Mel Brooks at 100

Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart: “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.” [...]

He is the son of immigrants who fought the Nazis and ultimately triumphed in every area of showbusiness. He is the American dream made flesh. Brooks might not live to be 2,000, but 100 years looked equally implausible when he served in the 78th Infantry division. When asked the secret to a long life after a screening of Blazing Saddles I attended in London years ago, this icon of American entertainment offered some sage advice he has evidently lived by: “Don’t die.” Darren Richman, The Guardian 

auguri, Mel Brooks, avanti fino a 120 anni! 

The Dark Side of Kodak

In her new book, Tales of a Militant Chemistry, Alice Lovejoy ’01 tells a different kind of war story, about the role film companies themselves played in developing weapons of war. At the same time the United States was fighting Nazi Germany, her book reveals, film giant Kodak was fighting its chief rival, German film and chemical company Agfa, both contributing to their respective war efforts. [...]

Later, the U.S. military asked Kodak to help enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project using centrifuges at its chemical subsidiary, Tennessee Eastman. At the same time, rival Agfa was producing chemical weapons in Germany, using forced labor from concentration camps.

Kodak continued its relationship with the military after the war, helping photograph nuclear tests in Nevada. When radioactive particles showed up while developing film at company headquarters in Rochester, New York, Kodak became part of a secret network of sites to test the flow of harmful radioactive fallout in the atmosphere, even as the larger public was kept in the dark.

“You can see the tension that exists between producing these technologies and living with the consequences of them,” says Lovejoy. Those are questions we’re still grappling with, she says, adding that some factories involved in cell phone production use rare earth minerals from war-torn areas. “It’s part of a larger history about what produces media and what it might mean to make industries more ethical and sustainable.” Michael Blanding, The Brown Alumni Magazine

il libro di cui si parla è: Alice Lovejoy, Tales of a Militant Chemistry (University of California Press). 

 

Sonny Boy

Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, starts smuggling him into the local picture house. Together they drink in the stories unspooling from the silver screen, doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose’s impossibly handsome boy-husband has already skedaddled to another marriage and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny delights in the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex from the drugstore and shouting at the construction workers who dare to leer. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino is published by Century

The Jazz Singer

Il primo film sonoro – prodotto dalla stessa Warner e proiettato per la prima volta il 27 ottobre 1927 – fu Il cantante di jazz (The Jazz Singer) nel quale, oltre a varie canzoni, si udivano una frase rivolta al pubblico dal protagonista e un breve dialogo tra questi e la madre. Il protagonista, interpretato da Al Johnson, è un ragazzo ebreo che non vuole cantare in sinagoga, come hanno fatto tutti i maschi di famiglia prima di lui, perché ama il jazz. Nel film canta però Kol Nidre, in una versione molto commovente. A proposito del Kippur appena trascorso.

The Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks [in Dune, n.d.r] represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you’ll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples (“Alpha”), spell-casting witches (“Penny Dreadful”), post-apocalyptic survivors (“Into the Badlands”), Superman’s home planet of Krypton (“Man of Steel”), a cross-species alien alliance (“Halo”), time-travelling preteens (“Paper Girls”), the Munja’kin tribe of Oz (“Emerald City”), and Santa Claus and his elves (“The Christmas Chronicles” and its sequel). Manvir Singh, The New Yorker

The Eight Mountains – a movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart

This rich, beautiful and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship between men who can’t talk about their feelings and about winning and losing at the great game of life. It is set in the breathtaking and wonderfully photographed Italian Alpine valley of Aosta, which includes the slopes of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. But the “eight mountains” of the title refers to the eight highest peaks of Nepal: a mysterious symbol of worldly ambition and conquest. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

insomma, è piaciuto molto!

Why Dickens still endures on page, stage and screen

All Dickens’s fiction – and any good adaptation – makes you laugh in the midst of what is horrible or sad. In Oliver Twist, Dickens commended “good murderous melodrama”, loved by Victorians, for presenting “the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon”. His audacious alternations of tragedy and comedy – or, in Great Expectations, terror and absurdity – provide the entertaining shocks essential to popular entertainment. John Mullan, The Guardian

in effetti i romanzi di Dickens sono delle macchine narrative ingegnosissime, dei veri modelli per chiunque voglia scrivere. Nell'immagine Olivia Colman nella nuova versione della BBC di Great Expetations.

Tatum O’Neal

Amazing as Tatum is in this performance, and iconic and penetrating as the film may be, the blockbuster slips into the same old car chase, between the same old cops and robbers. It’s all about stuntmen doing the fancy driving. And yet, Paper Moon has the face, neck, shoulders, hair, subtle morphing expressions, and very punchy attitude of Tatum O’Neal—and it has therefore held up beautifully. Later in life, Tatum would appear for a few seconds now and then on camera between points up in the stands watching her husband, John McEnroe, play tennis at Wimbledon, and she would leave the same sort of indelible impression—by virtue of her gaze and the mystery of her concentration. Jeremy Sigler, Tablet

Adorabile! L'articolo parla, però, soprattutto di Polly Platt, art director del film di Bogdanovich e anche sua ex moglie.

Inoltre:

Is Superman Circumcised? favourite to win Oddest book title of the year, Alison Flood, The Guardian

Tutto su Hitchcock

Even the biographers, watching the life ‘start at zero’, have struggled to establish where the motivation for the inventiveness came from. The most popular hypothesis, not least because Hitchcock himself promoted it so vigorously, concerns timidity. ‘The man who excels at filming fear is himself a very fearful person,’ Truffaut observed, ‘and I suspect that this trait of his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear ... David Trotter, lrb.

