Liars and Saints

If ever there were a documentary that feels like a PD James murder mystery, it's "Natchez."  The setup is almost too good to be true. In Natchez, Mississippi, there are eccentric boomers who belong to a "Garden Club"; each boomer leads tours through his or her own haunted mansion. Tension arises because a Black woman joins the Garden Club, and the Black woman wants her white colleagues to begin to wrestle both with slavery and with the *legacy* of slavery. The ensuing "community meeting"--with deep sighs, half-ironic statements, and the frequent clearing of throats--is a wonderfully passive-aggressive disaster. It is miraculous that someone agreed to have a camera present for this event. That's frequently the case throughout the movie--people say terrible things. People say these things on camera! The filmmaker must have counted her lucky stars night after night after night. (It's unfortunately a cliche of documentary filmmaking that the final ...

 Hammerstein's "If I Loved You" is more complicated than it looks. A descendant of Hammerstein's "Make Believe," "If I Loved You" is about coyness. Billy *does* love Julie Jordan. He can't say that. Pretending he does *not* love Julie, he suggests that he is going to weave a "counterfactual tapestry," but what he sings is (in fact) the truth. If I loved you.. Time and again, I would try to say... All I'd want you to know... If I loved you... Words wouldn't come in an easy way. Round in circles I'd go... Billy is of course predicting the future; he will be a very flawed husband, more flawed than the portrait he offers in his song. Julie understands this -- and, regardless, she says yes. Yes to everything. We're often most articulate when we're wearing a mask. Billy can find the perfect words to describe reality...but only when he is role-playing: Longing to tell you -- but afraid and shy -- I'd let my golden cha...

 *Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe for "The Mauritanian" but failed to secure an Oscar nomination. This essentially does not happen. In Foster's category, this hadn't happened even once in the previous 44 years.  *Dino De Laurentiis is the villain in the Thomas Harris story -- pushing for "Hannibal Rising," purely for cash. Deep down, no one wanted "Hannibal Rising." When it happened, it was embarrassing for Harris. *One odd twist in the story of Hannibal Lecter: Anthony Hopkins's performance is beloved, but many fans would not rank Hopkins as their ideal Lecter. Many would give the title to Mads Mikkelsen. Some might give the title to Brian Cox. (No one is fond of Gaspard Ulliel, the star of "Hannibal Rising.") *No one really understands Trump's fascination with Lecter. (Bill Clinton, the great explainer, cannot explain.) There are two main (contradictory) theories. One: Trump wants Americans to imagine immigrants as Hannibal Lect...

  My husband was drawn to the "Quad God"; he thought the Quad God's trajectory was really a parable about hubris. "You just don't name yourself the Quad God . That's asking for disaster." Of course we read that Ilia Malinin had chosen that nickname in a facetious way; he intended to be self-mocking. But I'm reminded of a lesson I learned in a creative writing class. Never, never choose an "ironic" title for your short story. This is just a gateway to confusion and misinterpretation. My own "Olympics journey" has led me to some shocking discoveries. For example: Kristi Yamaguchi is now a self-outed Conservative Republican. And--having lost the gold--Michelle Kwan once mounted a comeback by skating to the melody from the song "Fields of Gold." Was this meta-commentary--or just an athlete responding to a particular tune she liked? We'll never really know. In this house, we're still divided on the Ilia Malinin questi...

 Stefan Merrill Block had a hard time learning about sex. For a long while, he thought that "beating off" was a brass-tacks description of a process, so he would literally slap his own organ until he grew bored. He attempted to have an online relationship with a peer--"Skittles4U"--but he overlooked certain bits of subtext. When the "peer" sent a photo--a self-portrait of a man in his thirties--things fizzled. In college, hoping to create a dramatic rupture within his family, Block willed himself to become gay. He encouraged his own body to ignore its "programming." No dice. Not one of these stories is earning media attention; "Homeschooled" is buzzy because of its descriptions of Block's mentally ill mother. Block's mother--depressed and isolated in Plano, TX--kept her child home from school for something like five years. There was nothing like a curriculum. Block's mother physically assaulted her child, required him to cra...

