Miles David Moore

I saw Paul Newman only once in the flesh, several years ago, at a National Press Club luncheon. He was sitting with Joanne Woodward two tables away from me, listening to a speech given by his close friend Gore Vidal. I only glimpsed Newman and heard none of his luncheon conversation, but the fact that he paid for his ticket and sat in the audience spoke volumes about him to me. One call to the National Press Club Speakers Committee, and he could have sat at the head table. Apparently he did not make that call.

That memory seems typical of a man who was always reluctant to pull rank as one of the world's most beloved movie stars, except when he could do so to help others. It may seem egomaniacal to plaster your face across millions of bottles of salad dressing and spaghetti sauce, until you realize that Newman took not one penny of profit for doing so, but gave all the profits--more than $150 million at the time of his death--to various charities.

One of the handsomest men who ever walked in front of a camera, Newman never overtly traded on his looks, but chose roles that would stretch his talents as an actor. He was not afraid to play characters that were ethically flawed (Fast Eddie in "The Hustler" and "The Color of Money") or even downright hateful (Hud, a name as hard and vicious as the character it signified). Of course, Newman could also charm the sun out of the sky, as he did in his great collaborations with Robert Redford, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting." But even Butch and "The Sting's" Henry Gondorff were equivocal characters. Less extravagantly talented than his contemporary Marlon Brando, and never quite reaching the heights Brando did at his greatest, Newman nevertheless had a better and longer career than Brando, with a longer list of memorable roles and notably fewer embarrassments. Hard work and discipline pay off.

So what else can I say? Newman had one of the longest and happiest Hollywood marriages; he was a longtime, level-headed and eloquent advocate of any and all things that represented social and political enlightenment; and any man who takes up auto racing at 40 has to have guts of titanium. I will leave long encomiums to those who knew him best. I will only say that young actors today could do far, far worse than to emulate Paul Newman. As is always appropriate with actors, I also will quote Shakespeare--namely "Julius Caesar," Act 5, Scene 5:

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, This was a man!

.

Some may consider it unseemly that I am writing what amounts to a mash note to an eighty-five-year-old woman, but when people realize that the woman in question is Kathleen Byron, I might be forgiven. Opportunities to see Byron in her glory days in films of the 1940s and 1950s are rare in the United States, so the new Criterion Collection DVD of "The Small Back Room," a 1949 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film that gave Byron a rare over-the-title starring role, is cause for celebration.

A favorite actress (and sometime love interest) of Powell, Byron should have become a star on the level of her contemporaries (and "Black Narcissus" co-stars) Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons, but somehow never did. To be sure, she was very different from Kerr and Simmons: where their beauty was delicate, hers was bold. With her heart-shaped face, almond eyes, high cheekbones and aquiline nose, Byron could look either regally magnificent or utterly terrifying, as the role demanded, but she never failed to turn heads. ScreenOnline, a Web site devoted to British film and TV, hit the nail on the head: "Described by Michael Powell as looking `secret' and `witty,' Kathleen Byron brought a mysterious sensuality to British films as rare as it was underused."

To see "Black Narcissus," for my money the most beautiful, sensual color film ever made, is to become hooked on Byron forever. As Sister Ruth, a brittle Anglican nun driven mad by her unrequited love for the dashing Mr. Dean (David Farrar), Byron gives one of the all-time great screen portrayals of malevolent insanity. (Think Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" crossed with Anthony Perkins in "Psycho," and you're close; but that still does not give you the overwhelming power of Byron's performance, or the unique fascination she brought to the screen.) In one scene, having just broken her vows, Byron's Sister Ruth mockingly applies jungle-red lipstick in front of her superior, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr, also wonderful). Byron makes that simple act seem like the most obscene, diabolical sacrilege imaginable.

After that great performance, alas, Byron found herself more and more typecast. Her one attempt at a Hollywood career--in the film "Young Bess," which reunited her with Kerr and Simmons--proved abortive; online sources cite family obligations in England and her inability to find a good Hollywood agent. In any case, Byron returned to England, married the journalist and author Alaric Jacob, and combined marriage and motherhood with a still-busy career, mostly on British TV. Occasionally she would get a small part in a big-budget production; in "Saving Private Ryan," she played the elderly Ryan's wife in the film's framing sequences. Her son, Jasper Jacob, followed his mother into show business as an actor and musician. Meanwhile, Byron remained sufficiently popular in Britain that the BBC broadcast "Remembering Sister Ruth," a documentary on her life and career, in 1997.

"The Small Back Room" is particularly gratifying in that it shows Byron's gifts as a straightforward romantic lead. In a way, the film could be said to complete the story of Sister Ruth and Mr. Dean, for her leading man is David Farrar. Farrar's Sammy Rice--a World War II bomb defusion expert sinkling into drink and despair after being maimed by a German UXB--is not all that different from Mr. Dean, but Byron's sane, kind-hearted Susan is a 180-degree turn from Sister Ruth, and proves she could have had the same sort of career that Kerr or Simmons did. There are moments in the film where Byron takes your breath away with her radiant beauty, and her devotion to Farrar is both touching and completely believable.

In any case, Kathleen Byron--at least in the U.S.--is a woefully unsung actress. Rent "Black Narcissus" (also available from the Criterion Collection) and "The Small Back Room," and you'll see exactly what I mean.

