The Invisible Counterpoint

Richard Brody wrote: What the four-hour run of the two “volumes” of Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” shows and says about its protagonist is trivial, but what it reveals about von Trier and his method is worth considering. A man returning from a small convenience store finds a woman lying—torpid and bleeding—in a sepulchral courtyard. She refuses medical care, refuses the police, but will accept a cup of tea, and goes with him to his apartment. She’s Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg); he’s Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). After getting cleaned up, she rests in his bed and tells him the story of her life, which is mainly the story of her sex life. Throughout the telling, the quietly fanciful Joe, a sort of erotic Scheherazade, intently affirms a vague and unnamed guilt that the polymathic scholar Seligman tries to reason her out of. Joe’s precocious genital consciousness led her to follow the lead of a high-school friend, called B (Sophie Kennedy Clark), in a game of sexual conquests abo...

Her (Spike Jonze) "The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays like a feature-length kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at the cute humans who live like pets in a world-scale safe house." ( Richard Brody ) This statement is made by someone who clearly lives outside the safe house. I personally think the number of people out there like that, on the outside, are dwindling, and therefore imagine rather more people are relating to the film than he assumes are cooing. Brody lives in New York, and might assume that most people living in giant metropolises are still denizens of environments who go to kitten videos only as respite from the harsh city, but this may be more and more untrue. The reason is that the leverage cities need to be this way--and it does require leverage: the city as maybe not an easy but a possible sure way to cosmopolitan independence, is an acquisition, a height--may exist too shallowly right now so that in truth they're playing out now ...

Toward the End of Time (John Updike, 1997) Margaret Atwood : "Toward the End of Time'' is John Updike's 47th book, and it is deplorably good. If only he would write a flagrant bomb! That would be news. But another excellently written novel by an excellent novelist -- what can be said?  David Foster Wallace :  It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape. --- Margaret Atwood :  Like many late-20th-century writers, Updike is fascinated with bodily goo, and by things that go yuck in the night. The verbal pleasure he takes in describing the exact nature and texture of Ben's searing and dribbly symptoms rivals Cormac McCarthy on exploding skulls or Patricia Cornwell on decaying corpses.  David Foster Wallace:  As were Freud’s, Mr. Updike’s big preoccupations have always been wit...

The Wolf of Wall Street (part two) Richard Brody just wrote a review of “Wolf of Wall Street” where he began by discussing “Inside Llewyn Davis,” showing how anything good—he really liked both films—is “about pretty much everything.” Specifically, referring to Llewyn’s catching a glimpse of Bob Dylan on a stage that he's  sort of owned for years, he says that the film's about the “terrible, subtle blow that knocks a person from the vanguard to the sidelines, from the promise of youth to the nostalgia of age in a single moment.” He then gets to his discussion of “Wolf,” about the particular fashion in which it's about pretty much everything—or rather, the considerable part of the human that involves huge internal energies we tend to want to suppress or deny. I wished he had paused before rolling along, for it'd have been the right thing to have done, and inadvertently he had handed himself a solid prompt to have done so. For what Brody does not end up con...

Wolf of Wall Street (part one) There are no victims at the beginning of the movie. Basically, it begins with a lad finding himself in what turns out to be one of the engine rooms keeping a whole society running, that needs to be kept going smoothly lest – collapse.  To their "customers," they flood confidence, their own ego, surety, and unflappability. Anything equivocating must be "other side" – on the side of those investing in stocks, who need to have every bit of wavering greeted with an immediate return of reassurance. To be this for them, for society , means affixing themselves with the right mix of chemicals so to be a stable base of relaxed bliss from whence confidence can be spurt out as required. There are no victims, because the movie begins with a sense that this is just where society is. Whatever might have driven societies before then – which might in the past have been "righteous" war and sacrifice (the 40s), cautious but r...