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Granting Mozart a sounder listen

Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make beautiful. Just look what they did to Kim Novak. Until Sunday night, most of the world thought of Novak primarily as the siren of Hitchcock’s iconic “Vertigo,” a famously stunning actress whose career peak happened nearly 60 years ago. Then she showed up at the Oscars, presenting the award for best animated feature with an admiring Matthew McConaughey. Her hair was a shoulder length tumble of blond, but it was her face that was the most surprising for a woman of her 81 years. Her eyes seemed pulled back, her lips seemed strangely inflated and her skin seemed at once unnaturally taut and puffy. If you were on Twitter on the time, you could almost hear the collective gasp.  […] Kim Novak, who in just the past few years has survived breast cancer,   bipolar disorder ,  fire and a serious horse riding accident, doesn’t have to justify her face or her private choices to anyone. She essentiall...

Fealty to the Wretched

The King’s Speech is lovely. Some of my colleagues have, disparagingly, called it middlebrow, but I guess that depends on where your particular brow happens to be located. In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite movie of the year, Sofia Coppola’s extraordinary, steel-rod-delicate Somewhere would be on this list. It’s not a movie about a rich, spoiled, “Why should we care about him?” movie star; it’s a story about a human being who’s lost his way. Apparently, that’s just not as interesting as watching Paris fold over on itself. (Stephanie Zacharek, “ Stephanie Zacharek’s Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow,” Movieline, 25 Feb. 2011) "King's Speech" makes not only aesthetes but rights-of-man folk nothing but self-indulgent, self-serving parasites. It makes the duty-to-country crowd just plain right, and those who aren't quite prepared to cowtow to what's ordained -- specifically, King George, in planning to marry out of love, and in...