I don't subscribe to HBO, so I had to wait to see the "John Adams" miniseries until it came out on DVD. I can already imagine the voluminous, indignant letter Adams would have sent HBO, detailing his objections to historical events taken out of sequence or context--the DVDs' own timelines reveal them--not to mention his outrage at the portrayal of his intimate behavior with Mrs. Adams in the boudoir. (Right behind it would have been a letter from Thomas Jefferson, expressing his outrage at the casting of an Englishman to play him.) However, we residents of 2008 can only judge a miniseries by its entertainment value, and from that standpoint "John Adams" is outstanding in every way.

There were two main objections to the miniseries when it first appeared, both to my mind completely unsound. The first was that the series made Adams less admirable than he was in David McCullough's Pulitzer-winning biography. Frankly, that's the one thing I found wanting in McCullough's book--that he tended to gloss over Adams' well-documented character flaws. Screenwriter Kirk Ellis did a wonderful job of presenting the whole man--vain, petty, quarrelsome, yet also strong, brilliant, courageous, loving, and incorruptible. Which is more admirable, I ask you--a plaster saint, or a difficult, even impossible man who achieves greatness by fighting and largely overcoming his faults?

The second criticism was that Paul Giamatti was unconvincing as Adams, a slam unfounded to the point of insanity. Who did they want as Adams--Clint Eastwood? Giamatti is not only an apt physical match for the historical Adams, he is also perhaps the greatest living expert in playing lovably flawed men who struggle with themselves to do the right thing. Vocally, Giamatti does a brilliant job of handling Adams' various orations, and he brings ferocious life to Adams' iron determination as well as to his loneliness and uncertainty. The scenes where Adams is alone and ill in the Netherlands, struggling to persuade unresponsive bankers to lend the fledgling America the money it needs to survive, are heart-wrenching beyond measure.

I could write much, much more about this enthralling miniseries. Suffice it to say that Laura Linney, as Abigail Adams, is fully Giamatti's equal, just as Abigail Adams was her husband's match in every way. (If they both don't take home Emmys this year, it will be an injustice of monstrous proportions, even by the standards of a notoriously unjust awards program.) I must also pay homage to the first-rate performances of David Morse as George Washington, Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson, Tom Wilkinson as Benjamin Franklin, Sarah Polley as John and Abigail's ill-fated daughter Nabby, and Kevin Trainor as Charles, John and Abigail's pathetic wastrel son. The production is marked by its superb attention to detail--I noted with pleasure the black burn-marks on the walls behind the candle sconces. This is the first portrayal of the American Revolution, in TV or cinema, that really made me feel I was witnessing daily life in the 18th century as it really was. (Sometimes it gets gruesome: the scene in which Abigail has herself and her children inoculated against smallpox will haunt your nightmares for months.) "John Adams" is an excellent, excellent production. If you haven't seen it, rent it now.

Sooner or later, we all have to do it. I've finally seen "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in its entirety, from Netflix. It's been on TV often enough, but somehow I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm on an average evening to watch nearly three hours of Alec Guinness sweating and striving to build the blasted bridge while William Holden and Jack Hawkins sweated and strove through the jungle to, well, blast the bridge.

I found I liked the movie better than I expected, though I'm not sure it entirely lives up to its reputation. It certainly contains many wonderful things, including the heart-stopping Sri Lankan locations captured magnificently by cinematographer Jack Hildyard; the legendary performances of Guinness, Holden, Hawkins, and Sessue Hayakawa; and the film's final 15 or 20 minutes, which point up as powerfully as any movie in history the futility of war and the way it warps men's minds. But, against those virtues, you have to set a whole lot of building, building, building and slogging, slogging, slogging. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" undeniably is a fine movie, but--as one critic said of the medieval epic "Piers Plowman"--no one ever wished it longer.

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" marked the beginning of Lean's career as an epic director, which reached its apex with "Lawrence of Arabia" and also included "Doctor Zhivago," "Ryan's Daughter" and "A Passage to India." This has stirred a constant debate among movie buffs--similar to the constant debate among musical buffs as to whether Rodgers was greater with Hart or Hammerstein--as to whether the great David Lean, the important David Lean, began or ended with "The Bridge on the River Kwai." From "River Kwai" on, Lean undeniably gave us some tremendous movie moments, but also some tremendous longueurs. Sorry to you "Zhivago" fans out there, but for me the early, intimate Lean films--the Lean of "Brief Encounter," "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations"--are the ones I never tire of seeing. This was brought home to me particularly by a recent viewing, after many years, of "Hobson's Choice," the comedy Lean directed only three years before "River Kwai." Based on the 1915 play by Harold Brighouse, "Hobson's Choice" has some tartly witty things to say about the British class system, as a smart, tough-minded young woman rebels against her drunken, tyrannical bootmaker father by dragging the father's most talented workman to the altar and setting him up in business for himself. The social satire is of necessity more meaningful to British than American audiences, but what all audiences will appreciate are the superb comic performances, starting with Charles Laughton, an absolute scream as the tosspot dad, and John Mills, who grows from a scared little rabbit of a man to a lion ready to roar. "Hobson's Choice" represents probably the best role ever given to the excellent character actress Brenda de Banzie (she also was memorable in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "The Entertainer"). And who is the pretty, baby-faced blonde playing de Banzie's youngest sister? Why, it's none other than Prunella Scales, twenty years before she would write her own page in British comedy history as Sybil in "Fawlty Towers."