  As "The Simpsons" celebrates its 800th episode, I've been thinking about my favorite, "I Love Lisa." This is a Valentine's Day special. Ralph Wiggum is upset to discover that no one has left a card for him. Lisa feels a surge of pity--she gives Ralph a drawing of a train. The message is this: "I Choo-Choo-Choose You." Ralph misinterprets the gesture; even after Lisa confesses that she is uninterested in romance, Ralph chooses to be persistent. He drags Lisa to a taping of The Krusty Show, where he announces that he plans to marry her; the announcement is caught on national TV. I like this because it reminds me so much of James Marshall--the pitfalls of "gift-giving" were among Marshall's major concerns. I also like the feeling of a "campus"; Bart watches and records Lisa's behavior (because Bart is a Krusty fan), and Chief Wiggum gets involved (having decided to give his son very bad advice). I think this show is a pro...

  I'm especially fond of the waiter at the village pub; things aren't going the way he wants, in life, and he has forgotten (perhaps willfully) to put on an act. In icy silence, he brings your food. When you offer thanks, he says, "No problem," and his tone conveys a different message. "This--all of this--is, emphatically, A PROBLEM." The young waiter has a colleague--and these two flirt inappropriately during the overlap in their work hours. Maybe they'll have a brighter future. *** A kid at the high school died via suicide; the teachers did not know how to respond, so they banned "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." There is a suicide in that novel...ergo.... Local critics complained. We don't discuss suicide when a suicide occurs? Do we also ban "Hamlet," "Les Miserables," "Anna Karenina," "Spring Awakening," "Mrs. Dalloway," "Oedipus," "Macbeth," "Fun Home,...

  Anne Fadiman has written about Coleridge, about a Hmong community in America, about "them" as a singular pronoun with unknown antecedent, and about the habit of annotating books. She understands that a writer needs to "seduce" a reader. So one of her essays begins in this way: It was a late afternoon in November, and I was hosting a college talk by Mark Helprin. During the Q&A, Helprin told the assembled students that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible. A student stood up. Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy. She asked Helprin if he really meant that. There was a collective intake of breath in the room. It was what everyone else had been thinking but no one had been brave or brazen enough to say... What follows is a twin portrait. Ostensibly, Fadiman is writing about an impressive student. But--really--she is writing about herself. It's clear that she is tied to her student (...

  An indictment of Reagan-era greed, "Little Shop of Horrors" is as close as any work gets to "perfect musical" status. I have really only two complaints. One: the staging of the climactic battle, at least in the current version, is not very convincing. Two: Howard Ashman is sometimes a bit lazy in his mockery of Audrey (particularly in Audrey's awed reference to a "twelve-inch screen," in her "I Want" number). What is especially chilling is the tension between the two main storylines. Seymour tells us that he wants "a way out of here." Audrey, meanwhile, wants domestic tranquility. These two wishes do not have to clash; Seymour could cash a check early in Act Two and leave the flower shop. But Seymour is rapacious. It's Audrey who gets top billing--and, certainly, the current Audrey (Joy Woods) deserves top billing. Audrey's journey is perverse and fascinating. She can't even articulate her wish until the homestretch of...

  To me, the "Lincoln Lawyer" stories lack some of the power of "Bosch."  Connelly's Bosch is like Batman; he has a mythic storyline. His mother was murdered; he, Bosch, also carries the wound of Eleanor Wish's violent death. The "Bosch" TV series has the major asset that is Titus Welliver; though Manuel Garcia-Rulfo has charisma, he simply can't hijack a scene in the way that Welliver can. Welliver often seems to have ten or twelve mysterious, unstated thoughts happening behind his eyes--Garcia-Rulfo can't achieve the same impact. That said, "The Lincoln Lawyer" does profit from Neve Campbell's work. I can't remember the character of Maggie from the print version of "The Law of Innocence"--a novel I did not love. But--wisely--the TV producers have given Maggie quite a bit to do. She has to help her ex-husband while also paying attention to her current relationship. She has to listen to Mickey's wishes--but s...

 Around one year ago, I had a chance to attend a wedding, a gay wedding. As is often the case, one half of the couple seemed to have the "louder" personality; he was working on voting rights, so he designed the "order of activities" to resemble a voting pamphlet. Small stick figures illustrated the text. The font came from the NYC subway signs; each activity involved numbered " how-to- style" instructions. The louder spouse was a world traveler--so the food stations were from far-flung corners of the Earth; each station represented an actual, bizarre trip that the spouse had taken (and laminated photos drove the point home). All well and good--but I trained my eye on the quieter spouse. Still waters can run deep.  Not shockingly, the quieter spouse stole the show. He did this in his vows. He spoke about struggling to come to terms with his sexual orientation--feeling, for a long time, that he had to be guarded and "perfect" to compensate for his ...

