THE MAP

Alice Munro wrote a short story once called “Deep Holes,” and it’s as fitting a title as any when one considers her body of work. Munro has made a career out of writing the same short story over and over again, but because that story is shot through with an incredible amount of depth, with endless bottoms of nuance and complexity and minor shifts and adjustments each time, it constantly amazes. Jonathan Franzen (who himself rewrote his 2001 classic novel The Corrections as the even better Freedom), reviewing Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway, nailed it:

I like stories because it takes the best kind of talent to invent fresh characters and situations while telling the same story over and over. All fiction writers suffer from the condition of having nothing new to say, but story writers are the ones most abjectly prone to this condition. There is, again, no hiding. The craftiest old dogs, like Munro and William Trevor, don’t even try.

Here’s the story that Munro keeps telling: A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the girl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self-interested act. She marries young, moves to British Columbia, raises kids, and is far from blameless in the breakup of her marriage. She may have success as an actress or a writer or a TV personality; she has romantic adventures. When, inevitably, she returns to Ontario, she finds the landscape of her youth unsettlingly altered. Although she was the one who abandoned the place, it’s a great blow to her narcissism that she isn’t warmly welcomed back — that the world of her youth, with its older-fashioned manners and mores, now sits in judgment on the modern choices she has made. Simply by trying to survive as a whole and independent person, she has incurred painful losses and dislocations; she has caused harm.

And that’s pretty much it. That’s the little

… Read the rest

VENICE COMPETITION TITLES ANNOUNCED

The Venice Film Festival have announced their slate of competition films vying for the Golden Lion. Included in the list is the opening night film, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan as well as Kelly Reichart‘s Meek’s Cutoff and Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere.

Also announced are out of competition titles The Town, directed by Ben Affleck; little brother Casey Affleck’s documentary on Joaquin Phoenix, I’m Still Here; and Robert Rodriguez’s Machete.

The festival runs Sept. 1-11.

The full list of titles are below.

“Attenberg,” Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece
“Barney’s Version,” Richard J. Lewis, Canada/Italy
“Black Swan,” Darren Aronofsky, USA
“Black Venus,” Abdellatif Kechiche, France
“Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame,” Tsui Hark, China
“Happy Few,” Antony Cordier, France
“Meek’s Cutoff,” Kelly Reichardt, USA
“Miral,” Julian Schnabel, USA/France/Italy/Israel
“Noi Credevamo,” Mario Martone, Italy
“Norwegian Wood,” Anh Hung Tran, Japan
“La Passione,” Carlo Mazzacurati, Italy
“La Pecora Nera,” Ascanio Celestini, Italy
“Post Mortem,” Pablo Lerrain, Chile
“Potiche,” Francois Ozon, France
“Promises Written in Water,” Vincent Gallo, USA
“Road to Nowhere,” Monte Hellman, USA
“A Sad Trumpet Ballad,” Álex de la Iglesia, Spain
“Silent Souls,” Aleksei Fedorchenko, Russia
“The Solitude of Prime Numbers,” Saverio Costanzo, Italy
“Somewhere,” Sofia Coppola, USA
“13 Assassins,” Takashi Miike, Japan
“Three,” Tom Tykwer, Germany… Read the rest

YOU HOLLYWOOD, ME MAD

By Admin

The Guerrilla Girls for years have brought attention to sexism in the art world by simply calculating the discrepency in the percentages of men to women artists represented in galleries and museums. In recent years, this anonymous activist collective has turned their gaze towards Hollywood. This year they are vying for representation at the Oscars with a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. But their numbers always are more dangerous then their images. As they note:
Only 7% of 2005’s 200 top-grossing films were directed by women.
Only 3 women have ever been nominated for an Oscar for Direction (Lina Wertmuller (1976), Jane Campion (1982,) and Sofia Coppola (2003). None has won.… Read the rest

THE NEW ORDER OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

By Scott Macaulay

Any confusion about the kind of movie Sofia Coppola has been making about the life of Marie Antoinette can be rectified by watching the New Order-scored trailer.… Read the rest