able to share a life with her — a realization she has to accept as a blessing as she looks across the room at the end of the film to meet Sophie’s gaze — gratefully and gracefully. Don’t interpret this as “friendship should be enough”, “be grateful for what you can have”… It is rather – well, there are people like this, like Frances Ha (the last name is nonchalantly cut off), they will never settle down as “normal” people do, don’t pity them, envy them…

On the other hand, the film seems to be a little scatterbrain like its heroine…It is a life-style movie, the style of life as a mess.

Film: Blue Jasmine

“Blue Jasmine” is probably the best film Woody Allen has done in recent years. It is a drama with satirical 
overtones dialoguing  with the American drama classics (T. Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire in particular) to reflect on the sorry state of contemporary morals. It is a better and more laconic insight into the American culture of “irrational exuberance” than “The Wolf of Wall Street” with its typical Woody Allen morality-play rigid schema transpiring through the lightness of what is happening on the screen. And what is happening is quite comical – on the surface at least. It is the stuff comedies are made off: a rich woman has lost everything and is in a “fish out of water” situation having to share a working-class life-style with her sister Ginger (S. Hawkins). We begin to grasp the tragic side of the story when it becomes obvious that Jasmine (born Jeannette) wants to dig herself out of the hole and climb-back to her previous position by lying and nurturing delusions about herself and her prospects. Eventually, she has to sever herself from reality (read “poverty”). If she can’t accept being poor, her only option left is insanity. Her parallel with Blanche ends here: [she] can’t accept realism, [she] wants magic!” The “magic” that made her rich in the first place…Her parallel with real-life characters – e.g. the female protagonist of the documentary “The Princess of Versailles” (the wife of a real estate magnate gone broke who eats from a 2,000 dollar caviar box with a large spoon sitting alone on her messy bed) starts here.  Reality offers a lot of proof that people, who are compelled to be or act rich develop a behavior which borders on the insane – check all the “real housewives”, Kardashian reality TV or any other reality life-style shows. The life-style media has been driving all kinds of white-trash personas crazy. Those who accept to be “loosers” – like Ginger does – get to keep their sanity and keep stocking the supermarket aisles. Ginger also aspired to “break rich” but lost a handful — a lottery win (not without meaning in this context). She also aspired to climb socially by falling for a professional man but got duped on this front as well. Jasmine was “lucky” briefly through her marriage to a crook. Both sisters come from the working class. Blanche and Stella in T. Williams’ play were descendants of the Southern aristocracy – their problem was to accept the downfall of their class. In Allen’s drama, it is the working class who are driven crazy because they can’t jump the gap, can’t jump the great divide between rich and poor, which is growing wider and wider. And the wider this divide grows, the louder its allure is being blasted through all communication channels into the fragile psyche of those who “dream big.”  These are the choices – accept the loss and be content (there is love and sex for you as a consolation) or take Xanax and eventually – there is madness.
To comment on David Denby’s crucial question whether the best films of 2013 are also “important”: “Blue Jasmine” IS “important” as opposed to “American Hustle,” for example, which is NOT. W. Allen put his finger on the pulse of our time. Not frustrated sexuality or fall from aristocratic grace (Blanche’s tragedy) are our problems anymore but another type of Desire — materialistic and beauphoric, premised on instant gratification with a No Exist sign blinking at the end.
Kate Blanchett’s performance is superb. The mannerisms of her character mask a deep void that is scary and only occasionally lurks in her eyes and the low tones of her husky voice.

The Days of Abandonment. Elena Ferrante, 2002 (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, 2005)

Ferrante is one ferocious writer. What a tight, powerful prose, a “turn of the screw” narrative! Her style reminds of the classical 19 c novel, most of all — Tolstoy. The story of an escalating passion-slash-madness brings to mind “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Anna Karenina is also invoked by the protagonist herself (“Where am I? What am I doing? Why?”) as the thoughts of self-destruction become overwhelming.
This short novel enacts Everywoman‘s nightmare: the threat of the young blonde, betrayal, abandonment, lost beauty, aging, self-loathing, alienation, hate, loneliness – all fears, complexes and guilt, entangled in one hard knot. Ferrante writes without a shred of sentimentality, she does not nurture illusions or promise happiness. Through all the stages of the protagonist’s downfall and madness, Olga remains an honest narrator. She observes herself dissecting herself – and does that not coldly bur rather passionately, mercilessly.

As Olga pulls the pieces of her soul together slowly, it is not hope that she offers at the end, but solace: “There is no depth, there is no precipice. There is nothing.”

Looking forward to reading Ferrante’s other novels.

The Star of Istanbul. Robert Olen Butler, 2013

This untalented book is marketed as a historical thriller. It does not offer a single thrill unfortunately. No matter how hard the author tries to create “atmosphere” or be historically accurate, no matter how many times he uses words like “Hun”, “swell”, or “aft” – everything from plot to bottom rings fake. I wish the writer had a sense of humor because the novel could become a good parody. The action takes place during WW I and the main character, a journalist and American spy, engages in endless pursuits of two German spies while wearing ridiculous disguises. This constant “following” constitutes the bulk of the novel while most of the time the reasons for the following escape us. The love subplot between the journalist and one of the German spies, a world-famous film star, who eventually turns out to be an Armenian, on a mission to kill Enver Pasha, is an awful unimaginative cliche. The love scenes start with “we started” and end with “we were done” with a couple of tasteless sentences tucked in between…And no, the hero is nothing like Eric Ambler’s journalist character.

