What are we reading?

[Brazoliange]

yeah those novelizations always butcher the original movie, huh?

I find it funny that you still think I didn't know Dickens wrote it before Polanski made the movie. Get off my back.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Actually, I think P was making a reference to his favorite movie Airheads.

[Find Your Magali]

What SHOULD I be reading....
----------------------

'ACCIDENTAL GENIUS': INDIE GODFATHER OR RIOTOUS ICONOCLAST?

By DAVID THOMSON
The New York Times

   Anyone who ever met John Cassavetes, no matter what they thought of his work, has hungered for a biography that knew how to convey the fearsome, wild energy of the man, the wolfish appetite for spontaneity wherever it might lead and the scorch marks of the dangerous and the sinister. Whatever you think of him, don't forget that he was, in "Rosemary's Baby," one of the screen's most plausible and haunting sons of Satan. His laugh, his embrace, his offers of friendship and sympathy were as alarming as they were encouraging.
   But it's possible to have those mixed feelings in the arresting presence of other great American independent filmmakers: Nicholas Ray, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola. And even in cases where research has to make up for a meeting, as with D.W. Griffith, David O. Selznick or Orson Welles, much the same thing is likely to be true. "Independence" has been with us a long time in American film, and was actually invented by a desperate yet sublime inability to share, whatever the ostensible method of film production being employed.
   Marshall Fine's "Accidental Genius" is, really, the first full life of Cassavetes, who died in 1989 at 59 and who is easily offered as a kind of godfather to the independent film movement in America. For years, it was assumed in film circles that the scholar Raymond Carney would sooner or later turn from his immense and exhilarating protestations about Cassavetes' greatness as an artist to a treatment of the life. Since well before the filmmaker's death, Carney has been issuing books in his gospel of St. John, and they are fine works, wrestling matches with the reader, and a hint of what a good teacher Carney must be. Recently, alas, he has fallen out with the Cassavetes estate by discovering an early version of the director's first film, "Shadows" (one that Carney reckons superior to the version Cassavetes released in 1959), and making it available for illicit screenings. There's no need to take sides in that dispute, but still, an imp of mischief wonders whether it isn't the eventual payoff for the amazing turmoil and confusion that somehow attend the business affairs of our movie geniuses.
   Fine isn't Carney's equal as a writer or as a dogged hound for the last truth. (Carney has probably spent more money researching "Shadows" than it cost Cassavetes to make.) And my heart sank as his book began: There are the automatic assumptions that Cassavetes is father to our rich age of independents, that "Faces" and "Husbands" are sources for "Brokeback Mountain," instead of a surveillance camera positioned by Antonioni and left to turn dysfunctional. There is the sketchiest treatment of Cassavetes' early life. He was Greek by origin, the son of an immigrant father who got himself into Harvard and later became a successful businessman. But Fine leaves those formative years woefully empty and prefers to settle for the young actor — half-hawk, half-rat — who came along just as James Dean kept on driving.
   Never mind; as soon as we get to "Shadows," this book jumps to life. For then it was, in 1957-58, that this restless Hollywood actor took it into his head to open a New York studio for actors that was virulently opposed to both the doctrines and the harsh criticism at the Actors Studio. Indeed, then and for years, Cassavetes' strength was close to his weakness: He hardly ever saw an actor or an actress do anything he didn't adore — especially if they had done it wrong, by accident or in defiance of his own plan. And in Cassavetes himself, there was often that look of glee or imminent cruelty that said, Just as soon as I get a fix on you, I'll do the last thing you expect. One reason for missing a good account of his boyhood is the plain evidence in Cassavetes that vital parts of him never grew up. Almost exactly the same thing was often said about Orson Welles; maybe this is the glory that rewards a culture that aspires so strenuously to staying young forever.
   Fine's book has been permitted by Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' widow, but she has not poured out her heart. What that means is that the weird mob that Cassavetes encouraged as his group are still the witnesses to his life. And they were trained to ignore his shortcomings, just as very often he could be relied upon to tell them they were terrific. There is a school of thought that says Cassavetes discovered and fostered the greatest lights in American acting of his time, and obviously Rowlands must be accounted as the brightest, but other critics doubt his sure touch and wonder if, once he had gone past improvisation, Cassavetes didn't prove an awkward scenarist.
   I have a hunch that there was more room for drink, violence and sheer madness in his life than hero-worship can yet admit to. Never mind. This is a genuine attempt to get at the riot of inspiration and muddle. I'm not sure that Fine ever entirely settles in his mind what an "accidental genius" is, or ought to be. But this book is a terrific step forward in detailing the frenzy, the dread, the hope and the immense, self-destructive independence with which Cassavetes worked. There could be more on family; there could be a lot more on money. But I suspect in both areas we might come away shocked at how little the real Cassavetes noted either one.
   
   PUBLICATION NOTES:
   'ACCIDENTAL GENIUS:
   How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film'
   By Marshall Fine
   Illustrated. 482 pages. Miramax Books. $27.95. 

[Sigur Rós]

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

...

EDIT: Just saw Walrus had red this as well, what do you think? Cause I really don't know what to think about it.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

...

EDIT: Just saw Walrus had red this as well, what do you think? Cause I really don't know what to think about it.

I don't know what part you couldn't like... I rarely read something that makes me feel so uplifted.  What didn't you like about it?

[cron]

personally i didn't like the part where the policeman goes 'being light is kind of unbearable'. that spoiled it a bit for me.

[Reinhold]

i didn't get to read as much as i had hoped before vacation ended. i started the da vinci code before bed a couple nights ago. i'm only half way into it, but it was an autographed copy, so i left it at my aunt's house.

i've got to read all of the books that kubrick adapted as well as a kubrick biography for a class this semester. that'll be nice.

even though i'm sure i've read them all thumbing through, i'm actually reading the collected poems of dylan thomas cover to cover.  after the installment of poetry that i just finished, i'm gonna read a chapter of a text book from last semester that i find interesting enough to want to finish it before i sell it back. it's Documentary: a history of nonfiction film by Erik Barnow. good stuff.

new room. having some trouble getting to sleep, i guess.

[pete]

I read this book about anorexia called the unbearable lightness of being thin!

[cron]

personally i didn't like the part where the policeman christina ricci goes 'being light is kind of unbearable'. that spoiled it a bit for me.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

personally i didn't like the part where the policeman goes 'being light is kind of unbearable'. that spoiled it a bit for me.

Ok, I'll give you that.  The words in the phrase are abused a lot in the book, but it's still an amazing piece.

[Ravi]

The Jerusalem Syndrome:  My Life as a Reluctant Messiah, by Marc Maron

Apparently it is out of print, as used copies are going for over $40.  I found it at Half Price Books for $6.

[hedwig]

[Gamblour.]

[squints]

nice, me too!

[The Perineum Falcon]

And how is this?
Good?
Informative?



Recommended?