good evening

While watching In Her Shoes (2005), I checked to see what Toni Collette will be up to next. There are a few things, but I want to talk about Evening (2007). I watched the trailer. It all reminds me of Mrs. Dalloway.

Looks like Collette and Natasha Richardson play the daughters of a dying Vanessa Redgrave. She's a bit loopy because they don't understand what she keeps going on and on about, about some guy she killed when she was younger (as Claire Danes). So in making sense of their own love lives, they have to sort out what their mother's past means (with the help of mommy's friend Meryl Streep).

Why does it remind me of Mrs. Dalloway? Well, Clarissa in her old age felt nostalgic about a complicated love triangle (actually it was more like a rectangle or a pentagon). Sure she didn't kill Peter, who was hopelessly in love with her, or prompt his suicide as she does in Evening, but she did break his heart.

And I'm sorry, but I cannot help from seeing the connection that Vanessa Redgrave played Clarissa in the 1997 filmic adaptation penned by Eileen Atkins (who's in Evening, too). Oh, and Meryl Streep was in The Hours (2002), where Virginia Woolf's book plays a large part. And Michael Cunningham, who wrote the novel on which The Hours is based (and also wrote the splendid A Home at the End of the World--the book and the screenplay), wrote this screenplay with the novel's author, Susan Minot. Minot wrote one of my favorite movies: Stealing Beauty (1996).

It looks sappy, but I will probably see it anyway in June.

i don't like my job either, gregor

Tomorrow, I promise, is Kafka day. I will continue with the new additions I encountered this afternoon, I promise. Having just stuffed myself (and wanting some more oreos), I just don't have the energy to work through these new Kafkaesque thoughts.

Until tomorrow.

who is jane austen?

It's not released in the U.S. until August, but I just saw Becoming Jane (2007) before going to Sainsbury's this afternoon. The movie theatre (or as they say here, "cinema") was empty. There was only one person manning the concessions area, and I had to ask him to tear my ticket so I could go into the auditorium. It was that dead.

And when I got inside the theatre, I was the only one there. For at least ten minutes, and then couples started to pour in: mother and daughter, teenage female friend and teenage female friend, and even middle-aged male friend and middle-aged male friend (or is that male lover and male lover?). I really was looking forward to having the theatre all to myself. Not only would I be watching it alone, I would be watching it alone, in a first-run movie theatre, a full five months before it comes out in the States. Pity. That would have been a great blog post.

Now, the film. I haven't even written about it yet in my film journal, so I hesitate to get really into it, but I will say a few things:

1.) Anne Hathaway's acting is better with an English accent.

2.) James McAvoy tried too hard to be Jane Austen's lover that he acted more like one of her CHARACTERS. If Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham and all those other men are inspired by McAvoy's Tom Lefroy, it seemed more like HE was inspired by THEM. I suppose this is the danger in making a biopic about an historical figure, a writer whose characters are so well-developed we think they're REAL because we've seen them in our minds as we read or on our TV screens as we watch actors portray them over and over. You can't wipe Mr. Firth and Mr. Grant and Mr. Northam and Mr. Hinds and Mr. Macfadyen (the best!) away, whether you're playing a new Jane Austen man or watching him. But having said all this, I think McAvoy is still one of the sexiest Austen men.

3.) I think they granted Jane a lot more "independence" than she probably had. What is this called? Retroactive gender role subversion?

4.) Very much inspired by Pride & Prejudice (2005) because it is grittier and more conscious of how to use the medium to create a style that captures a time and place. The other major filmic adaptations--Emma (1996), Sense and Sensibility (1995), and Pride and Prejudice (1995)--are very by the book, if you will. The Keira Knightley version, which I take over the Firth-Ehle one any day, represents the landscape (I'm not just talking Nature here) as one that is much more lived-in and beautiful. It's not stiff and prim and proper all over. The Dashwoods may be poor, but their cottage is so cute and charming, everyone wants a house just like it. How realistic!

5.) Hated the title, but I've thought about it some more. Yes, the film is about how she developed into a writer, how her experiences contributed to her worldview and to her work. I think it can also be that she is very becoming.

6.) Unfortunately, the epilogue overlapped with the last sequence of the film. And I think it would have been better without one because let's face it, anyone who sees it must already know a thing or two about Austen and/or her works. Unless, of course, you are one of my former roommates who LOVED Masterpiece Theatre and romances, but when I mentioned Pride & Prejudice (it was coming out while we were still living together) she didn't know who this Jane Austen person was that I was talking about.

Glad I saw it, and I recommend it because you are a Jane Austen fan. Wish I had iTV so I could see the Masterpiece Theatre-type adaptations of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.

i'm feeling nauseous

As one of my "Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes" suggests, I have started to read a book outside of my coursework. In fact, I bought Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre a few weeks ago but had to read Our Father San Daniel by Gabriel Miro for class. And that tome took up a bit of my time.

Nausea, in case you don't already know, is about an Antoine Roquentin who is writing a book about a forgotten historical figure and he is camped out in a village/small town because it's where the best archival information on his subject is. The novel is actually Antoine's diary. I know this doesn't sound very exciting (and it isn't), but Antoine gradually determines that the world is devoid of meaning and everything is completely random, so he must find a way to live in this world with purpose. According to the back cover* of the book, Nausea is "an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times--existentialism." I am only about 45 pages in, and Antoine is only just starting to have his bouts of nausea--a sort of hallucination--where he feels sick to his stomach and anxious based on his observations of society. The fits end up clearing up things for him, helping him come to this conclusion about the world.

I hope I did not sound condescending there, describing the premise of the book because I don't know much about it either. Neither the Waterstone's on campus nor the one in town had Misfortune by Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), so I decided to wander through the fiction section. I scoured every shelf. Since I don't normally read fiction, it is amazing to me the sorry state of fiction today, to see all these serial novels, like the ones about women detectives in African huts or the ones that are historical romance novels about the Tudors. (I think every character from Elizabeth [1998] must have his or her own novel.) In short: nothing really interested me.

Until I found this one. Yes, I have heard of Sartre before, and I knew he was an existentialist, but I have never read anything by him. I couldn't name anything he'd written before finding Nausea in my hands. The topic interested me, but I never intended to buy something on existentialism that day. (I made a choice; how existentialist of me!) I say this because "existentialism" has always been a word that floats in and out every now and again, and before you can call yourself something (or deny it), you have to know SOMETHING about it.

I'll let you know about the novel as it comes.

*I should note that the front cover attracted me, too: Salvador Dali's Little Cinders from 1927.