"Hobson's Choice" is shot in sharp black-and-white, restricted largely to a few indoor sets including Laughton's shop and the pub where he hangs out. Certainly it presents nothing like the glorious panoramas that "River Kwai" provides us. Yet I know which movie I could sit down and watch right now, and every month hereafter.

There are only a couple of weeks left to view "The Cinema Effect: Dreams," the compelling current exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., but if you're in DC or plan to be there shortly, be sure to go see it. This bracing exhibit of 20 avant-garde films from 21 filmmakers demonstrates the power of the medium to enter and, in some ways, create the subconscious of the viewer.

The curators of the exhibit designed it astutely, with an eye for effect. Douglas Gordon's "Off Screen." the first exhibit, lures viewers into a properly dreaming state, as a beam of light projects their shadows at double size onto a wavering orange curtain. From there we proceed to the granddaddy of all dream movies, Andy Warhol's "Sleep"--mercifully a mere two hours of the 5 1/2-hour original, as the naked poet John Giorno lies still in his own world of dreams. The third exhibit is masterfully insinuating--Stan Douglas' "Overture," a grainy black-and-white film of a train trip through the tunnels and trestles of the Canadian Rockies, seen from the engineer's view, as a flat-voiced narrator intones the great passages from "Swann's Way" about the twilight state between waking and sleep. And so on, until Harun Farocki's TV-monitor exhibit, "Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades"--presenting documentary images as well as scenes from the work of such filmmakers as Chaplin, Antonioni and Von Trier--releases us back into the workaday world.

To describe each exhibit in detail would take much more time and space than I have (and would also spoil the fun of seeing the exhibit), so I'll only touch on a few of my favorites. The most written about of all of them is probably Christoph Girardet's "Release," which stretches Fay Wray's famous scream at her first sight of King Kong into a half-agonizing, half-ludicrous 9 1/2 minutes. Darren Almond's "Geisterbahn" is the nightmare analogue to Stan Douglas' dream state--a darkly lit trip into a carnival funhouse, accompanied by an unnerving electronic music score. Chibo Aoshima's vibrantly colored five-panel animation "City Glow" forges a link between anime and nightmare science fiction, as mutating skyscrapers sway and chatter at each other. Kelly Richardson's "Exiles of the Shattered Star" channels Magritte as it depicts flaming meteorites falling in endless succession into a peaceful mountain lake. Perhaps the most amazing of all is Anthony McCall's "You and I," in which a projector beams ever-changing parabolas onto a pitch-black wall as machines shoot water vapor into the air. If you walk into the projector's beam and look into it, you will find yourself enveloped in an amazing tunnel of light and smoke.

I meant to write about this exhibit much sooner--it opened in February--but I found that one viewing wasn't enough for me to take it all in, and various obligations delayed my second visit. Oh well--it's still there at the Hirshhorn until May 11, if you're in DC and can possibly take the time. If you miss it, all is not lost: "The Cinema Effect: Realities," the second part of the exhibit, opens at the Hirshhorn in June, and if it's half as good as "Dreams," it will be well worth seeing.

A few months ago, I wrote about Kathi Wolfe's pending chapbook, "Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems." The chapbook is now available for $10 from Pudding House Press in Columbus, Ohio, and I assure you your $10 will be well spent indeed if you buy it. These poems achieve the very highest goals of historical/biographical poetry--to project themselves into the inner life and world of the subject with total believability, and to do so using language that is both precise and beautiful. Wolfe's Keller is not the plaster saint of sentimental legend, but flawed, at times irascible, and always scintillating. Wolfe begins her collection with "Q&A: Palace Theater," a marvelous found poem that features Keller's own words from her appearances in vaudeville:

What is the greatest obstacle to world peace?
The human race.

What is the slowest thing in the world?
Congress.

Do you think women are men's intellectual equals?
God made woman foolish
so that she might be a suitable companion to man.

Do you desire your sight more than anything else in the world?
No! I would rather walk with a friend in the dark
than walk alone in the light.

From this statement of original principles, Wolfe creates a flesh-and-blood Keller who disarms us with her brilliance, wit, insight, and romantic intensity. "They call me wonder woman, then say/they'd rather be dead than live like me./I'd like to blow smoke rings around/their pity," Keller says in "Fingertips and Cigarettes: Helen at the Cafe." In "Dreaming of Heaven," Keller defends her perceptions of the world: "What right/do I have to even talk/of color, you demand.//No more right/than you/to tell of Paris,/unless, like me,/you've inhaled/the mingled scent/of cigarettes and hyacinths/along the Seine." Yet Keller by no means is always on the defensive; there are poems of great tenderness, such as "Brush Strokes: Helen Greets a Friend": "Your mustache/dances with my fingers,/tickles their tips. Your skin, rough,/misshapen as a skewed moon crater,/smells like sun-drenched lavender." In "A Letter to my Hands," Keller says of them, "You exhale the dots of Braille," and concludes, "You'd go on strike/if I were the factory boss/and you the union./Who knows/why you stick with me?/I only know,/apart from you,/I couldn't even breathe."

