It’s a murder mystery unraveled via slice-of-life stories of the various Roman proles who passed through the park adjacent to the scene of the crime. Each segment begins with a police interrogation and a flashback to the beginning of the day, and is marked by a sudden afternoon downpour. In between these episodes are glimpses of the victim moving gently around her room during that storm, preparing for her night’s work. Bertolucci claims he hadn’t yet seen Rashomon (1950), but I’m not convinced. Maybe Pasolini was influenced by the famous Kurosawa film?

La commare secca is very easy on the eyes and by far my favorite of Bertolucci’s films.* Beautiful faces and some terrific moments of melodrama—just engrossing. Fascinating Italian dialects too! And I love the strange and striking six-tays dance scene at the climax. Feels like I’d seen it before. Ditto the scene with the kids dancing to a record player in the apartment.

Criterion + my public library = big love

****

From here:

• avanti ad Accattone e la magnifica Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma
• un ripasso di Il conformista
  

*Last Tango in Paris—traumatizing; the four hours of 1900—forgettable, apparently; The Last Emperor and Little Buddha—I don’t remember much about them either (totally overshadowed by Scorsese’s Kundun in my mind); Stealing Beauty—gag me with a spoon; The Dreamers—just not interested…

Best echo of recently enjoyed English fiction about crotchety German philologists (amidst a marvelous digression on the controversy surrounding the plural form of protagonist, which prompts a close examination of the OED entry and oldest citation of the word’s written use):

This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the OED offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at finding quotations that antedate those in the OED: At last count the Germans alone had found thirty-five thousand instances in which the OED quotation was not the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)

Best stirring reminiscence of the first feature film I captioned (at the scene in Westminster of the seminal November 5, 1857, meeting of the London Philological Society):

The gas lamps fizzed and sputtered, and on the corners of Piccadilly and Jermyn Street small boys were still collecting last-minute pennies for fireworks, their ragged models of Guy Fawkes—soon to be burned on bonfires—propped up before them.

Mapped, in my mind, just around the corner from the murder and insanity of Hangover Square!

Moving ahead, The Professor and Madman inspires me to:

• read more Simon Winchester, including even his second book on the OED, The Meaning of Everything (because I’m that dorky).
• collect a personal copy of Hangover Square, now finally available on DVD!
• spend some time with The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.

1/2 star for the dizzying web of references that stoke my fascination with pop western mythology; for the catchy, make-your-family-crazy-humming-it-for-days-on-end “Ballad of Cat Ballou”; and for Lee Marvin and Slim Pickens.

***1/2

Spurs me on to:

• everything Lee Marvin; for starters I’ve thrown Paint Your Wagon, The Professionals, Emperor of the North Pole, and Hell in the Pacific in the Netflix queue
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

***

With precise and breezy British prose, Winchester deftly navigates the scene of Minor’s crime, the circumstances of his youth as well as Murray’s, his traumatizing service at the Battle of the Wilderness, the OED’s conception and development, the popular myth of the two men’s first face-to-face encounter, their twenty-year-long relationship, and the sad decline of Minor’s post-dictionary life. All in just over 240 pages. It’s a fascinating multifaceted story with something for everyone—or at least for fans of true crime in Victorian London, Civil War buffs, mental health care history enthusiasts, and lexicography nerds! It’s especially not to be missed by the lexicography nerds: Woven so compellingly by a gleeful wordsmith and self-professed dictionary hugger, with nuggets of raw dictionary entries prefacing each chapter and the deliciousness of the author’s prose itself, it often approaches word porn.

Random awesome sentence (on the protagonists’ beards):

But both were magnificently fecund arrangements.

Random favorite moment of linguistic humor and British wit (on the changing of the guard at Broadmoor):

He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the asylum.

Most shocking new vocabulary:

autopeotomy

Random, intriguing aside I might like to follow:

The great librarian—for Justin Winsor [of Harvard College] remains one of the grandest figures in all of nineteenth-century American librarianship, and a formidable historian to boot—then told the story, which Murray then retold to his friend in Boston.

Anyhoo, to drum up some penguin mania in advance of this documentary screening (since we’re almost three years behind the curve here), we staged a stuffed penguin death match with the dogs, or as Scott has dubbed it, Munch of the Penguin. Enjoy!

