Cover of Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening (2007) is almost mediocre but still worth seeing.

Director Andrew Wagner’s adaptation of a novel by Brian Morton, it tells the story of elderly novelist Leonard Schiller, a fictitious New York intellectual, and a female grad student, Heather, who gives the gent an emotional and sexual attention she has no business giving him.  She does so, while making Schiller the reluctant subject of her master’s thesis, because she fell in love with the man whose first two novels meant so much to her.  But Heather plays with Schiller’s feelings.  There is naught but an ugly mismatch here.  Similarly, Schiller’s daughter, yearning for a baby, finds a mismatch in her relationship with the willful boyfriend who desires no children.  The film has to do with hopes stranded and appetites ungratified.  And it has to do with Heather’s uncondonable behavior.

Starting Out is dramatically thin and provides a little unconvincing uplift.  Some of the talk about literature is claptrap.  Never mind what Heather says; does Schiller really have to call one of his novels passionate?  None of which means the movie lacks verity.  Or gravity.  Also true, though, is that the subject matter is sadder than Wagner seems to realize.

Frank Langella IS Schiller the novelist, giving a splendidly truthful performance.  Nearly as strong is Lauren Ambrose, whose Heather is an intelligent extrovert unconscientious in her vulnerability.  And Lili Taylor does a typically nice job as the writer’s middlebrow daughter.

The first of two (so far?) flicks starring SpongeBob —2004’s The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie—is raffish fun with nothing to say, which is good.  The comic lines are simple, conventional and droll, the comic action loony.

A written note falsely claiming that SpongeBob’s employer, Mr. Crabs (a crab), has stolen King Neptune’s crown puts Mr. Crabs in real jeopardy.  After being refused a manager’s position at the boss’s new eatery, SpongeBob must prove himself—him?—by retrieving the crown from a mean “city”. . . I don’t understand the rock god sequence near the end, but Stephen Hillenburg‘s animated lark is weird.  There’s some risk-taking behind the slapdash insanity.  Tom Kenny has one heck of a voice as SpongeBob, and Scarlett Johansson is more pleasing as the voice of Mindy the mermaid than she is in her live-action performances.  Too, there is easy charm here.

A nightmare unfolds in James Whale‘s The Invisible Man (1933):  The formula that renders Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) invisible, which is bad enough, also works against the mind.  Griffin turns into a crazed killer, something he never anticipated—responsible for the murders he commits insofar as meddling with chemistry was a bad idea.  Now all that’s left is for the authorities to destroy the Invisible Man, and director Whale is impressive at showing the single-mindedness here, and at building momentum.  I don’t know how well R.C. Sherriff’s script represents H.G. Wells’s novel, but I know how well it represents the acumen about fictional horror.  It’s an acumen Whale possesses.

John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is a Western strictly for fun as well as a fairy tale, especially in the eventual showdown between John Wayne’s  Ringo and the three treacherous brothers.  But the fanciful stuff is everywhere; the Old West mythology here is VERY mythological.  Yes, there is even a prostitute with a heart of gold (mythology) and Ringo falls in love with her (fairy tale).  His gallantry is the complement to the refined gallantry of Hatfield to Mrs. Mallory.

The movie was Ford’s first sound Western in a flatly uneven body of work.  Here, he had good material to shoot, with his usual smarts.

Cover via Amazon

Did Pedro Damian die as a brave man or as a coward?  Jorge Luis Borges‘s short story, “The Other Death,” centers on this question.  That the story makes us wonder what the suppression of the past, if it were possible, would mean and adverts to the foretold “birth of God” proves how expansive it is.  Philosophical the tale is, but on another level it reminds us of the perennial importance of war to the minds of men who have fought.

Another Borges story, “The Dead Man,” entertainingly resembles a Western.  In it, a narrator with incomplete knowledge gives an account of the life of a hoodlum in the late 1800s.  The young man’s “only recommendation was his infatuation with courage.”  In the long run, it’s an infatuation that doesn’t matter.  The young man ends up dead and the narrator, as he indicates, must later correct and expand the story he is telling.  The hoodlum is, as it were, lost to us.  But very possibly he met his death with the courage so esteemed by the great Argentine writer, Borges.