 My family has a tradition of benign polyps. Polyps in the colon! They're benign sometimes, but they could morph. They could become vindictive--at any moment. What this means for me is that I get to "jump the colonoscopy line." For a long while, I've been thinking about my 45th birthday--that special time when I will drink a potion, spend hours in the bathroom, and then get probed. I'll always recall how gracefully my spouse handled this event in his own timeline. He even seemed to enjoy himself. He was loopy after the procedure--and we headed home to Brooklyn to watch "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (It was the one where Larry David steals flowers from an impromptu roadside memorial.) From certain angles, an early colonoscopy is not a twist to be celebrated. But I'm sort of pleased--because this will generate new material. And so I know how Julia Wertz feels. Wertz is my favorite cartoonist. I'm including her new work here.

 The famous story about Barbara Pym is that--after a long run--she fell out of fashion. Her career seemed to be over. Then, British luminaries were asked to name the most underrated writer of the past 75 years. (Why not?) Only one name earned double recognition--from Philip Larkin and from a critic. The name was Barbara Pym. It's a cliche to say, "I didn't want this book to end." I almost always want a book to end. I get ready for the next option. But, with Barbara Pym's "The Sweet Dove Died," I did actually ration the pages--because I didn't want the book to end. "Dove," the final Pym book published in Pym's own lifetime, is deliberately darker than Pym's legendary "early-career" novels ("Excellent Women," "A Glass of Blessings," and so on). It's also full of sex. Gay sex! (Pym has an elliptical style, at times, but you can sense what she is alluding to.) Finally, Pym's characters are very real...

 The strange thing about any kind of good family counseling is that little asides can have more weight than the "big declamatory" moments. I was flustered at the start of a session because I had just finished an hour of tutoring, and my student's "absolute value" chapter did not match my own "absolute value" chapter. I had prepared certain material--and I then had to observe, in real time, that I'd made an error and I'd created a need for on-the-spot course correction. I happen to be weirdly insecure about absolute value, and I had to say, in a faux-calm voice, "We'll start here next week." The counselor I talk to rummaged around in her "cognitive-behavioral" toolbox. Apparently, if something small is bothering you, you have to "drill down" to a core belief, the real source of the distress. Then you have to try to "tell a different story" about yourself. So--for example--if you flub a question about a...

  A Gothic novel tends to be built on family secrets and a hint of the supernatural. "A Beautiful Family"--the recent debut novel by Jennifer Trevelyan--fits the bill. It's c. 1985. Vanessa, a teen girl, seems drawn to the ocean waves. When she almost drowns, she describes a feeling of having been summoned, as if by the gods of the ocean. Could this be possible? Or is Vanessa making up the story to conceal the fact that she just wanted to be rescued by a hunky lifeguard? The question is left unanswered. Vanessa's family is rotting away; the "parasites" in question are just a series of lies. Vanessa's mother is lying about her rapport with a vacationing neighbor. Vanessa is lying about her extracurricular activities. The narrator--ten-year-old Alix--is committing multiple sins of omission. For example, she has suspicions about a missing Walkman--but if she shares what she knows, she will be disciplined. The short-term misery seems to outweigh the long-ter...

 One thing Sia handles particularly well is storytelling. A pop song can easily fail to seem rooted in the "here and now"--we don't know which room the speaker is in. But Sia's speakers have a way of looking around and noticing the weather: Sun is up; I'm a mess. Gotta get out now, gotta run from this. Here comes the shame. Here comes the shame. To show that the speaker is troubled, Sia has her recall some recent events: Help, I have done it again. I have been here many times before. Hurt myself again today. And the worst part is there's no one else to blame. I always admire Sia's candor. When working with Disney, Sia chooses to be slightly sunnier--but the result is *not* cloying. I messed up tonight. I lost another fight. Lost to myself--but I'll just start again. I keep falling down. I keep on hitting the ground. I always get up now to see what's next. It's impossible not to find this protagonist charming--and Shakira's buoyant performan...

 I felt that "The Pitt" became slightly preachy and monotonous toward the end of the first season, but I was still engaged. What interested me was the choice to focus on doctors' moments of insanity--we all know that many of the patients are kooky, but the human frailty of the caretakers is sometimes (elsewhere) overlooked. Dr. Samira Mohan seems "high on life"--she wants to keep on picking up cases even as she enters her fifteenth hour of work. A colleague observes that she is just feeling a surge of adrenaline and she will very quickly crash. We next see Dr. Mohan crying, alone, in the bathroom--then scrubbing away the tears and leaving the workplace. This was a subtle, insightful story. It resisted the siren song of melodrama. It also seemed to have been lifted from a doctor's actual testimony--like one of the monologues in Studs Terkel's "Working." The protagonist--Dr. Robby--cannot tolerate the "vax denial" tics of a particular f...

