For Your Consideration

There are many heralded best supporting actor roles in 2005, but how about considering an unheralded one?

For my money, one of the most startling performances (in a lousy picture) was Mr. Craig Bierko - who? - see below - playing the mood-swinger with the matinee-idol-looks psycho pugilist Max Baer in Cinderella Man - no one has ever made dating two leggy blondes during the Depression seem more malevolently rich than Caligula at play in his Senate, and no man has ever knit such brows. I was compelled to watch this on the flight back to London from Montreal - that winter paradise - and enjoyed it even with the sound off - because Bierko is that good.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0081572/

An even stranger possible Academy Award Nomination - and so left-field I wish to signal its worth in advance - is quirky thespian Ed Norton as slim noble and strange King of Jerusalem in the globally-derided The Kingdom of Heaven - Norton, who plays the role of the leper from behind a golden mask - sounds like 50s-era Brando, and yet manages to move like some masked orgiastic wretch in the traume that was S. Kubrick's Cruise-Kidman dream-bomb - Eyes Wide Shut (my favorite bad movie).

Oh - and happy new year to each and everyone of you.

Comments

Adam Fieled said…

Hey, I liked Eyes Wide Shut. What could be richer than sexual psycho-drama centered around a gorgeous redhead? And the last line of the script is an exquisite anti-climax. Semi-literally.

Mon Jan 02, 08:59:00 pm 2006

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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