Catchup
I feel like I’ve been chasing myself for the past two weeks, but I’ve managed to do some catching up in the last three days.
64. Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio
An exercise in style that screws with your head. You think you know what’s going on, and then everything is upended. Leonardo looks awful, and it suits the part. He looks old for someone in his 30s, but Max von Sydow, appearing as a Nazi psychiatrist, looks young for someone who’s about 200. Leo calls this movie Abstract Expressionist.
65. Date Night, directed by Shawn Levy and starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey
It’s bland, but I still love Steve and Tina. And Mark Wahlberg with no shirt.
Solar, the new novel by Ian McEwan
The prose is brilliant, the issue—global warming—the hottest of hot-button issues—but Solar is just finger exercises for Ian McEwan. I had the same feeling with his previous hot-button issue book, Saturday, although that one was riveting. When McEwan is at his best, you feel like you’re about to lift off from your seat from clenching your glutes so tightly. Here you feel a bit slack and lazy. Better to reread The Cement Garden and Atonement, then compare the children in those two books.
A still from the film version of The Cement Garden directed by Andrew Birkin and starring Charlotte Gainsbourg.
April 19th, 2010 at 16:27
max von sydow was like 70 freaking years old on The Exorcist. I think that guy’s immortal.