xxxo

M.I.A.'s new video directed by Hype Williams.

eat pray love

Ryan Murphy is certainly gutsy for taking on two acclaimed memoirs (Running with Scissors and Eat Pray Love) and turning them into films. Personal, quirky, and in some cases, far from actual truth, memoirs are tricky to adapt.

Unhappy with her life in New York, Elizabeth Gilbert divorced, left a hasty relationship with a younger man and for one year, trekked Italy, India, and Indonesia. The book is still a phenomenon: Oprah Winfrey touted the tome and devoted shows to its subject matter. Gilbert's story is extremely readable (I breezed through it in a day and a half), full of wordplay and unusual observations--an intensely personal journey but also a sometimes humorous and charming travel guide. The symmetry of the story (inherent in its title) ends up being pretty exquisite, if too precious.

Despite an overall faithfulness to the book, the interior spark and its immediacy (diary-like chapters go in and out of present and past tense), is lost in translation. It's definitely a rich feast for the eyes (Robert Richardson of Kill Bill and Snow Falling on Cedars did the cinematography) and Murphy (the editing work on all his projects are always fantastic) seamlessly blends the looks of each locale together. The soundtrack too (Neil Young and Joao Gilberto) is apt and appealing to Gilbert's generation of Starbucks yuppies.

Yet the emotional frailness of Elizabeth, magnified on the big screen, feels trite in an era of sullen faces in unemployed lines on the evening news. Liz is often oblivious to her privilege and the constant support around her, complaining over trivial matters. It's premature to say what effect the film will have but perhaps watching Julia Roberts clad in leather and Anthropologie-esque tops eating pizza and prosciutto on melons is our contemporary version of Busby Berkeley. Roberts certainly has more vulnerable moments than in any film she's done and the film seems to have struck a chord with her (she is now practicing Hinduism), but Liz's sweeping travels are a lot for her to balance on her shoulders. One wonders if an actor like Toni Collette with stronger chops would have made it more touching. Any emotional investment hinges far too much on how one responds to Elizabeth as a character.



This is why it's refreshing whenever we have a glimpse into the lives of those she meets on her travels. Luckily here they are portrayed by great actors like Viola Davis, Richard Jenkins and Javier Bardem. The gifted Davis, is essentially given a throwaway part in the slack opening scenes (before all the eating, praying and loving), burdened with listening to Gilbert's incessant griping. Bardem, as Gilbert's Brazilian lover, is a natural. Jenkins has one particularly strong, loosely done monologue, a style of which I think would have benefited the film overall. But it blind sides us a bit, coming too quickly, before we feel we have gotten to know him enough.

Issues of race and cultural appropriation inherent in a story of a well-off white American will ignite controversy as it did with the book. Particularly cloying is the parallelism of the arranged marriage of an Indian girl and the plight of Bali's poor to Liz's emotional debilities. I guess one should be grateful that mainstream Hollywood took on such a messy project (female soul searching hasn't really been seen in pictures since the heyday of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore). It's a mess that's often too cute, glossy and not ambiguous enough (Bali and India are fetishistic visions here), but an attempt nevertheless.

-Jeffery Berg

i die

Rachel Zoe and designers in Harper's Bazaar.

outside of the circle

I feel that it is necessary to respond to Anis Shivani's article, The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary Writers on the Huffington Post. Huffington Post is a powerful political entity which recently added a section for Books: a fledging form of entertainment in our country. Some agree with Shivani's choices. Some, as indicated in the comments below the post, hadn't heard of or read many of these authors (which makes me question whether they should be deemed "overrated" at all). Literary Facebook friends have responded with equal amounts of solidarity and disdain.

As a writer and admirer of many of those skewered here, I was interested to see his arguments. Instead I found myself flinching at his brash insensitivity. I could defend some of the good in everyone of these writers, something that Shivani eschews--to which I call "bad criticism." There's a muddled pettiness and laziness to his attacking.

He writes of The Hours: "Another devotee of the antihumanist message, which comes packaged as resignation to reality--in other times, such an attitude was called fatalism." So according to Shivani, to be a "good writer" one shouldn't explore fatalism? Based on his assessments, not only do I think Shivani misread The Hours, but he doesn't take in account Cunningham's other works (A Home at the End of the World is a fantastic read; Specimen Days, less so, though full of interesting ideas).

Of Jhumpa Lahiri, a tremendously gifted and subtle storyteller, Shivani dictates what he thinks she should not write about: "Utterly unwilling (though probably fully capable, since she's the only readable writer on this list) to write about anything other than privileged Bengali immigrants with PhDs living in Cambridge's Central and Inman Squares, and making easy adjustments to the top of the American meritocratic pyramid." I would disagree that the adjustments her characters make are "easy." Did he read and fully comprehend the exile and heartbreak in "Mrs. Sen's" or The Namesake?