As a journalist, Wolfe writes often about differently abled persons and disability issues; in "Helen Takes the Stage," she has raised advocacy for the differently abled to art--much as Helen Keller herself did. This is a deeply humane, moving and funny book, and you can buy a copy from www.puddinghouse.com.

Roger Ebert may have been the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, but Pauline Kael was the first to become a household name (and the first to win the National Book Award). Critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, Kael was a one-woman Cahiers du Cinema, combining an encyclopedic knowledge of cinematic history, theory and technique with a tart, vivid literary style and very strong opinions as to what made a good movie. She excelled at the long-form reviews she published in The New Yorker every week, in which she could expound on the cinematic trends she considered important and the actors, directors and screenwriters she most admired (or, more memorably, despised). However, readers can still get an idea of her style and her influence by reading 5001 Nights at the Movies, a compendium of her encapsulated reviews still in print 26 years after the first edition appeared.

Rereading Kael after a number of years, I can attest that her reviews always make a bracing read, even when (fairly often in my case) I disagree with her. I still don't comprehend Kael's enthusiasm for John Boorman's indigestible Excalibur("It's as if Boorman were guiding us down a magic corridor and kept parting the curtains in front of us," she wrote); still less do I endorse her dismissal of John Ford's masterful The Quiet Man as "fearfully Irish and green and hearty" or of the exquisite David Lean-Noel Coward Brief Encounter as "implicitly condescending." And don't get me started on her downgrading of Hitchcock (a petit maitre if ever there was one") while she praised Brian De Palma for doing Hitchcock knockoffs. Nevertheless, at her best she could encapsulate a director's entire oeuvre perfectly in one line; of Jean Cocteau, she wrote, "Cocteau's special gift was to raise chic to art." She was every bit as good at pinpointing the appeal of popular films she didn't necessarily admire: she wrote of An Officer and a Gentleman, "It's crap, but crap on a motorcycle." And of Easy Rider, she wrote, "The film became a ritual experience. It was the downer that young audiences wanted; they puffed away at it."

Of course, no one ever got skewered in print until they got skewered by Kael. She positively body-slammed Samson and Delilah: "De Mille, with God as his co-maker...The sets are wondrous chintzy." And she was no respecter of high reputations, as evinced by her review of Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour: "(I)t makes you so conscious of its artistry tht you may feel as if you're in church and need to giggle." And I am overjoyed when Kael agrees with me about a movie; I cannot tell you how happy I am that there's one other reviewer besides me who doesn't think Terms of Endearment is the heartbreaking, staggering, magnificent, eternal, makes-Jean-Renoir-look-like-Andy-Milligan masterpiece that every other critic said it is, at least in 1983.

Reading Kael's capsule reviews is like eating a jar of macadamia nuts: a gourmet but compulsive experience. Although you may not always agree with her, you will respect her as a cinematic scholar who despised the generic, who championed what she saw as the idiosyncratic and innovative, and who had the guts, brains, and literary talent to make her influence felt.

P.S. To update my pre-Oscar entry, left hanging so shamefully for two months: Congratulations to Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who made headlines in Dublin, Prague, and everywhere else after all.

For such an overcrowded field of worthy movies, the 2008 Oscar race certainly narrowed itself quickly. Most of the winners in major categories are foregone conclusions: "No Country for Old Men" for Best Picture, the Coen Brothers for Best Director AND Best Adapted Screenplay, Daniel Day-Lewis ("There Will Be Blood") for Best Actor, Julie Christie ("Away from Her") for Best Actress, Javier Bardem ("No Country for Old Men") for Best Supporting Actor. Best Original Screenplay is a little harder to read, but the Academy has a history of honoring quirky left-field hits ("Breaking Away," "Little Miss Sunshine") in that category, so logic dictates that the Oscar will go to Diablo Cody for "Juno." The only really contested category is Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, Ruby Dee and Amy Ryan, who split the pre-Oscar awards between them, all have a good shot. In such a close race, the Academy usually resorts to its sentimental side as a tie-breaker, so my guess is that Dee--an octogenarian and first-time nominee whose credits include extraordinary performances in "A Raisin in the Sun," "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever"--should start clearing her mantelpiece to make room for that little gold statue. I would guess the same thing for Hal Holbrook, another octogenarian first-time nominee with a long and glorious career, except that the pre-Oscar acclaim for Javier Bardem has been so overwhelming.

The good thing about this year is that there was such a preponderance of Oscar-worthy films. The bad thing is that, in an awards program that allows only five nominees per category, a lot of very worthy films, actors, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, etc. got stiffed good and hard. The five films nominated for Best Picture--"Atonement," "Juno," "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men," and "There Will Be Blood"--all indisputably deserve their nominations. Yet I would remove any one of them--yes, even "No Country for Old Men"--to make way for my own favorite this year, Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd."

I haven't yet seen the film whose exclusion from the Best Foreign Film category scandalized everybody--the Romanian drama "4 Months, 2 Weeks and 3 Days," which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and has been described everywhere it's played as a cinematic revelation. I have seen, however, a lot of films that deserved Oscar consideration but received not a single nomination. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"--the probable valedictory film of the great Sidney Lumet, as fresh and thrilling as "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon" were 30 years ago--leads this sad list, followed by the late Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" and Scott Frank's "The Lookout." There also are worthy films that were shunted aside with one or two minor nominations, such as James Mangold's remake of "3:10 to Yuma" (Best Original Score and Best Sound Mixing).

