I watched the film Infamous recently and found that it sent me back both to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I consider one of the best-written books I’ve ever read, but to some other books that surround it—including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Last year I saw the film, Capote, which was powerful and dominated by Phillip Lee Hoffman’s tour de force performance. It took about a year for me to be ready to revisit the harsh subject matter of a cold-blooded killing in the American heartland. The intriguing spectacle of the glitteringly, openly gay, Capote charming his way into the hearts and minds of 1960’s small town people of 1959 Kansas has some humor.
Writer/director Douglas McGrath’s Infamous focuses on the damage inflicted by lost love while in Capote writer Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller zero in more on the damage inflicted by betrayal, some of the improvisation took me out of that film's reality.
The Futterman/Bennett film was primarily based on Gerald Clark’s biography, while Infamous was more based on George Plimpton’s book of interviews Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.
For me, Infamous was easier to view, less bleak, I guess. It was surprisingly evocative—not just of its time period, my 1960s were considerably different than either the glittering world of New York or the small town, but of the power of art and the price... Sandra Bullock's gentle words as Nelle Harper Lee about the "blue" at the heart of the the brightest flame was as affecting as some of the more dramatic moments.
November 22 to December 2, 1977. I read:
Literary Women, the Great Writers, Ellen Moers
Note: elusively written, didactic, disorganized. What is the odd feminist obsession with George Sand?
Media Sexploitation, Wilson Bryan Key
Note: a wealth of unsubstantiated statements, and some actual data.
Patternmaster, Octavia E. Butler
J. R. R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle Earth, Daniel Grotta-Kursk
Note: very nice, clean, literate
Loose Changes, Three Women of the 60s, Sarah Davidson
Note: It took about a week to finish this. I did not like it
November 22 to December 2, 2007 I read:
The Ghost, Robert Harris
A thriller, state-of-the-art escape reading!
The TV series Huge and what was added (and subtracted) from the book
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Usually a book contains subtle layers and little touches that are missing
from the more streamlined film version. But *Huge* is that rare video that
adds d...
11 years ago
2 comments:
Ooh, Wilson Bryan Key -- I haven't thought about him in YEARS! I had to read one of his books in my college advertising class and the main thing I remember is that he believed the fried-clam photo on a Howard Johnson's menu had been manipulated so the clams spelled out the word "SEX" over and over again. That subliminal suggestion was supposed to make you crave clams, I guess.
The weird thing about all the subliminal seduction stuff is that whether or not the graphics were sexual (or death wishing as in the cigarette ads) they were onto something about people buying for irrational, deeply ingrained reasons. Like all that stuff about SUVs accessing the reptile kill-or-be-killed brain. Gotta love it.
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