The Rare Review - Movies, books, music and TV

‘Tis A Pitiless Life: “Take Pity”

On January 17, 2025

An ex-coffee salesman, Rosen, strenuously tries to help a young mother whose husband has died. He is not in love with her, or lusting for her, he wants only to help her; but the financially sinking woman keeps refusing.

This is what “Take Pity” chronicles. It’s a Bernard Malamud short story, so the characters are Jewish. And they aren’t happy. The woman is refusing to accept the norms of society and the Jewish community. She is unwise, but another fait accompli in the story is that a particular man ceases to be an angel, so to speak, and turns into a devil. In Malamud, Jews let down other Jews. The woman, I say again, is unwise. Rosen becomes worse.

The ten pages here are tough and crisp and fascinating.

And What A Dalliance It Is! “Babygirl”

By EarlD

On January 14, 2025

In Movies

Babygirl (2024), by director-writer Halina Reijn, concerns the female CEO of an automaton, or robotics, company and the sexually perverted affair she enters into. I agree with Kyle Smith that Nicole Kidman‘s Romy, the CEO, is like the “fully realized character from a literary novel or a memoir.” She is married with two daughters, and her dalliance is with a young male company intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson).

Though not without banality, the screenplay is sharp and probing and weird. It’s weird because of Samuel’s kinkiness but also such details as Romy’s young daughter dancing the tarantella—and being named Nora (like the wife in Ibsen’s A Doll House). Too, it is non-woke.

The three main actors—Kidman, Dickinson, and Antonio Banderas—never make a misstep, which is a very big deal in Kidman’s case since the role is certifiably difficult. Not that the men’s roles are easy, though.

Early Sixties Fun: “Experiment in Terror”

By EarlD

On January 9, 2025

In Movies

Blake Edwards‘s Experiment in Terror (1962) is about a bank teller (Lee Remick) forced by a murderer to rob her place of employment. A vivid thriller, it is very much a police drama—with Glenn Ford‘s John Ripley on the case—which somewhat anticipates Klute, The French Connection and Dirty Harry. Edwards did some admirable directing here and got some scary lighting from cinematographer Philip Lathrop. There is beauty (and decent acting) from Remick, sexiness from Stefani Powers as the bank teller’s younger sister.

Living In Tulsa County, Visiting Osage County: “August: Osage County”

By EarlD

On January 6, 2025

In General, Movies

A true sense of tragedy intermittently comes through in August: Osage County (2013), the John Wells film of Tracy Letts’ play, as the troubled Oklahoma characters blow it big-time. Successfully Letts adapted it, confidently Wells directed it.

The complaint has been made that the movie contains too much Meryl Streep (as the ranting, pill-addicted Violet Weston). I’d say that considering the thoughtful, unself-conscious magnificence of Streep’s performance, she has exactly the right amount of screen time. Julia Roberts is stunningly impeccable as a candid and discontent wife and mother, while Margo Martindale is very good at making Violet’s sister complex.

Chris Cooper delights with common-man qualities, but the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, for all his effort, is not meant for the role he was given. Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis are engaging enough that we miss them after they drop out of the film. (I do, anyway.)

Wells’s movie was made a lot closer to where I live, which is OK’s Tulsa County, than other movies are. It’s a funny-bleak work not without faults, but whose acting means a lot and is not to be underrated.

By John Williams (The Writer, Not The Composer): “Stoner” — A Book Review

By EarlD

On December 30, 2024

In General

Cover of Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)

The novel Stoner (1965), by John Williams, chronicles the life of William Stoner, a farm boy sent to college where he falls in love with literature before becoming an adept English professor. This is in the early part of the 20th century, during which Stoner does not enlist to fight in the First World War. Drawn to a woman named Edith, he courts and marries her—one of the worst wives in American literature, and not much of a mother either. The couple have a fragile daughter, Grace. Gradually Stoner enters an affair with an attractive student, but is also deprived of it before long. The passage in which he learns of the student’s feelings for him is superbly written.

An unfortunate fact in Stoner is that an academic career is used to support such sordid realities as Stoner’s ugly marriage and the abetment of a deplorable grad student protected by a vindictive colleague. Human meanness encircles the scholar, although when Grace mentions that things have not been easy for him, he admits, “I suppose I didn’t want them to be.” He says this before he dies of cancer, a disease which merely becomes Stoner’s last enemy, as Edith and the vindictive colleague are his enemies. But none of these enemies does he hate. They create conditions to which he becomes resigned. Over and above, the novel implies that if a man can be resigned to (non-lethal) human enemies, he can be resigned to inevitable death.

The book’s description of the moments before this death is memorable, set forth in what has been considered a lost classic.