There were so many great performances by leading actors this year that--even granting the dominance of Daniel Day-Lewis, giving in "There Will Be Blood" the sort of performance that's seen maybe once a decade--you could make a credible alternate list of Best Actor nominees off the top of your head:

Christian Bale, "3:10 to Yuma"
Josh Brolin, "No Country for Old Men"
Emile Hirsch, "Into the Wild"
James McAvoy, "Atonement"
Denzel Washington, "American Gangster"

And that isn't even mentioning one of my favorite performances of the past year, that of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "The Lookout." I said at the time of its release that I doubted I would see a better performance in 2007; except again for the remarkable Mr. Day-Lewis, I didn't. Yet I heard not the slightest whisper of Best Actor talk for Gordon-Levitt, and also none for Best Supporting Actor for his co-star, the versatile and brilliant Jeff Daniels, who is about two decades overdue for his first Oscar nomination.

The sad omissions go on and on: sure, Ellen Page was delightful in "Juno," but so was Keri Russell in "Waitress," playing a VERY similar character. And, going down the list, the most magnficent photography I saw in any film in 2007 was Eric Gautier's for "Into the Wild." I am second to none in my admiration for the genius cinematographer Roger Deakins, but couldn't the Academy have lopped off one of Deakins' two nominations to give one to Gautier?

Here's a name I never thought I would include in the Legion of the Robbed: Eddie Vedder. I had thought I would be complaining here about the unfair omission of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the lovable and very gifted songwriting duo from "Once." Hansard and Irglova were excluded from the Golden Globe nominations for Best Song, and that award went to Vedder for his song "Guaranteed" from "Into the Wild." The Academy, however, stiffed Vedder, gave a single nomination to Hansard and Irglova, and gave three "Enchanted" nominations to Disney house composers Stephen Schwartz and Alan Menken, who rent a hangar at LAX to store their previous Oscars. I had thought going in that the race would be between Vedder and Hansard-Irglova, with Vedder the winner, and consoled myself with the thought that Vedder's songs were very good and added greatly to the film in which they appeared. I had forgotten that, in the Academy's eyes, great songwriting begins and ends with The Mouse. I'll still keep hoping that the Best Song award this Feb. 24 will make headlines the next morning in Dublin and Prague, but I won't hold my breath.

The time you won your town the race,
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

--A.E. Housman, 1896

By now I hope everyone has read Kathi Wolfe's column this month, paying just tribute to Karren Alenier and her book, "The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas." I've known Karren for more than fifteen years now, and it's been a wonderful and invigorating process to see how her fascination with the life and work of Gertrude Stein led first to a series of poems about Stein, then to her opera, "Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On," and finally to her immersion in the world of new American opera that has made her a leading authority on the subject. Besides "The Steiny Road to Operadom," I recommend checking out Karren's books of poetry, especially "Looking for Divine Transportation." To read Karren's work is to introduce yourself to a witty, quirky and sagacious observer of life and art.

Kathi Wolfe is too modest to boast about herself, but she too is an excellent poet. Her own fascination with the life and work of another great American woman writer--Helen Keller--led her to write a chapbook of Keller poems, "Helen Takes the Stage." The chapbook was one of six finalists in this year's Pudding House contest--out of a field of 750--and will be published by that press sometime in 2008. Wolfe rips the cloak of sanctity we've draped over Keller, revealing her as a woman of fierce loves and hates, a scholar and thinker, a connoisseur of hot dogs and good scotch. These poignant, profound and often laugh-out-loud funny poems give us Keller as a flesh-and-blood woman, and stand as a work of bold advocacy not only for Keller, but for the differently abled everywhere.

As usual, I don't have a thought in my head, so here instead are some random scribblings:

1. My deep and blushing thanks to Brenda Balfour for her kind words about my reviews on the Reader's Blog. (To be compared with Roger Ebert is high praise indeed, especially when you've read his books and his Sun-Times columns as I have.) I haven't seen "American Gangster" yet, Ms. Balfour, but I plan to, and my thoughts on it will appear in due course.

2. If you live anywhere near the Washington, D.C. area, you still have time to see the very fine production of "As You Like It" at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre. The sparse yet lovely staging, with its imaginative use of illuminated panels, airily recreates the Forest of Arden in the Folger Library's intimate Elizabethan theater. The cast is excellent: Amanda Quaid (Randy's daughter) is a charming and graceful Rosalind, Noel Velez a suitably manly Orlando, and there also are two first-rate if diametrically opposed Shakespearian clowns in the buoyant Sarah Marshall (Touchstone) and the saturnine Joseph Marcell (Jaques). The production runs until Nov. 25.