Let’s see. It happened one night recently that I finally got around to watching It Happened One Night. Solid Frank Capra entry. Good show! Check!

Bringing Up Baby, on the other hand, didn’t happen one night. No, it took me the past three evenings to get through this assault of a screwball comedy. The sensation of watching it was vaguely reminiscent of trying to chase away (catch?) little Jeremy Martin, the fastest runner in my fourth-grade class, as he took schoolyard name-calling to an interesting new level by mercilessly taunting me: “Katherine Hepburn! Katherine Hepburn! Katherine Hepburn!”

The best thing about the Bringing Up Baby DVD (another generous loan from The Best Library) was the gallery of trailers for other Howard Hawks films. This trailer for Rio Bravo is kind of a giddy thrill, especially when the rockin’ baby-faced Ricky Nelson breaks into song and then breaks character to address the movie-going masses. (”There’ll never be another like the ragged woman-wrecked castoff called Dude.” Those folks obviously never predicted the coming of The Big Lebowski.)

Even more enduring a thrill is the reference interview fantasy that introduces The Big Sleep. Check it out!

The celebrations reach back to lucky Friday the 13th, when Scott and I saw The Host at the Darkside. This wild Korean film is like a monster movie or a disaster flick laced with family slapstick, genre spoofs, political satire, and probably a bunch of juicy references I didn’t even pick up on… It’s the best new movie I’ve seen in ages. I laughed! I cried! I got into it! I’m alive! You all go see it now and then let’s meet for coffee and dessert to discuss, hmm? Dennis, who brought it to my attention and insisted that we see it, has more than made up for his endorsement of Pan’s Labyrinth. Giant sewer-monster thanks to you, Dennis!

Saturday, ahh. Pulling weeds awhile, and then chillin’ in the sunshine, legs stretched out in the grass, lazily reading a Ken Kesey book with Maddy at my side. Saturnight, Scott built a fire in our new back porch fire bowl, and we huddled close to the heat, mesmerized by the light—so relaxing!—and lazily roasted marshmallows. Maddy lay just beyond the circle of light, guarding the pack.

Sunday, an unabashed return to gastronomic pleasure! Yes, folks, I will gladly rise before 7:00 and cycle almost 10 miles for a farm-fresh omelette and all-you-can-eat pastry buffet. We cycled home gingerly, rested, digested, and then headed out to India Night for dinner and song and dance generously offered by the OSU Indian Students Association.

And did the beauty end there? No, sirree! Monday was fun-day, folks, because after work, Scott and I escaped to Portland in the Barry-mobile for a fabulous sushi dinner with his friends and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at the Hawthorne Theatre. The unbelievably amazing music (and energy!), the intimate grittiness of the venue, the city at night… Vision of ultimate coolness—distant dream of my small-town teenage years—realized.

One last celebration, not tied to any particular day, of the mundane and the sublime in the kitchen. I’ve freshened up our old dishwasher (Eek! 1994 is old?) and started using it to alleviate the oppressive countertop cluttering of dirty dishes. (Emily, I dedicate my dishwasher campaign to you.) And the sublime—Scott standing at the stove crafting curry for chickpeas, the scent of the freshly ground cumin and coriander hitting the hot cast iron!

Scott came to the rescue with a bottle of nuclear pink pepperminty slime-dicine, and yesterday I managed to choke down (and keep down) a few glasses of Cran-Raspberry, a small bowl of granola, and six stale water crackers. Still bereft of all epicurean desires, I pulled Twentieth Century Eightball off my bookshelf and burrowed into the sofa to enjoy the misanthropic pornography of Daniel Clowes. Late in the afternoon, I got the crazy notion to do something useful and decided to cut the grass. So when Scott wasn’t looking, I hauled our new old reel mower out of the shed and set to work. Maddy ran wide circles around me as I staggered across the back lawn, stopping to catch my breath and steady myself after each pass. Not the bliss of before.

The good news is that I ate a full plate of peas and pasta for supper (though sadly recoiled at Scott’s objectively wonderful garlic sauté) and Inland Empire is playing at 3:00 and 6:40 today. Depending on how lunch goes, I may just be ready to take it on.