 I find deep pleasure in disliking something I'm "supposed to" like -- and that's how I feel about the current revival of "Ragtime." Everything about this effort seems misguided. It's a resuscitation of a mediocre show that does not need to be resuscitated. Also, the "bold vision" seems to be this: "We've taken everything from the original production and made it  slightly worse !" It's like the 1990s "Ragtime" -- but without a set. It's like the 1990s "Ragtime" -- but without Audra McDonald. It's like the 1990s "Ragtime" -- but without an effective publicity team. (It seemed especially unfortunate that the production announced a "first choice" Sarah, only to lose her. The team then announced a "second choice" Sarah, only to lose her. "Grab your wallet and come on out for.... our *third* choice !") "Why look for answers where none occur?" The earnest,...

 A personal essay should be iconoclastic. "Against Love." "Against Nature." If the essay just wants to affirm "received truth," it's going to be boring, like a bad watercolor on a coffee mug in an airport gift shop. Alice McDermott knows the rules, so she opens her essay by deflating Emerson. She suggests that, when Emerson told Whitman, "I greet you at the start of a long career," he was being silly. There is no "start" to a writer's career. A writer does not "make progress" -- everyday is square one. Every laptop screen can be a source of "rookie anxiety." McDermott has a talent for surprise. She next tells a tale about having been nominated for a National Book Award for "That Night." There was a sense of calm in the room, because everyone *knew* the prize would go to Toni Morrison for "Beloved."  The winner's name was called. It was an obscure novelist -- for a book that is (now) ut...

 I agree with the Roger Ebert website that "KPop Demon Hunters" has a script problem; the dialogue just isn't on par with the songs. The movie starts to lose steam in the second half. Oddly, I'm familiar with this problem. It's the problem in almost every Sondheim show (and particularly in "Follies") -- you have amazing musical interludes and then you have banal chit chat. But the music! "KPop" borrows from the world of Howard Ashman. (This connection is underlined through the casting of Lea Salonga, a living legend who once worked with Ashman.) An opening number needs to inform you about the plot -- but, really, it needs to introduce you to the *style* you're going to be "wearing" for the next two hours. Ashman uses an opening number to tell you about his own special cheekiness: Little shop! Little shop of horrors... Watch 'em drop! Never stop the terror... Call a cop... Little shop of horrors.... No! No, no! Nuh-oh! "KP...

 One of my guilty pleasures when traveling is a trip to any near-my-hotel movie theater.  Often, I can finesse this as an effort to identify "local color" -- the quirky indie palace that Judy Blume built in Key West, the terrific museum-slash-screening-room in Miami.  It's a different story in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Caribbean Cinema is just like AMC -- by another name. What I can say is that it's really nice to see a movie without the Nicole Kidman speech. Without the guy who drives a race-car. Without the booming voice and its nonsense declaration: "LIGHT is OUR HERO...." I felt a little more virtuous when I visited the bookstore. There in San Juan, I picked up "Dear Dolly," a series of "agony aunt" letters that Dolly Alderton wrote for publication in her early thirties. Immediately afterward, I met a waitress with an abiding passion for Alderton's work. "I read her memoir last year....and I plan to read it again one decade ...

  "The Correspondent" is an unusual mystery story. Sybil has a secret about her past; the secret rears its head in the present. In the present, family relationships are strained and Sybil herself sometimes behaves in odd ways. Sybil's daughter--Fiona--is determined to solve the mystery. Fiona enlists the help of a family friend, Rosalie. But Sybil sees this bond as a kind of betrayal. Ruptures occur; Rosalie keeps pushing. In a heroic display of self-control, Sybil decides to make a change. She hears her friend; she recognizes good intentions. She offers a confession. All is (sort of) well. As the family story unspools itself, little subplots pop up. These are like the victim stories on "The Pitt." A Syrian desk worker tries to climb the professional ladder in the United States. A beleaguered Dean of English considers allowing non-students to audit courses at the University of Maryland. Joan Didion--yes, Joan Didion!--seeks editorial feedback for her draft of ...