Although a cruel illness sidelined Deborah Kerr for the last twenty years of her life, she was never forgotten by those who appreciate either great actresses or beautiful women. From the 1940s on, she quietly gave some of the most distinguished perfomances the British and American cinemas have ever seen. Although her image was always that of an elegant and proper lady, within that image she had an astonishingly broad range, from the beleaguered nun of "Black Narcissus" to the adulterous officer's wife of "From Here to Eternity," the King of Siam's friend, adviser and dancing partner in "The King and I," the nightclub singer of "An Affair to Remember," the hysterical, mother-ridden spinster of "Separate Tables," and the possibly mad governess of "The Innocents." The last-named movie may contain her greatest performance; during her interview with Michael Redgrave, when she affirms her love of children, there is just the slightest touch of desperation in her voice, just the slightest glint of derangement in her eyes, making us wonder just how far we can trust this woman. Kerr deplored the trend toward nudity and blatant sex that began on-screen in the late 1960s; as the actress who appeared in possibly the single sexiest scene in the history of the movies, making love in the Hawaiian surf with Burt Lancaster in "From Here to Eternity," she knew the difference between what was sexy and what was merely salacious. Whatever your religious persuasion, I think you'll join me in thanking whatever Powers That Be for letting us have Deborah Kerr.

The world cinema was dealt a double tragedy on July 30, 2007 when two of its most renowned directors, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, passed away. Arthur Meiselman has already paid eloquent tribute to Bergman, a director who expected maturity and deep thought from both his actors and his audience. I remember my first encounter with Bergman in college, coming out of the Athens Cinema in Athens, Ohio, after having seen Bergman's "Shame," and feeling as if all the skin had been peeled off my body. I did not quite replicate that experience with the other Bergman films I have seen, but still marveled at the power of "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," "Autumn Sonata," "Fanny and Alexander," "The Virgin Spring," and other merciless dissections of the human mind and heart. But Bergman could still surprise me, as he did with that most exquisite and worldly-wise of romantic comedies, "Smiles of a Summer Night." (It's now impossible for me to think back on that film and not hear the sweetly acidulous, funny-sad melodies that Stephen Sondheim created for his musical adaptation of it, "A Little Night Music.") I am far less familiar with Antonioni's work, and what I have seen of it tends to make me agree with Orson Welles' assessment of Antonioni as "that fabricator of empty boxes." But the image of Monica Vitti in "Il Deserto Rosso," looking lost and waiflike in the industrial wasteland her haute bourgeois world created, is one I still carry with me.

As sad as the loss of Bergman and Antonioni was, they were old men who lived fully, created an impressive body of work, and knew well the world's adulation. Far sadder was the death of German actor Ulrich Muhe, who died of stomach cancer July 22, just months after the worldwide distribution of "The Lives of Others," the first film to bring him international attention. Playing a rigid, authoritarian Stasi agent whose views are transformed by the dissident intellectual couple he is keeping under surveillance, Muhe created an unforgettable portrait of a man who, slowly and at first unwillingly, undergoes a metamorphosis from monster to hero. Few cinematic portraits of redemption have been more moving. At 54, Muhe was a little over half the age of Bergman and Antonioni. It is tragic that there will be no more new work from him; but his performance in "The Lives of Others" still constitutes more than most actors accomplish in a lifetime.

Given today's geopolitical situation, it's no surprise that Michael Winterbottom's film "A Mighty Heart," about the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, premieres just as the Muslim world rises in protest at the British government's grant of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie. The most memorable news photograph of the past week was that of the sandaled foot of a little boy stamping on a picture of Rushdie; the caption said the photo was taken in Lahore, Pakistan, but it could just as well have been Iraq or Morocco or Indonesia. The Pakistani government responded to the news of Rushdie's knighthood by granting its highest civilian honors to Osama bin Laden. The idea that Rushdie could be honored for distinguished contributions to English literature is, to the protestors, an insult; the only conceivable purpose for honoring Rushdie, they claim, is to show enmity toward everyone and everything Muslim, and to declare war against Islam. This, of course, is what the protestors teach their children, who trust their parents and teachers like all children everywhere. Which is why the little boy in Lahore stamped on the picture of Rushdie.

I have no idea if children in Pakistan and the Middle East are taught anything about Daniel Pearl. But his story and Rushdie's alike leave me afraid, angry, and grieving. What hope does the world have if children in Muslim countries are brought up to believe that everyone in the West actively seeks to destroy everything they hold sacred?

The same question, alas, can be asked of at least some of the children in our own country. Last year's documentary, "Jesus Camp," depicted a group of children from fundamentalist and evangelical Christian families, being tenderly brought up to believe that people who are pro-choice or believe that global warming is real are minions of Satan.

"When I'm with non-Christians, I feel kinda creepy...kinda yucky," says of the children at one point in the movie. Yes, the boy meant Muslims by that, and also Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and atheists. And he also meant Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians--all the mainstream Christian sects whom the evangelicals do not regard as true Christians, because they do not accept the Rapture and other doctrines put forth in the Schofield Reference Bible. As someone who has always been just fine with Lutheran interpretations of the King James Bible, I can't help but feel the noose tighten a little around my neck when a little boy says he finds people like me kinda creepy...kinda yucky.

George W. Bush once famously asked, "Is the children learning." Yes, Mr. President, they're learning. But some of the things they're learning scare me to death.

In the White Pages for the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. (where I live), there is a Benjamin R. Stone and a Bennie W. Stone, as well as three other Stones with the first initial B, who are potentially if not actually Benjamins. I note this only because the lead male character in Judd Apatow's new movie, "Knocked Up," is named Ben Stone. He is only the latest in a series of cinematic and TV Ben Stones in Hollywood's apparent effort to have us believe that "Ben Stone" is as common a name as "John Smith." (There are 58 John Smiths in my phone book, including one I actually know.) Besides the Ben Stone played by Seth Rogen in "Knocked Up," there is the Ben Stone played by Michael Moriarty in "Law and Order;" the Ben Stone played by Michael J. Fox in "Doc Hollywood;" and the Benjy Stone (a/k/a Benjamin Steinberg) played by Mark Linn-Baker in "My Favorite Year." I also remember that Donna Reed's TV family was named Stone (no Bens that I remember, though).

