I almost forgot, but for the the deafening internet hysteria

New Moon is out. I was going to see it and be sarcastic, but Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian has done it for me: "There will be no end to the parade of neo-horror archetypes who are not getting anywhere near Bella's silver ring of abstinence." Consider Mr. Bradshaw officially invited to this blog.

A Raisin in the Sun

I first read Lorraine Hansbury’s play in high school, and still today I think it’s a powerful response to Langston Hughes’s poem. This play is a true Greek tragedy, but with an extra act. It’s…the saddest movie ever to have a happy ending (and ending which I think, despite the film’s misguided final music, is ominous at best). Hansbury does a beautiful job imaging a single family’s myriad disappointments in the face of a deeply tragic history, and woeful economic hardship. Though I haven’t read this play since, I remember very clearly the piteous and hateful Karl Linder, who so obsequiously tries to tell the Youngers they aren’t wanted in their new neighborhood. But there are many details I had forgotten—most of all Beneatha, whose chaotic interests (that made her seem so flighty to me as an adolescent) now look like a surprisingly lighthearted examination of many perspectives on the question of evolving African American identity. Hughes experimented with all of these extremes, whereas Hansbury herself seems to settle in a modest version of the American dream:

“We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick. We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors.”

The Youngers are decent people, and just want some time and space to live as such. The rich debates about black identity, the agenda of the NAACP, though all valuable, aren’t practical for them. They want little more than a little peace. The other aspect of this that escaped me till tonight is the somewhat sad turn around gender at the end. The strength of this play has always seemed to me to be its three strong central female characters, though tonight I noticed how clearly the play is really about one boy becoming a man. I feel a little cheated by that, but certainly it’s a good opportunity for Poitier to make speeches. Oh right. Poitier. Did I mention I’m reviewing the movie and not the play? Yeah. I am. As hard as it is to watch and as disappointing as I find the end, I do still love this movie. [photo: This movie is so much sadder than it looks.]

Sauna

Finland is creepy. Beautifully creepy. Sauna is the story of two brothers, Eerik and Knut, who are mapping the borders between Finland and Russia after the Russo-Swedish War (1590-95). Eerik has served Sweden since he was sixteen and now bears the weight of the 73 souls taken during his time as a soldier. Knut is the aspiring professor mapping the borders for the empire in hopes of receiving work at the university back in the capital. Their small party of Russians and Finns encounters a village in the middle of a swamp (home to 73 souls, no less) not yet found on any map. The town is shrouded in mystery (no history, no children, no monks to fill the cowls that have been left lying around), at the center of which is a sauna.

For those of you not used to life in the Great White North of Europe, this isn't your typical gymnasium steam room. In medieval Finland, the sauna is the place where the recently born and the recently deceased are taken to have the past and their old sins washed away. A long bath for a man with 73 (or is it 74?) dead muddying his soul.

I don't know why I found Sauna so appealing. Most likely my nostalgia for the swamps off the Gulf of Finland, permanently overcast, steel-colored skies, and humid sub-zero temperatures were the cause. However, the novelty of the film's plot and setting impressed the neophyte horror fan in me. The time and place are long ago, but this isn't the gothic horror of Dracula and the Catholic Church. Finland is barren and empty. There aren't any churches or beasts to fill your nightmares, just the remnants of pagan belief and a porous border between the natural and supernatural. The film shows how terrifying it would be to live in an isolated, frozen wasteland even without the gore-dripping dead bodies that haunt Eerik and Knut and I think that that's why the film works. There is little in the way to make the audience jump or squirm, but you feel a little colder and a little lonelier with each passing minute.

Part of me hopes that there is more to come from Scandinavian horror as both Sauna and Sweden's Let the Right One In have been enjoyable alternatives to the stale horror films I know.

Yeah...

so, remember when we were having all those debates about blackface?

Cactus Flower

The plot: a dentist who is defensive of his freedom has fallen in love with a young girl who works at a local record store. The movie opens on her failed suicide attempt, a response to the dentist's claim that he cannot leave his wife and three children. The dentist, in truth, is unmarried. His story is simply to keep all of his lovers at bay. The suicide attempt convinces the dentist to marry the young girl, and then the plot unfolds as he asks his stodgy nurse to play stand in for his wife. Cactus Flower has a Breakfast At Tiffany's backdrop: a young girl about town lives next door to a young playwright who comes in and out of her window. The young man, however, is mostly a wry backdrop to Toni's machinations as she tries to be sure her fiance does right by his current wife. From the beginning it's pretty clear the four characters will eventually pair off by age--the two young neighbors together and the dentist with his nurse and assistant.


[photo: meh]

If I were to have one movie wish for this movie it would be to see this remade in the style of The Proposal, with all the roles switched. The problem is that Walter Matthau and Goldie Hawn are no where near as charming Ingrid Bergman and Rick Lenz (so fabulously named Igor!). Matthau especially is more a grumpy grandpa than a womanizing bachelor. Bergman, on the other hand, would make a wonderful independent dentist and Lenz an oh-so-charming record store clerk. Matthau is perfect for the judgmental desk attendant and Hawn was made to play the occasional jokester. In my movie dentist Bergman would, after much slap-stick hilarity, come clean to her young lover and they could run off together, leaving Matthau and Hawn to eye one another in the waiting room.


[photo: yeah!]

I am hoping this movie can kick off a new theme for me for November: women in comedy. I wanted to start by getting a sense of what Hawn did before the 80s. Cactus Flower is her first big movie. Also: Bergman in comedy--what?! That's like a grilled cheese with mayonnaise on it. Note to self: rent Indiscreet.