Ecco le nuove biografie su Hitchcock:

• Peter Ackroyd, Alfred Hitchcock (Chatto)
• Michael Wood, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest)
• Jan Olsson, Hitchcock à la carte (Duke)
• Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Vol. II, a cura di Sidney Gottlieb
  (California)

Bob Hope

Ora dimenticato, Bob Hope sembra fosse un grande comedian. "When Bob Hope died in 2003 at the age of one hundred, attention was not widely paid. The “entertainer of the century,” as his biographer Richard Zoglin calls him, had long been regarded by many Americans (if they regarded him at all) “as a cue-card-reading antique, cracking dated jokes about buxom beauty queens and Gerald Ford’s golf game.” A year before his death, The Onion had published the fake headline “World’s Last Bob Hope Fan Dies of Old Age.” Though Hope still had champions among comedy luminaries who had grown up idolizing him—Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, most prominently—Christopher Hitchens was in sync with the new century’s consensus when he memorialized him as “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny". Frank Rich, nybooks.

Hope: Entertainer of the Century, Richard Zoglin (Simon and Schuster).

Biopics

Francine Prose discute sui recenti film biografici e sulle polemiche che hanno suscitato, a causa di errori storici. Ma i biopics devono veramente essere fedeli alla realtà storica?
"Meanwhile I can’t help noticing the difference between historical films whose veracity stirs up a controversy and historical films about which nobody seems to care if they’re true or not. One need only compare the tenor of the conversations generated by the mistakes in Selma and (to a somewhat lesser extent) The Imitation Game with those kicked up by the question of what Mike Leigh did and didn’t get right in his brilliant Mr. Turner; in fact, it would seem, not many people went to see Leigh’s biopic about the landscape painybooks.
nter, J.M.W. Turner, though it was one of the best films of last year". (Nella foto, Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, 2014).

Le traduttrici di Isaac Bashevis Singer

Pare che Isaac Bashevis Singer avesse molte traduttrici (48) che fungevano anche da muse e probabilmente da amanti. The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer è un documentario girato dai registi israeliani Asaf Galay e Shaul Betser che ne racconta la storia anche raccogliendo le testimonianze di chi tra loro è ancora in vita. "Isaac Bashevis Singer, the famous Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner wrote with a 'harem' of dozens of translators behind him. Beyond simple translation, these women were a vital source of his creativity. The inspiration he drew from them came in many forms, often mixing romance with professional aspirations. Today nine remain to tell his story". mosaicmagazine.

Child Star

Il 23 aprile Shirley Temple compirà 85 anni. Bisognerebbe ristampare la sua autobiografia, Child Star, scritta 25 anni fa e ora fuori stampa (su Amazon ce n'è rimasta qualche copia, dai 100 dollari in su). Di essa Matt Weinstock scrive, "Celebrity autobiography has been a denigrated genre since at least 1982 (when Orson Welles and Gore Vidal spent most of the year poring over Rudy Vallee’s memoir “like a pair of Talmudic scholars” ). But “Child Star”—published twenty-five years ago, and lamentably out of print—doesn’t register as an autobiography so much as a little-girl classic that ought to be shelved alongside “Anne of Green Gables,” “Little Women,” and Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s a bildungsroman scaled to the intellectual limitations of a child, a book that takes six months to read and becomes part of your life". newyorker.

Scorsese e la NYRB

Questa settimana a New York si sono svolti vari party in onore del cinquantenario della New York Review of Books. Pare che Scorsese sia interessato alla storia della rivista per un prossimo film/documentario.
"On Monday evening, at a small private party commemorating the magazine’s 50th anniversary, held in its Greenwich Village offices, Mr. Scorsese, accompanied by a film crew of about a half dozen, interviewed various current and former writers and dropped boom mikes into clusters of casual cocktail chat. A crew will also be filming an event at Town Hall on Tuesday night featuring Joan Didion, Michael Chabon, Daniel Mendelsohn, John Banville and other longtime contributors, as well as the magazine’s editor and co-founder, Robert Silvers". nyt.

Manhattan's Forgotten Film Studio

Keaton, Arbuckle e St. John, 1917 circa

In un simpatico articolo, Charles Simic ricorda lo studio cinematografico di Manhattan di Buster Keaton: "Here, briefly, is the story. In March, 1917, while walking on Broadway, Buster Keaton bumped into a friend from vaudeville who happened to know Fatty Arbuckle, the famous silent movie comedian and Chaplin’s rival. Asked if he had ever acted in motion pictures, Keaton said no, and was invited to drop by Arbuckle’s studio on 48th Street the following Monday. Keaton first declined, because Arbuckle had stolen one of his vaudeville routines in the past, but then changed his mind because his curiosity was piqued by the opportunity to see how movies are made and especially how the gags are filmed.
The Comique Film Studio was located in a warehouse at 318-320 East 48th Street, in the tough neighborhood west of the elevated subway tracks on First Avenue. ..." nybooks.

It's Dangerous to Be an Artist

La (o il?) Los Angeles Review of Books ha rinnovato il suo sito, arricchendolo con diverse funzioni e sezioni, tra cui una dedicata alle interviste. Dall'intervista a David Cronenberg, It's Dangerous to Be an Artist, "It's dangerous to be an artist. That's what we talk about in Naked Lunch. It's dangerous on many different levels. Politically it can be dangerous, but psychologically it can be quite dangerous too. You make yourself very vulnerable. You put yourself out there and of course you open yourself up to criticism and attack. And so you have to be strong if you're going to make movies. But once you accept that movies can come from anywhere, that a movie can come from a dream or a conversation or a newspaper article, or it could be based on real people, you can expand that and say it could come from a work of art that someone has already done. It could be a play, it could be a novel, it could be a remake of another movie, and of course I've done all those things, and in each case the satisfaction comes from making a good movie; not from where the movie comes from. I don't have to question it if I find the story interesting". larob.