There's no point to this rumination, except that "Ben Stone" seems to have become an all-purpose, shelf-friendly name for irritable screenwriters to reach for. I guess we should all be thankful that the names "Reginald Van Gleason," "Clem Kadiddlehopper" and "Gervase Brooke-Hamster" did not reach this level of ubiquitousness. Meanwhile, if anyone knows of any other Ben Stone characters from movies or TV, please provide them in the Comments section.

I am a journalist by trade, and like most journalists I tend naively to believe what I read in print, particularly from news sources that are commonly referred to as "accredited" and "respected." So if the two gentlemen I am just about to mention protest that I am treating them unfairly, I can only quote my sources.

Both of them, to different degrees, can be described as media moguls. Rupert Murdoch is a media mogul by any standard--owner of newspapers and cable news networks around the world, so jealous of the phrase "fair and balanced" to describe his properties' news reportage that he sued for its exclusive use. By all reports, he is about to add a particularly glittering jewel to his media crown: the Wall Street Journal.

On the eve of this important acquisition, therefore, it is interesting to note that Matt Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter assigned to China, wrote recently in the Washington Post that Phoenix TV, the Chinese cable news network in which Murdoch owned a substantial stake, routinely kowtowed to Chinese government policies during Murdoch's ownership, even when those policies were violently condemnatory of the U.S. and the West. (Murdoch might want to confront Pottinger about this "unfair and unbalanced" story, but he'd have to go to Iraq to do so. Pottinger is with the Marines there--not embedded, mind you, but as a combat soldier on the front lines.)

Danny Glover can't claim to be a mogul on Murdoch's level, though as the star of the "Lethal Weapon" movies, "Lonesome Dove," "Places in the Heart" and many other famous films, he can claim a substantial measure of world fame. But he does qualify as a media magnate, based on his board membership in Telesur, the Latin American TV network founded by his old friend, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Glover has a longtime reputation as an advocate for the poor and oppressed. His dream project is a film about the life of Toussaint Louverture, the 18th-century Haitian who led the successful revolt against French imperialism that made Haiti an independent nation. Recently, Glover solicited and received $18 million in financing for the project from his old buddy Chavez. That announcement was simultaneous with the news that Chavez had yanked the license for Radio Caracas Television, arguably the most important opposition media in Venezuela. Meanwhile, Venezuelan directors said they could produce 36 films for the $18 million Chavez is giving Glover. (One of my sources for this is Time Magazine, which Glover and Chavez could denounce as a propaganda organ for the Bush administration. The other is Agence France-Presse; I guess Chavez and Glover will say that France wants Haiti back.)

I imagine I'll catch hell from both sides of the ideological spectrum for pointing out these things; but, like I said, all I know is what I read. Meanwhile, if Messrs. Murdoch and Glover would care to explain their fondness for dictators, all they have to do is press the "Comments" icon.

Dear Hollywood,

You wouldn't put a guy in a trenchcoat at every box office and video store counter, accusing every customer automatically of trying to shortchange the cashier.

So why do you put ads at the beginning of every DVD--ads we can't skip by pressing "Menu," as we can with previews--reminding us that video piracy is a crime?

I know that illegal video downloads are a crime. So you have told me 849,000 times. I would never think of doing an illegal video download--and not just because my computer literacy is on a level with Samuel Johnson's. I want the actors and directors and writers and cinematographers and gaffers and best boys to receive just recompense for their labors. (The fact that Julia Roberts makes more in a week's shooting than I will in a lifetime is irrelevant. No one's going to plunk down $9.50 to see ME in "Pretty Woman.") I realize that every time someone sees a movie without paying, it eats into the profits that allow future movies to get made. Furthermore, because I am a technological dinosaur, I actually like going to Borders or Barnes & Noble or Best Buy, looking at all the DVDs in their shiny boxes, browsing through them, making the hard decision whether I will go home that day with "It Happened One Night" or "Escape from New York" or "Au Hasard Balthasar." (Julia Roberts, of course, could go home with all three, but I told you I don't make as much money as she does.)

So why do you constantly have to chide and rebuke me about pirating your intellectual property? If you think I look like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow or Errol Flynn as Captain Blood, I'm flattered, but it's a case of mistaken identity. The guy you want to reach with your ads is fingering his pocket protector with one hand as he presses the "Enter" button on a download of "Spider-Man 3" with the other. Only you're not reaching him. Because he's not watching your DVDs.

I've been a Washington journalist for more than 25 years, but I'm not necessarily one of those who gets to hang out with the big guns. I go to the hearings, I listen to the senators and congressmen pontificate, but I'm not one of the Bob Schieffers or Wolf Blitzers who debates Iraq war policy in cigar-smoke-filled backrooms, glasses of 12-year-old Glenfiddich in hand, with Ted Kennedy and Trent Lott. So when I saw the cover of the current "Weekly Standard"--featuring a caricature of the GOP flavor-of-the-month presidential hopeful, Fred Thompson--I remembered with a shock that I had met him once, many years ago.

