Coincidentally, the last three movies have all featured Scarlett Johansson (or at least her voice) and have all been pretty good. Neither of those are statements I ever expected to write.
First of was Her. Johansson played the voice of the OS (operating system) that Joaquin Phoenix’s character fell in love with. She was very good in that, I have to admit. Having her performance separated from her famous body enabled one to get a better appreciation of her qualities as an actor. And speaking of acting, the movie also drove home the fact that while Phoenix was going through his crazy period, we were missing out on all the great movie performances we could have had during that time. He really is that good. And the movie, at its best, was a moving and realistic depiction of how a relationship grows, develops, and the breaks apart as two people find themselves drifting further away their shared spaces and experiences. That being said… I’m not sure what the point of the movie was. I mean, I know… relationships, technology, singularity, blah, blah, blah. But… I don’t know. It wasn’t that it was cold or passionless, but the passion came from the great acting. Why did director Spike Jonze make this film? I don’t know, because I felt no passion from behind the camera and it left me feeling a little let down and betrayed. It made the whole less than the sum of its parts.
Spoiler alerts coming, by the way.
Captain America: Winter Soldier was, as the reviews have often noted, the best of the recent spate of Marvel universe films (which is to say, excluding the Spiderman movies). I’m also biased because I liked the first Captain America movie better than any but the first Iron Man movie. The unironic, straightforwardness of it appealed to me.
This one is more convoluted but solves, or at least, works around, what has always been the character’s conundrum. Captain America was created during World War II and makes the most sense in the (relative) black and white world of that conflict. Like most of the best comic book story arc around the Captain, this one plays on the boy scout being thrust into a complex situation and trying to still be a boy scout. Chris Evans is suitably boyish and charismatic. Scarlett Johansson looks good in Diana Riggs’ old skin tight catsuit from her Avengers days (not the Marvel Avengers, but the old British tv show). And Robert Redford should play more villains. Never one to overact, he drips menace, without raising his voice and with boyish, rakish twinkle in eye.
I have some qualms (the Winter Soldier looks too boyishly handsome not menacing enough when he’s not wearing a mask), but it’s got a nice, though imperfect combo of action and conspiracy flick.
Under the Skin is deeply alien. In an awesome way. Johansson plays an alien wearing the ‘skin’ of a human being to lure other humans to her lair for… some kind of harvesting. The harvesting isn’t Cronenberg-seque, really, but there’s a definite element of body horror.
The movie is from Johansson’s (she’s never given a name) point of view. How to make relatable an alien who is deeply alienated in her reactions to and understanding of our world? Easy. The movie takes place in Scotland and the other characters (Johansson speaks with a decent, but not great, generic British accent) have heavy, sometimes nearly incomprehensible Glaswegian accents. The landscapes are deliberately alien looking. They’re clearly earth landscapes, but it would no surprise to learn that everyone of them had been used as stand in for an alien planet in a long ago episode of Doctor Who.
When she’s scared, we feel and empathize with her fear, even though, in another movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger would be hunting her down before she kills again.
And yes, there’s nudity. She gets naked. But if that’s your reason for seeing it, you’ll be a little disappointed. Not just because her body is good, but not great, but also because there are far more shots of unobstructed full front nudity by men in various stages of tumescence. She draws them onto a reflective black floor, leading them on by slowly taking off her clothes (most of the time, just bra and panties are enough to get them men to drop their pants) and once the men are full naked, the floor turns into thick black sludge that they blithely walk into and finally under, while it remains firm beneath her feet. It’s very yonic (when they walk into the place where that black floor exists – the room and building changing over the course of the movie – the walk into a lightless black opening), but the alien lacks a true vagina. Her sex organs are literally only skin deep (as she finds out when trying to have sex).
The whole thing is mysterious and strange and resists easy meaning or interpretation, but it’s an amazing piece of film making and Johansson does very, very well. Partly, she is called upon to be a siren, who leads men happily to their death via the irresistible lure of the promise of her body, but she’s also a cipher, trying to figure out what it means to be human. She is never human, but wearing the skin affects her and she does embark on an exploration of what the human skin means.
Go see it.
So, here’s this list of recommended poetry collections for seven different types of readers.
Kudos to the listicle author for opening up with Kay Ryan. I think that Ryan is amazing, but it’s a bold move to place her front and center as the suggested poet for the reader of general fiction. And Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is an inspired choice for YA book readers. Actually, it might be a great way to introduce contemporary teens to contemporary poetry – and via a poet who is also a well regarded classicist. Two birds, one stone, that kind of thing.
