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). 

 

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.

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska

Alexander Payne’s wonderful new movie, Nebraska, a deeply felt but—thanks to Payne’s signature drollery—never sentimental homage to a son’s relationship with his crusty father. Or, to be more precise, the relationship the son wishes he’d had with a father who might have been, as opposed to the actual one who accompanies him on a quixotic quest across Nebraska to collect a bogus sweepstakes prize. vanityfair.

Again on the Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned “Gatsby” into a theme-park ride. But he’s done it in exactly the right way. He hasn’t tried to make the novel more respectable, intellectual, or realistic. Instead, he’s taken “The Great Gatsby” very seriously just as it is. ...

Gatsby isn’t like other great American books. It’s not a social novel, like “Sister Carrie,” or a novel of manners, like “The House of Mirth,” or a novel about our national destiny, like “American Pastoral.” “Gatsby” is weirder than all those books; it’s more like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” It’s about a spiritual atmosphere, and about the inner life that gives rise to that atmosphere. It’s popular because we still live in that atmosphere today. Fitzgerald’s novel is cool, sexy, stylized, and abstract; there’s a dreamlike falseness, a hollowness, an unreality to it, and that apparent superficiality is part of what makes it fascinating. It’s modernist and European without being arty. The best moments in the novel have the devious, carnal sophistication of high fashion; the characters seem unreal, but are also unforgettable. And, for all its strangeness, it also possesses a glamorous, crowd-pleasing commercialism. newyorker.

I Do and I Don't

I Do and I Don't è il titolo di un libro di Jeanine Basinger sulla storia dei matrimoni al cinema, edito da Knopf. "Romance movies may demand chemistry, but movies about marriage demand something more difficult to create — a sense that a couple are simpatico, that however much they may bicker and snipe, their deep understanding and feeling for each other will ultimately keep them together" ... Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy worked so well as a married couple not just because they were known to be an off-screen pair, but because, as Basinger explains, they “generated a sense of incompatibility, competition, class difference and underlying tension.” Beyond attraction, there was respect: each saw the other as the most interesting person in the room.. nyt.

A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay è il titolo di un film che Michael Maren - giornalista e sceneggiatore per film - sta girando, e che contiene una scena al Kos Kaffe di Park Slope, Brooklyn, in cui è riunita una decina di scrittori. "At one table, Jennifer Egan sat scribbling on a yellow legal pad, not far from Roxana Robinson, Philip Gourevitch, John Burnham Schwartz and Jane Green. Across the room, Michael Cunningham chatted with Nick Flynn, while Mary Morris sat with a battered notebook and a pile of printouts and Darin Strauss checked ESPN.com on his laptop.
The occasion was the shooting of a scene in Michael Maren’s forthcoming film, “A Short History of Decay,” that aims to show off the most impressive mass literary cameo in recent film history. ... And that doesn’t even count the reporters who were on hand to document this very meta Brooklyn literary moment. As Ms. Egan put it, “Someone should write about all the writers who have come to write about us writing.” nyt.

Mad Men

Per gli appassionati di Mad Men, un sito super intellettuale e notizie varie: "Since the beginning of Season Five, “Mad World,” a forum at the scholarly Web site Kritik, has been offering a lively if occasionally jargon-heavy discussion of the series, itself intended as an extended trailer for “Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s,” a collection of essays coming from Duke University Press later this year.

The contributors aren’t the first academic types to problematize, interrogate and otherwise analyze the series, which has also inspired courses at Northwestern and Berkeley as well as at least one scholarly podcast. But they may be among the most willing to use terms like “diagetic.” nyt.

La curiosità per le storie altrui

E' una caratteristica di New York - o del modo in cui percepisco NYC - che mi è sempre sembrata una riproduzione dello shtetl dell'Europa orientale, o di un gruppo di shtetl. Il NYT, oltre a essere il grande giornale globale che è, non ha perso la funzione di gazzettino delle storie della città e dei suoi abitanti. Lo dimostrano la rubrica The Ethicist (ora curata da Ariel Kaminer, finora con più brio e meno umorismo di Randy Cohen) e l'articolo di Adam Sternbergh sul Magazine di domenica scorsa su Dana Adam Shapiro e come sia arrivato al film Monogamy (appena uscito in USA). Incuriosito dai molti divorzi dei suoi conoscenti, DA Shapiro ha scoperto che se diceva di star scrivendo un libro sull'argomento, la gente gli confidava volentieri i suoi guai. In due anni ha raccolto 50 interviste sui motivi per cui si divorzia, che a lui sono servite per il film, e a Sternbergh per costruire un articolo avvincente come un racconto. "Nothing that I ever did during the course of our entire marriage involved me thinking about my wife as a first thought. And yet now, as we were going through the divorce, she was all I could think about. If there had been one-tenth -  one-hundredth -  as much passion in our marriage as there was in our divorce, we would have just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary". nytmag.