1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 54: Blood & wine

R.I.P. Mikhail Gorbachev.

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R.I.P. Bob Rafelson, director of:

Five Easy Pieces, with Jack Nicholson and Karen Black …

Black Widow, the homoerotic thriller with Theresa Russell and Debra Winger …

Mountains of the Moon, the homoerotic Victorian-explorers-of-Africa biopic with Patrick Bergen and Iain Glen …

that is to say, three movies of which I’m very fond (perhaps inordinately so, in the case of Black Widow) …

also, the music video for my favorite Lionel Richie song, “All Night Long (All Night)” …

and Blood & Wine, which I hadn’t viewed until this week.

This is hardly Rafelson’s best movie, but it’s watchable. Like other Rafelson movies, this is an actor’s movie.

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There’s an awful-looking movie from 2007 that I’ve never gotten around to viewing, in which terminally ill Morgan Freeman and terminally ill Jack Nicholson go on a road trip and do cheesy, life-affirming things. Blood & Wine is like that; only, it’s Nicholson and Michael Caine. And it isn’t a road trip with a lot of stops, it’s a single jewel heist and its aftermath. And it isn’t life-affirming, it’s grim. These guys are cadaverous ne’er-do-wells who still hanker after the big score – who, after all these years, haven’t given up their pathetic dreams of glamor. Their time is running out.

Caine, in one of his scummiest roles, is dying. He coughs through all of his dialog. It would be terrible to listen to, if he weren’t so good at it.

Nicholson, too, is out of options. He has alienated his wife (Judy Davis), whose money has been propping up his wine shop – the venture that has enabled him to rub shoulders with, and scope out, the inhabitants of Miami’s gated communities. His romantic efforts are lavished upon a young nanny (Jennifer Lopez), who came over from Cuba in a little boat. She is as nice as anyone can be who’s hell-bent on obtaining other people’s property.

So, Caine and Nicholson are desperate. And bad. And they don’t like each other. They’re not so different from the criminal partners in Fargo, except they’re a lot older.

They hole up together in a seedy motel room. Caine, in between coughs, manages a soliloquy. “This is not an oceanfront suite in Marbella,” he wheezes. “There are no flowers or champagne from the management. I don’t, I don’t see a Swiss chocolate on my pillow. My masseuse is not at the door. And I am f⁠-⁠-⁠-⁠ing dying, Alex!”

“Take it easy, Vic,” says Nicholson.

Caine and Nicholson occupy half of the movie. Lopez’s screen time, and her affections, are divided between Nicholson and his earnest stepson (Stephen Dorff), whose mother is Davis. Davis and Dorff are the good guys; Lopez has to make up her mind whether to be bad or good. Yeah, OK, fine. I didn’t pay much attention to Lopez or to Dorff. I was too interested in the wicked old men.

And I enjoyed watching Davis, who, as in other movies, pulls faces that are downright acerbic. She may be mistreated, but she’s no pushover. She walks with a cane; perhaps it’s Nicholson who crippled her. Well, you know the rule that if a gun makes a casual appearance in an early scene, it’ll get used, later on, upon one of the characters. Apply this same rule to the cane. Again, as in Fargo, the movie has long passages of wry set-up … and then, bursts of violence. There is a car chase scene that is worthy of Fargo. Most of the movie isn’t in that league, but some of it is.

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P.S. After I watched Blood & Wine, I watched Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens, with younger Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, and Julia Anne Robinson, a cutie who died not long afterward, in a fire. I liked that movie, too. Two brothers and two women bum around wintry Atlantic City and fantasize about building a resort on a Hawaiian islet. Atlantic City’s grand old hotels are wonderful to look at. They were torn down not long thereafter.

A consumer report

I’m testing the public library’s interlibrary loan service. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to order books through the website (and, usually, I’m pretty handy at that sort of thing).

No matter. The library is a six-minute walk from my house. I make the journey.

I disclose my desire to the clerk. He puts in the order. It takes two minutes. All hunky dory.

Three days later, I get an email. Your loan will be ready in 2 to 4 weeks (boldface in the original).

Two to four weeks! Now, I don’t like to be an ingrate, but that’s just not going to cut it, at least not on a consistent basis. In two to four weeks I could have an entirely different set of interests. Thank goodness this book isn’t for a research project; it’s just Pop. 1280, another of Jim Thompson’s lurid, cynical novels about wicked small-town officers of the law. Another novel I could take or leave (although, at this moment, I’m definitely itching to read it).

There are days I wish I still worked at IUSB, where, as often as not, a desired book would be on campus; alternatively, I could order it from Bloomington, Fort Wayne, Kokomo, or wherever and pick it up after four or five days.

Step out of academia, though, and I get banished to the outer darkness.

Daniel is old enough now that I give him board books and they entertain him for a good ten minutes. Samuel, alas, is not as interested in books as he used to be. He watches too much YouTube.