I used to like the idea of a bookstore that, when you entered, the staff would size you up, ask a few questions and give you your book. A book you would not only enjoy, but which would be a truly good book. Not good like ‘John Grisham is a comparatively good writer because so much out there is crap,’ but for goodness real good writing. If you like action, what about Wind, Sand and Stars about the being a pilot when planes were still new and dangerous. Written by the dude who wrote The Little Prince, no less!
But he’s not a poet. Or not primarily. Maybe he wrote tons of poetry, but that’s not what we know him for.
So what poets does the coffee philosopher think you should read?
Autobiography of Red is probably the best introduction to the novel in verse I could recommend. Not that it’s better than The Odyssey or Paradise Lost because that’s just not the case. But it’s a coming of age tale that captures very well all the awkwardness of growing up different, the flush and subsequent crushing betrayal of first love, struggling to find one’s path… that sort of thing.
I’m going to pitch for Wordsworth. Some of his mid length poems, like The Excursion tell a moving and compact tale in clear, yet beautiful language. The Prelude is too long and some of the shorter poems are too specific to the time (poems urging Englishmen to stand fast in the event Napoleon invades). But I think The Excursion, while not my favorite, could really strike a certain kind of someone who thought they didn’t like poetry in a very particular and good way.
So those are both narrative poems. Do I think that’s the best way to pull readers into poetry? Maybe. I wouldn’t have said that if asked, but it looks that way.
Without going into the two books I purchased and got signed (Matter of Fact by Eamon Grennan and Selected Poems by Bernard O’Donoghue), I’ll just write about my impressions of the Monday night’s event.
Originally, Heaney himself was scheduled to appears. But, of course, he died.
So, with some help from the Irish embassy, a collection of three prominent Irish poets (Paula Meehan and the two aforementioned poets whose books I purchased) and two American (Frank Bidart and Jane Hirschfield).
I feel like I have Hirschfield’s collection, After, somewhere in my library but didn’t find it nor, consequently, bring it for a signature. Which is okay. Because one of my takeaways from the evening is that she rubs me the wrong. It’s entirely personal. I feel like that if I were younger (let’s say, late teens or early twenties), I would gladly be here willing disciple and nurture a secret crush on her. At this point in my life, she strikes me as a name dropping caricature of the poet as spiritual shaman. The outfit, the attitude… I feel like she is villain in made for Christian television movie, where the young girl is almost led astray by the wild and probably atheist poet-professor, but is saved by… I don’t know, maybe a pastor the youthful heroine used to think boring and staid or a wise old gardener who never finished college. Something like that. She also dropped a lot of names and locations that made her seem very cool. Did you know that she hung out with Heaney in Rome, at the American school? After he left the boring others behind, he and and his wife drank wine and ate awesome Italian things with Hirschfield in an apartment, probably overlooking somewhere romantic and historical. Having attended the lecture, variations on this incident were drilled into my head. Repeatedly. But, it has to be said and cannot be ignored: Jane Hirschfield is a very, very, very good poet. Not completely my cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize quality when I see it (or hear it).
Bidart, who is a poet I greatly admire, was the most interesting speaker, because he actually took the time to not to just read his own poetry (in fact, he read very little of his own), but to almost give a lecture on a particular aspect of Heaney’s oeuvre, namely, political poetry in Heaney’s canon. Bidart also had the longest line of people looking for autographs, which made me feel bad, so I was happy that I went for some of the lesser known poets.
Paula Meehan has one of those great reading voices that seem tailor made for poetry. I’m not sure how if I’d buy a collection of her poetry (I didn’t that night), but I would definitely buy an album of her reading her poetry. She spoke melodically and at length about Heaney’s place in Ireland’s history, literary or otherwise. More than any other poet, she gave a feel for Heaney as a larger than life figure.
Eamon Grennan, besides having a wondrous, Amish style beard, spoke movingly about Heaney’s poetic influence on his work (which is great – I’ll write more about it at a later date, I’m sure).
Finally, Bernard O’Donoghue. A nervous speaker, but also the most knowledgeable about Heaney (as one might expect from someone who has written a book about Heaney’s poetry). He is probably the one I would have most enjoyed hearing more from (though I wish, in the time that he did have, he had taken a page from Bidart’s approach). Again, I’ll write about the book I bought from him later.
At the signing period, I was waiting in line, before realizing that everyone was waiting for Bidart, so I just skipped around and got to chat with both Grennan and O’Donoghue. Of course, one also can’t help but feel bad for the non-superstar poets (at least, non-superstars to the Folger attending, poetry reading public of the DC metropolitan area) and I hope more folks made their way over to the other parts of the table, not being bum rushed by Bidart aficionados.
the coffee philosopher 