This author has a passion for unnecessary detail and has filled almost 400 pages with that. He is also a Pulitzer Prize winner with 14 books under his belt and teaches creative writing…

A lot of paper has gone into that book. Can’t they have something like “straight to e-book”policy for this kind of work…

Rachel Kushner. The Flamethrowers, 2013

It is an ambitions book, a stab at “great literature” and it works…

One of the big American novels from recent years.

 It offers a sweeping representation of radicalism – in life and art – in Italy and New York of the 70s. Reno, the main character, a young girl who wants to make it in the art world in New York of that time, guides us through the lofts, studios, galleries, and pubs of modernist NY and her observations draw the sad picture of art once trying to be “revolutionary” and “subversive” to the point of its annhilation and its becoming an obscure ornament pinned on the big egos of self-absorbed, manic, and sad people posing as artists. Tragically, the only thing beyond this “radical” art world depicted by Reno/Kushner that has a greater claim to authenticity, is the lurking menace of political violence and terrorism. Reno’s brush with the underworld of Gianni and his comrades (the Italian Red Brigades) is a sobering experience which feels almost like a nightmare and can be told only in a matter-of-fact language which describes actions but does not attempt to wrench out meaning. While the art world is stylistically exuberant, narcissistic, and ridiculous, the Italian radicalists, indulge in a different kind of self-importance – the scary claim on ultimate justice, and on delivering that justice. By punishing and killing.

 There is a lot more in this novel except the story or Reno and her passage into adulthood and her initiation into cynicism — for what else can we call her coming to terms with reality…The narrative involves heavily metaphorically laden images of metal, rubber, and velocity (the Valera motorcycle), the fetishes of industrialism, film stock, photography, futurism, war, etc… In the end, there is a sense of too much “research” being ingested into a fictional work. In the end, one may wonder if the novel’s complexity is not an effect of the diligence of this research, of the too many important themes being juggled with (a sense that lingered in me after reading Don DeLillo’s “Libra” or “Underworld”). But the writing occasionally is so good, that it redeems the author for having been so ambitious.

 I shouldn’t be complaining about this, actually – it is a rich book and reads with pleasure. That is rare.

I am back…

Several years and some hundred books later…I am restarting my Reader’s Diary.

I was surprised to find out that some of the posts had actually generated some comments. Very grateful for that…

I have decided to write not just about books but also film. We’ll see how it goes.

Wishing you a Happy New 2014!

Arthur and George. Julian Barnes, 2006

I have to admit the book was a bit disappointing. The introductory chapters were extraordinary -especially the part on George growing up in the vicarage. Barne’s potential for mimicing a nineteenth century writer’s style is amazing. The rest though was somewhat boring and banal, the intended suspense did not work, the intricacies of the supernatural and Arthur’s fascination with the above are more ridiculous than anything else.

Kafka on the Shore. Haruki Murakami, 2002 (English Translation 2005)

Haruki Murakami sucks. The book is a prefect example of a senseless, though artful, concoction of literary references and popular postmodern devices. It sounds like a 101 course in Comparative Literature. It could be written by anyone who has taken a literature course on that level and has read a Marques novel, (or Tolkien in the worst case….) with a pinch of Pynchon – and I mean here the leeches falling from the sky, the door to a different reality, the quest for a magical stone, the divine idiot talking to cats, the Hegel quoting prostitutes, the American pop-culture icons (a Johnny Walker as a cat-murderer….??! – did I really read that?…), the elementary reductionist references to Aristotle, Plato, and Chekhov, the mystifications of some spiritual “depth”, the Oedipal plot, the transsexual character, the menstruating teacher episode, and the entire existentialist scam that Murakami perpetrates on the unsuspecting reader….And the writer’s “Japan-ness” hanging on by sentences like “His penis was hard as porcelain.”!?…

Murakami’s success as a writer is one more indication of the snobbery of the reading public who can’t think for themselves and indulge their provincial pseudointellectualism by letting the literary scam artist flatter their vanity misleading them to believe that they belong to an “educated” reading club (which unfortunately they are not…Far from it…).

Oracle Night. Paul Auster, 2003

“Oracle Night” sounds like an exercise for “Brooklyn Follies”. While the former contains mostly summaries of stories, plot outlines, skeletons of possible narratives, in the latter the stories have flesh, mood, and the sense of joie de vivre (as well as joie d’ecrire).

And of course, in both works, everything starts with someone buying a notebook. Auster makes writing look so easy and so exciting…

In the 2003 work, the story that lacks closure — the story of Nick Bowen, is the most fascinating one–full-scale dramatism taken to a dead-end. The framework story – that of the protagonist Sidney Orr, has a beginning, middle and end, but refuses to explore the drama that is contained in it – the drama of betrayal. Auster seems to avoid that and turns it into a sentimental illustration of friendship, generosity, forgiveness or (I am not really sure what… may be – true love?!)