For nerds

The latest video from Un mundo inmenso takes us on a quick tour through utopian social theory, with mentions of Plato, More, Bellamy, and Nozick …

… as a prelude to discussion of a homegrown work, Arjirópolis or Argirópolis (1850) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the author of Facundo.

Sarmiento wrote a lot of things. Even so, I’m a little shocked that I hadn’t heard of this book. I’m especially shocked that there’s no mention of it in the best English edition of Facundo.

I’m not shocked that Argirópolis wasn’t translated until recently, or that the translation’s price is $70. But there’s no fee attached to the Spanish original, in which Sarmiento uses utopian spelling (Arjentina, Uruguai, fewer accent marks, i rather than y, etc., etc.).

To call this book “utopian” is a bit misleading. A utopia is a no-place, or a no-place-in-particular, but the new country is precisely situated: it’s a confederation formed from Paraguay, Uruguay, and river-adjacent parts of Argentina, with a new capital on an island in the Río de la Plata. As in Facundo, the local geography determines the politics; the new land subscribes to no replicable political philosophy, though certain countries (e.g., the USA) serve as its models.

This is perhaps one of the more prescient “utopian” works, anticipating and even recommending the subservient role that Latin American countries would assume in global trade. Sarmiento is said to have been a Latin American apologist for neoliberalism well ahead of his time. To assess whether this is fair, I’d have to read the book.

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If the world had only twenty countries of roughly equal surface area, what would they be?, Un mundo inmenso asks in another recent video.

So: the channel has turned to counterfactual speculation. I hope it isn’t running out of things from actuality to discuss. This is an immense world, after all.

The punishment of Achan and his household

This is the third straight week that our neighbor has mowed our front lawn without our having asked him to. The lawn hadn’t even gotten very scraggly.

It’s kind of him, but it’s making me nervous.

I’ve begun taking Samuel to the library for longish periods – something I only can do if Karin is with Daniel. (I couldn’t attend to Daniel and let Samuel loose in a public place; he’d get into trouble.) The main attraction of the library, for Samuel, is the huge variety of crayons and markers in the children’s play area. There are some cool toys there, too, but Samuel colors the whole while.

The attraction, for me, is that going to the library uses up a little more of Samuel’s day. I’ll say it again. A lot of parenting is just running out the clock.

Our pastor has been preaching through the book of Joshua. This week’s sermon was about Achan’s sin and how he and his household were punished for it. Why were Achan’s sons, daughters, oxen, donkeys, and sheep put to death along with Achan? Because they knew about the sin and didn’t do anything about it, said the pastor. They, too, were responsible. I’ve been told this quite a few times, but I can’t accept it. Achan’s sons and daughters may have been complicit in his sin. But his oxen, donkeys, and sheep? Naaaaah. Well, one might say, they’re just livestock; they don’t matter. But animals do matter, at least according to the last verse of the book of Jonah. They matter very much, and they’re blameless, yet they’re liable to be destroyed. Also, why do the Israelites bother to burn up Achan’s tents? Apparently, some sort of literal or symbolic cleansing is taking place; and if this is true concerning Achan’s household within Israel, why shouldn’t it also be true of the destruction of non-Israelites – and of beasts, tents, garments, and other goods – during the wars of conquest? But the idea of large-scale violent purging doesn’t sit well with us twenty-first century folk. Which is good; but it makes Joshua hard for us to understand.

Sally Rooney; body-text fonts, pt. 6: Garth Graphic

This is another August when I’ll fail to read Light in August. Instead, I’ll finish my second Sally Rooney novel. (No, I haven’t seen the TV episodes, which are reputed to be steamy.) I’m pretty sure Rooney is the youngest novelist I’ve read – the youngest, as in, the most recently born; not as in, the youngest to write a novel. That person is Daisy Ashford.

Rooney is less jaundiced than Ashford was at age nine. But you can sense Rooney inching toward disillusionment. These are her novels’ titles: Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Rooney’s pacing is propulsive. Her scenes are tautly constructed. Her protagonists make me feel like an old fogy: I spend most of the time feeling sorry for them. I suppose that for a lot of her fans, her blank young men and, especially, her aloof young women are personal reference points, imaginary peers for modeling oneself after or for suffering with or for projecting one’s self-conception onto. Some books lend themselves to that sort of thing. Jane Eyre is a fine example, carefully and richly realized though Jane and Rochester are as characters.

As much as I like Jane Eyre, I don’t read that way anymore: I stopped around age thirty-two or thirty-three. Sally Rooney is thirty-one.

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Now, this month’s mini-essay on the typefaces in my books.

One doesn’t often see this font used for setting body text. Which is too bad!

Look at those inconspicuous commas and apostrophes. Look at those very conspicuous, asymmetically serifed, lower-case ys. Look at those interrogation marks, and the big, spiky serifs on the Gs: were I a fly fisherman, this is the font I’d choose.