The Writer's Poke

The lighting and shading in this movie are amazing. Great use of colors. I watched this movie as a kind of modern-day fairy tale, with Claire Danes playing the role of a modern-day Cinderella... Mirabelle (Claire Danes) and Jeremy (Jason Swartzman) are both in their mid-twenties. Ray (Steve Martin) is in his 50s. A weird Mirabelle love triangle develops. Mirabelle has nothing in common with Jeremy, and she's way too young for Ray, but he is also the man of her "dreams," in terms of a man who has the means and the experience she's looking for to make her feel seen and important. I think we're supposed to feel uncomfortable about the age difference. Ray even comments at the first date that he hopes she has a good relationship with her father, so he's uncomfortable by the age difference. too. Ray's house is immaculately clean. And sterile. It feels empty and unlived in. When he gives Mirabelle the tour, everything is in its place. He saves the bedroom for las...

Pretty nice retrospective of Garbo's life and career made 15 years after her death in 2005 by TCM. Kind of wish they had made it during her lifetime, because as is, the people alive that still knew her were pretty old, and many of the people interviewed are just the children or grandchildren of those who knew her. The other thing: She retired at 36 and apparently completely disappeared from public life. So as the documentary notes, not much is known about her life after her career. She walked. She had a friend that she walked with and who acted as her confidant, but she lived in America, which means she was completely cutoff from any family. She never had children, and I guess never married. This is never explored. Did she completely give up dating, too, when she "retired." Did she stop going back to visit Sweden? Although it would be easy to call her a hermit or a recluse, the idea presented in the documentary is that she simply liked being alone. Her last film, 1941...

The scene that stands out to me most is when Queen Christina (Greta Garbo) is dressed as a man and has secured the last room in the Inn. Antonio (John Gilbert), the Spanish ambassador, needs a room too. He's willing to share it with the "young man" he assumes Queen Christina to be. She tries to give him the room, but in the end, they do end up sharing it, and once she removes her hat and coat, he discovers she's all woman. It's funny how Garbo has eyelashes and make-up, breasts, and yet, she was able to fool everyone into thinking she was just a young man who couldn't yet grow a mustache... The canapé bed has curtains, and so we assume that she and Antonio spend three full days in bed together during the snowstorm. That's pretty racy, but the curtains always remain closed. Even when the innkeeper comes in to offer them both chocolate, Antonio's is the only voice we hear invisibly respond. So we let ourselves logically imagine that both are in bed toget...

Interesting to pair this one with a reading or viewing of 1984, which I've been studying and teaching to students at the time I watched this one.  It's frustrating watching Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) for the first 50 minutes of the film. She's so monotone, so lifeless, so robotic. This is all on purpose, of course, but as a viewer, it's not very much fun to watch.  Ninotchka is a special Soviet agent, sent to Paris to check on three Soviet agents sent there to sell the former jewels of a Russian duchess. She arrives, and the men are surprised that Razinin (Bela Lugosi) sent a "female comrade." She tells them not to see her womanhood, and she clearly tries to see herself simply as a "comrade," not as a woman.  Nevertheless, Leon (Melvyn Douglass) immediately becomes attracted to her. He's close with the duchess, but neither he nor the duchess believe in love. Later he suggests to the duchess that he always thought love was "too middle class....

The movie starts with a montage sequence, with both Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicolle (Scarlett Johansson) telling what they like and appreciate about each other. This seems really cute, until it becomes obvious that there must be a reason that they are saying nice things about one another, and then the film cuts to the couple sitting in a room with a therapist (Robert Smigel). In other words, this was all just an exercise assigned to them by their marriage counselor, with the expressed purpose of reminding them that, at least once upon a time, they liked -- maybe even loved -- one another. And maybe they still do, because all of the stuff they mention is nice, and it remains to be seen why they are at a marriage counselor, or what secrets they're hiding that they didn't want to write down on notebook paper at the shrink's request. Wrong. They aren't at a marriage counselor at all. They are at a mediator, preparing for a separation and amicable(?) divorce. They've w...

Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) first met at some random party. They're both in their early twenties. She's an aspiring actress, and he's, well, we don't really know much about him. He's just a guy who works some random job. Later, we will learn that he had briefly been in the military and had seen Paris. At first, it's not clear why she would like him. She seems to have hopes and dreams. He, maybe he's just a conventional guy who will work a job, get married, and have a few kids. But what apparently attracts April to Frank is the fact that he had been to Paris, and when he talked of that experience, he was full of energy and life. Maybe April imagined that both of them were special, designed (or destined) to live extraordinary lives. Not just the typical lives of married couple with two kids in the suburbs. Clearly she wants him to want more to life, too, and she wants to feel what she first the first time they made love... she wants to f...

Part of me wants to look through Garbo's catalog to see what roles she played. In the last few Garbo movies I've watched, she was a courtesan, an erotic dancer, and in this one, she's a prostitute. Did she ever play a scientist or a school teacher? Must she always play "indecent" and castoff women? When Anna's (Garbo) mother died, she was only 5, and her father, a sailor from a long line of sailors, decided that she should stay with relatives in Minnesota. They were good farm people, he said, and if we are to believe him, he thought she would be much better off living on the Minnesota farm than with him on the sea. He's a sailor and doesn't think much of his profession and the lifestyle of sailors. His one hope is her, that she will marry a farmer and escape the fate of being attached to a sailor. Now 20, Anna meets her father for the first time in 15 years. Her life on the farm wasn't everything her father imagined. She was forced to flee the farm...