Unfaithfully Yours by Preston Sturges

I've just been watching the Criterion Collection edition of Unfaithfully Yours and it's all just so delightful. I watched the introduction with Terry Jones, and am so glad I did. I think it helped me to enjoy the film. And, the fact that Jones' cat walks in front of him just as he is finishing up the interview, as if to say, "I want my part of this conversation!" sets just the right tone. Jones enthusiastically points out that there's lot of language, beautifully delivered, and that in general, the pace is snappy. There's also an interview with Sturges' widow, Sandy Sturges, who has lots to say about the story of how the picture got made and the inspiration for the screenplay. It's all very lovely.

 As Jones points out, some of the two slapstick sequences in the film don't necessarily fully work. I hardly noticed the first one; I had a "respectful" attitude about the second. In Jones' comments, he mentions that "slapstick" was not a speciality of Harrison's; when I watched it the second time, I found myself admiring because now I saw it as something hard. 

What makes this film engrossing is the idea: a jealous man who cannot accept that his beautiful wife loves him faithfully, and all the complications that come with it - and incongruities. The tailor he meets who's a bit of a philosopher; the private detective he meets who essentially says, "I am your biggest fan" and means it; the broken English and brilliant metaphor of Lionel Stander's character, who I think refers to the members of the orchestra as "meatheads." I loved Rex Harrison in Major Barbara and I love him here. There's something masterful in the way that he delivers dialogue; something wicked in that glint in his eye. 

About the orchestra: I read that Sturges was not a fan of classical music. This surprised me a little bit because I so loved the way he filmed the orchestra. I don't quite know how to express it. I guess I'd say he makes the orchestra seem like a football team or an assembly line. They're stripped of their glamour, wearing street dress, but their synchronization seems very impressive, their intensity workmanlike rather than exalted. Of course, it reminded me of Peter Schikele's Beethoven's Fifth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg). There's a little bit of comic business about the cymbals that I love: it's simple, it's modest but it seems to work.

I knew nothing about Linda Darnell before seeing this film and still know very little but here she was wonderful, really inspired.

 

 

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

I thought it would be fun to see this movie, based on the novel of the same name, because I really loved the novel. It was fun. I really loved this movie. It was very faithful to the novel (the screenplay was written by the novel's author, Jesse Andrews). Not perfectly faithful .. but details don't matter. But it was different, and for me, richer, to see the story with someone else's images. 

One of the things I loved about the movie was that it captured the humor of the book.  The film parodies that Greg makes with his friend Earl are just hilarious. I laughed out loud several times .. and that's unusual. 

One of the things that I loved about the book was that it was anti-dramatic. There's another, better word for what I mean but I can't think of it now. Greg does not fall in love with Rachel, who has leukemia. Greg does not want to be Rachel's friend, and certainly not just because she has a life-threatening illness. Greg flat-out refuses to befriend Rachel until he is coerced by his mother. (Greg's personal approach to surviving high school is just not getting involved with it, or its cliques, or its individuals.) At one point, Greg lashes out at Rachel in blind fury, completely reactive and completely insensitive to Rachel's pain. In other words, it's so much more like real life than books like these often are. And Greg doesn't have a brilliant career as a filmmaker, either.

 

 

New TBR

Sort of a very tentative TBR list 

(have long meant to read)

 

A fine Brush on Ivory by Richard Jenkyns

A Gentleman of Moscow

(YA)

 

The Hate U Give

To All the Boys

 

All That I Can Fix

Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda

 

If I Stay

 

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

 

One of Us is Lying

 

Dear Life, You Suck

 

Walkable City Jeff Speck

 

Right of Way Angie Schmitt

 

Belinda - Maria Edgeworth

 

 

Columbus by Kogonada

I loved this film. It has all the things I love: libraries, architecture, the Midwest. It captures the wonderful incongruity of modernist architecture set in a small Indiana town with its weed trees,  chain link fences and abandoned farmers' stalls. I loved it. The plot was minimal, but life affirming. The amount of silence in this film was daring. 

The film is set in Columbus, Indiana, a city of 40,000 people that is a living museum of modernist architecture.

https://columbus.in.us/columbus-the-movie/

 

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

I had never heard of this book, or the film it was made into ("Love, Simon"). I asked a bookstore clerk for some recommendations and this was one of them. The blurb on the front that read, "The love child of John Green and Rainbow Rowell" sold me. In many ways, I think that's pretty accurate description. This book is a fast, easy read and quite suspenseful as the plot develops.

Simon's a teen in an Atlanta suburb. He's a junior, and he's funny, and talented at entertaining his family with his sense of humor. He's gay, and no one knows he's gay.

And he's having an email correspondence/flirtation with one of his classmates. They're feeling each other out and getting to know each other. Neither of them knows who the other one is: they only know that they both attend the same high school as they met on a high school chatboard.  

Early in the story, a guy named Martin sidles up to Simon and lets him know that he'd left his email open in the library, and now Martin knows that Simon is gay and is having some kind of online relationship with another gay teen whose name is "Blue." And it's not just that Martin knows; Martin knows that Simon is not out and he wants to control Simon and force Simon to include Martin in his social circle, so that Martin can get close to Abby, one of Simon's friends.

Simon's shocked, disgusted and terrified. He's not ready to come out, and he's not ready to betray his friend Blue. He knows Blue's not ready to come out and disclosure could be really devastating for him.

Meanwhile, there's lots of stuff going on around him: his older sister has gone away to college and now she seems to have a secret boyfriend; his younger sister, always quite but always a comforting presence, seems to be gone all the time now. His two oldest friends, Nick and Leah, are his safe haven. He knows that whenever he spends time with them, he can just be. But something has changed: Leah has a major crush on Nick that is not requited; Nick is interested in Abby. Leah is often just .. miserable.

Then rehearsals for the winter musical, Oliver!, begin and everyone's thrown together is awkward ways. Simon thinks he's falling in love with Blue, but he has no idea who Blue is.

This book got so much love from so many places. It got a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, which also named it a "Best Book." Jennifer Niven, whose All the Bright Places I loved, gave it a blurb. Amazon named it the YA Book of the Year. And it was on the longlist for a bunch of prizes: the National Book Award, YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) Best Book for Teens Award, and the UK Literary Association Book Award.