He writes of Ashberry as a mixer of "low and high levels of language, low and high culture, every available postmodern artifact and text, from media jargon to comic books, to recreate a reality ordered only by language itself." Ashberry isn't a poet I always connect with necessarily but I don't see what's wrong with the criticisms Shivani lays out here.

And the critiques on Sharon Olds are quite ludicrous and reek of an innate discomfort with writing by women: "Her poetry defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up its own hot and bothered cadaver, exposed since the 1970s. Female poets in workshops around the country idolize her, collaborate in the masochism, because they say she freed them to talk about taboo subjects, she "empowered" them."

I disagree with his characteristics of "bad writing": "obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance." As a writer, I should have a better "moral core"--a firmer grasp on the good and the bad. Such a laxness has left me on the on the outside of circles or snarky workshops discerning why something sucks. There is just so much out there, recognized or unrecognized (Shivani claims he will put out an underrated list: a much more worthy, but less-attention-seeking endeavor) to engage with, to explore and to take away from.

The lack of openness on Shivani's part is toxic. There is a personal, interior texture to writing that separates it from any other art form. This pursuit, I believe, should be encouraged more than derided, especially by fellow writers and contemporaries.


-Jeffery Berg



My friend Becca wrote a measured, articulate post in defense of Sharon Olds that I hope everyone reads.

See also Anna North's response on Jezebel

And Charles Jensen, who is so smart.

the powerful and the powerless

Ewan McGregor plays "the Ghost" (his name, fittingly, is never revealed) assigned to the memoirs of British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Bronson) in this atmospheric thriller from Roman Polanski based upon a controversial novel, The Ghost by Robert Harris. Taking the place of a previous ghost writer who died mysteriously, McGregor is sent to a house on a remote beach in wintry Massachusetts to begin his work. Meanwhile Lang is under intense scrutiny from the public and media for potential involvement in war crimes. McGregor finds his life in jeopardy as he uncovers unusual connections with people from Lang's past.

Polanski's films often deal with seemingly affable people committing the worst crimes against humanity. His best films (Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown) are foreboding ones, where innocent characters are seemingly unaware in how much danger they are in, the film carefully building suspense (though events seem to be happening in a seemingly loose manner) until it reaches a striking conclusion. The tensions that lie within the controversies of Polanski's real life are applicable to the mise-en-scène. Edited in final stages while Polanski was in a Swiss prison, this project takes on a creepy, claustrophobic air. Filmed in Germany, it often looks bleak and other-worldly, as if it exists at the edge of the earth. Polanski's filming is stylish and gripping--meshing realism (the topical nature of the news stories) with artifice (a look-alike Condeleezza Rice appears). The house set design is a marvel: a glassy, ironic dwelling, with huge open windows to the sea, yet so closed off from the outside world. Here, Lang's quirky mix of assistants (a well-played Kim Catrall among them) have established their mode and routines. A brilliant Olivia Williams, with a gray streak of stress in her hair, plays Lang's oblique and hardened wife, who is housing secrets of her own.

As in any adult thriller, the script is prone to melodrama. Although the dialogue is at times awful, the whole affair is tamed by a subtle, well-honed performance by McGregor and Polanski's gorgeously overcast visuals. Unintentional or not, the obvious parallels to Tony Blair and distressing, Bush era malaise (though the clouded ramifications of war seem unending) are less intriguing than the stylish look of the film itself. Like Michael Clayton, the movie is less a specific political statement and more a universal rumination on the powerful and the powerless. In Polanski's film, the powerful are weakened and isolated which leads them to be dangerously bitter and vengeful towards the powerless.

Alexandre Desplat (one of the finest film composers working today) recalls Bernard Herrmann with his brooding score, a kinetic and stormy myriad of bass clarinets and minor tones, adding to the gloomy but riveting atmosphere. In an interview, Desplat notes that Polanski wants the "music to mislead, to boost the energy in a scene, to create an invisible world and make it visible."


-Jeffery Berg

funny lady

I love this Jennifer Aniston meets Streisand spread in Harper's Bazaar.

chelsea getting married

Love it. I understand their right to privacy though I do hope more pictures emerge. Would love to see the bottom half of Hillary's dress: she looks fabulous. Check out NYT article on Chelsea's dress by Cathy Horyn.

UPDATE: new photo with Dorothy Rodham (a young looking 91) and a better view of Hills's Oscar de la Renta gown.