Faraway, So Close! [1993]
1. Emit Flesti.
2. “Columbo is looking for his contact lens.”
3. Lou Reed laments the loss of a good line that he should’ve written down.
What a frustrating, long-winded mess of half-baked ideas. Some great isolated moments, but they just don’t cohere. Clearly Wenders is at his best when he’s not working from his own screenplays.
The Ides of March [2011]
1. Final shot. The look on his face rivals Garbo’s at the end of Queen Christina.
2. He insists on reading a hard copy. Later he tells them to write something, then “I’ll put it in my own words.”
3. “We have new donations coming in daily,” he tells Rachel Maddow.
Naturally, since I’m going to Paris for the first time in more than ten years soon, I’ve been thinking about my last trip there. And digging through stuff that’s buried in my computer. Here’s something I wrote back then.
CULTURE LESSON
Surfing channels in
Paris I
see a woman on TV
in bed pausing
from her book carefully
marking her place
with a flowered strip of paper she
smiles her nurse comes
to assist her
an upright metal pole on wheels
following behind her.
The sound happens
to be turned off. Later
her husband greets her in the
kitchen also smiling she is
fully dressed now
like a white lily freshly drawn
from the porcelain vase
at her bedside.
He drops tea
into a pot and readies
the boiling water.
Even without sound it’s clear
this is a happy French
existence.
April-May 2001
Midnight in Paris [2011]
1. The way Dali pronounces “rhinoceros.”
2. “What is Valium?”
“It’s the pill of the future.”
3. In the middle of their conversation it begins to rain. “I don’t mind being wet,” she says. The raindrops darken his jacket as they stroll together across the bridge.
A Separation [2011]
1. “The court doesn’t care about those things.”
2. She phones for advice. Is it sacrilegious to clean the old man?
3. Rather than hit his wife, he slaps himself violently over and over.
Bad Santa [2003]
1. “Well sure. Santa fucking someone in the ass …” John Ritter winces exquisitely.
2. Willie favors Old Grand-Dad Bonded Bourbon.
3. He uses the golf club as an axe to chop down the mannequin.
The Artist [2011]
1. Over time, his mustache morphs from pencil-thin to brushlike.
2. “BANG!”
3. Malcolm McDowell’s ruddy nose (even in black & white).
The Great Escape [1963]
1. Trouser leg dirt sleeves.
2. Richard Attenborough’s eye scar makeup seems to come and go.
3. He ends up back in the cooler with his baseball.
The New World [2005]
1. They share breath.
2. He carefully places her feather in the wooden box and closes the lid.
3. Waves crash against a beach of round, smooth stones.
Rebecca [1940]
1. She hastily pops a chocolate into her mouth to cover up the taste of the medicine.
2. “A bunch of young people from London will come up and turn the place into a nightclub.”
3. Mrs. Danvers softly rubs the fur across her face.
