Movie Round-up: Short Reviews of Scarface, Postcards from the Edge, Pollock, and Frida

My Host of Imaginary Readers hates my success.

I started a writing business a few months ago, and a few big projects materialized very quickly. Consequently, my time for review-writing has tapered off a bit.

I've kept pace on the books, mainly because reading them takes way more time. But I'm behind on movies. So to keep my HIR happy, I'm going to bring the blog up-to-date with a roundup of the last four movies I watched.

"Four reviews in one?!" cries my HIR, delightedly.

"You bet your sweet imaginary butts," I tell them. And thus we begin:

Artists are a tortured bunch. We want to recreate any beauty we see, and the impossibility of this desire torments us, and drives us to folly. Most of us are so plagued by self-doubt and emotional turmoil that our inspiration chokes before it produces.

Once in a while, someone comes along who has the right combination of productivity and inspiration to change his art form. But success doesn't usually calm a stormy soul. It amplifies it.

And so it did with Jackson Pollock, who made his name by perfectly and completely embracing the reality of a flat image on a flat canvas. Watching Ed Harris portray this volatile painter is a revelatory and terrifying experience.

I feel similar to Pollock in all the wrong ways. I am prone to recklessness, rage, selfishness, and despair if my impulses are allowed to grow.

Pollock is a resounding, rattling challenge for this young creative to calm down, to let go of my raging desires, and to quietly go about the work of bringing my little inspiration to bear.

Warning- This will be a confusing sentence. Bear with me: Frida is one of those exceedingly rare movies about artists which emulates the form of that artist while successfully telling that artist's story while retaining its own power as a film, all at the same time.

It belongs in a small camp with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and maybe Rushmore if we are liberal.

Frida is a sensual, stylized masterpiece which, as Volver did with Penelope Cruz, takes an actress who America pretty much sees as a vacuous sex symbol, and shows us that our obsession with appearances blinded us to a phenomenal talent.

What does one say about a movie like Scarface, about which so much has been written and said?

Nothing.

I made the grave mistake of watching Postcards from the Edge right after I finished reading Carrie Fisher's book of the same title.

The movie retains few of the assets of the novel. Carrie Fisher adapted her own book, and she did an okay job. While the dialogue and characters have all been altered and amplified, the punchlines remain the same.

What made the book so powerful to me was the internal monologues of its characters. Their self-absorption is hilarious and captivating. The movie, by virtue of not being a book, can't really touch that theme. So instead it plays like an overblown Altmanesque riff on the novel. By the time I got oriented and stopped rolling my eyes at all silver-screen-Hollywoodization of the story, the movie was over.

If there was something here for me, I missed it.

And there we have it, my actual and imaginary readers: Four reviews in one. I hope you're happy. I know I am.

Self-Speech as Self-Defense: A review of Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

Admittedly, I'm writing this review in a rush.

I made a resolution this year to review every book I read for this blog, and I finished this book Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher, and I loved it so much that I ordered the movie from Netflix. The movie arrived in the mail today, and Ruthie and I are going to watch it after dinner, which Ruthie is currently preparing.

And I know that somehow, in some way I can't yet identify, writing a review of the book after watching the movie would be a whole different deal. How could I avoid a comparison? How could I speak to the content of the book when its images have been jostled around, overrun, and challenged by the movie?

And this book already has enough filmic baggage to deal with. For example, take the inevitably distracting fact that it was written by Carrie Fisher, who plays Princess Leia. It's hard, while reading, not to imagine Leia with her white gown and buns of hair narrating this story. It's also hard not to think of it as autobiography, which I'm sure much of it is. And then to wonder who did to her what the characters in the story do to the narrator.

And I suppose that layer adds to the whole story, which is good enough on its own. The main character essentially watches her own life and narrates it to those around her in witty one-liners, transcending her own pretensions by pretending to be honest by being honest.

As she runs through rehab, unemployment, a return to stardom, one relationship and one complicated unrelationship, Fisher does such a hilarious job, both as a character in the story and as an author fictionalizing her own very surreal life that I thought on more than one occassion of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

I told my friend this on the phone last night and I instantly wondered if that was a mistake. It might make it sound like I didn't understand IJ, or like I enjoy fluffy little Hollywood books as much as big blue masterpieces. I'll stand by the comparison, though. While Wallace treats the theme of honesty as a form of pretense incidentally, Fisher wallows around in it, draws it out, and tickles it. Her form is so understated and witty that I wonder if I should take it as seriously as I do, and feel so moved.

So there you have it, kids. If you liked Infinite Jest, you should check out Postcards from the Edge. It will blow your mind, but in a much smaller block of time, in a much more modest way, and with absolutely no endnotes.