It wasn't in Washington, but in Lancaster, Ohio, that I had my encounter with future greatness. As a reporter for "The Reaction," the student newspaper for Ohio University-Lancaster Campus, I was assigned to cover the speech at the campus of the minority counsel for the Watergate hearings--an up-and-coming Tennessee lawyer named Fred D. Thompson.

This was years before "Law and Order," before "Wiseguy" and "The Hunt for Red October," before his battles as senator with Jane Alexander over whether the government should continue to fund the National Endowment for the Arts. (Alexander, who was Bill Clinton's NEA chairman, said Thompson believed that if an arts project couldn't attract Hollywood money, it couldn't be any good.) I don't remember Thompson's speech very well, except that he used the phrase "bite the bullet" several times. In this time of national trouble, he said, it was good that the government could bite the bullet and face the endemic problems that Watergate signified.

Thompson certainly wouldn't remember me; I was one of about eight people after the speech, sitting around a booth at Old Bill Bailey's Bar, swilling pitchers of Rolling Rock and listening to Tom Ryan, "The Reaction's" photographer, reel off several choice excerpts from his inexhaustible fund of dirty stories. I remember Thompson, beer in hand, looking vaguely embarrassed and very, very tired.

Tom Ryan died a year later, in a car crash. Fred Thompson is on the cover of the "Weekly Standard," and I'm here, typing.

I forgot to mention I also knew Sen. Chuck Hagel way back when; he was government affairs director for Firestone when I first came to Washington. In the Reagan administration, he headed some White House commission or another; he called me to his office to give me a big interview about what he and the commission were doing. When he was elected senator, neither he nor his staff returned my calls. In the words of the late Kurt Vonnegut, "So it goes."

The common wisdom is that Eddie Murphy got robbed, and perhaps he did--I haven't seen "Dreamgirls" yet. I myself, however, couldn't suppress a little yelp of triumph when, last Sunday, the name of Alan Arkin was read as the winner of this year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I'm not sure that many moviegoers under the age of 50 had a very clear idea before this year of the depth and range of Arkin's talents (though my friend Jon Gardner, a mere broth of a boy at 38, cherishes Arkin's performances in "Catch-22" and "So I Married An Axe Murderer"). Filmgoers of my age, however, can remember the incredible star run Arkin had in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a bewildering range of roles in which he was never less than perfect. Arkin had us rolling in the aisles as the befuddled Russian U-boat commander in "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming;" gripping our seats in terror as the psychotic murderer who doused Audrey Hepburn with gasoline in "Wait Until Dark;" and using up box after box of Kleenex as the tragic deaf-mute in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" (still one of my all-time favorite screen performances). And that isn't even mentioning "Popi," "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," "Freebie and the Bean," "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," "The In-Laws," "Grosse Pointe Blank," and of course the aforementioned "Catch-22." Arkin has continued to work steadily throughout the decades, but mostly in low-budget independent films that few people saw. "Little Miss Sunshine," which at first glance seemed like just another one of those indies, unexpectedly turned out to be one of the most beloved films of 2006, earning Arkin a Screen Actors Guild award, a BAFTA award, and the Oscar. Not only do I applaud these awards, but I sincerely hope they will send audiences back to Blockbuster and Netflix to check out Arkin's earlier films. How many living actors could make us believe in and love a dirty old man who snorts heroin, advises his grandson to "fuck a lot of women," and teaches his seven-year-old granddaughter a strip-tease routine? There's only one, and his name is Arkin.

I found out early this morning: tuning to 104.1 FM and expecting to hear the Cleveland Orchestra, I heard instead...the Electric Light Orchestra. The long-threatened demise of WGMS is now a fait accompli. Bonneville International Corp. didn't sell out to Dan Snyder in the end, but to the perception--in my opinion erroneous--that classical music is a dying art form, in radio and elsewhere. WGMS, which purveyed Mozart and Mendelssohn to the Washington, DC listening public for six decades, is now something called "George 104," dedicated to playing "The Music of the Seventies...The Eighties...And Anything We Want!!!" (Just as long as what they want doesn't involve anyone named Beethoven, apparently.)

On a hunch I fiddled around with the dial, and sure enough came upon WETA-FM just as announcer Scott Blankenship introduced the Theme and Variations for flute and string quartet, by Amy Beach. About an hour later I was reading the scoop from Paul Farhi, the Washington Post's excellent media reporter: Bonneville and WETA have been in negotiations for the past month, planning an orderly turnover of classical programming to WETA, a public station that switched from classical to an all-news format a few years ago.

In a sense this is good news: WETA has the strongest signal of any station in the Washington area, no commercials, and a library of 43,000 classical recordings (including the 18,000 it inherited from WGMS). I will now resume sending the membership checks to WETA that I stopped sending when it switched to all-news (just as long as they don't expect me to listen during Pledge Week). It would be nice if WETA and WGMS were both still classical outlets, as they were for so many years. The Washington public supported them both, and--despite the pessimism of Dan DeVany and Joel Oxley--still would. And it would also be nice to listen in to old friends like James Bartels, Chip Rienza and Diana Hollander when the mood struck me. Wherever they land on the radio dial, I hope their parachutes are golden.