June 22, 2007
Poetry in Movies
A poignant love letter to youth and longing, the movie Venus stars Peter O’Tool as Maurice, an ageing actor hung up romantically sexually (despite his impotence) on Jessie, a very young and slightly wayward girl. The movie is a real gift, deftly handled so that instead of being repulsed by a seventy-something year old man fawning over a twenty year old girl, we love Maurice’s almost subtle (subtle to Jessie) double entendres, his exuberant passion for life women and love and the force of character that he imparts to Jessie, grounding her a bit before she falls apart herself.
One memorable scene is of Jessie getting dressed as Maurice, watching on with barely a view of her from a mirror, recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…” It’s a beautiful reading and wholly appropriate for the film; for example, the sonnet’s final couplet…
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
It was impressive too that Roger Michell, the film’s director thought well enough of his audience to linger over the entire sonnet (not that long, but in the movies 14 lines is a lot).
Stacy Harwood has compiled the beginnings of a list of poetry in movies at The Michigan Quarterly Review (“Poetry in Movies: A Partial List”) and written about some of the best of them there and reprinted at Poets.Org as “The Well Versed Movie”.
Comments
No Comments yet.
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
RSSlinks saved, etc.
me posting elsewhere
You'll find me posting at the
Words Without Borders Blog
find stuff at this site
- tags:
- don quixote
- dependent children of independent bookstores
- pen world voices festival
- william gaddis
- the paris review
- cervantes
- thomas pynchon
- roberto bolano
- rilke
- william h. gass
- zbigniew herbert
- paul muldoon
- laird hunt
- osvaldo golijov
- daniil kharms
- coffee
- anna deveare smith
- etgar keret
- proust
- steve reich
- electric literature
- fence magazine
- witold gombrowicz
- national slowetry month
- flann o'brien
- translation
- gotham book mart
- words without borders
- brooklyn
- john ashbery
- death of print
- bea
- cesar vallejo
- shakespeare
- joan didion
- seamus heaney
- ecolibris
- lydia millet
- john o'brien
- jorge luis borges
- wiki
- nathalie sarraute
- yoko tawada
- italo calvino
- paul auster
- cervantespen world voices festival
- elizabeth gilbert
- death to print
- dante
- lee hyla
- ted
- boris pasternak
- philip glass
- javier marias
random longer posts/reviews
Recent Comments
One of the reasons I publish online!
– L. Lee Lowe
on “Would He Do it Again?”
Last year Derrick Brown did living room readings. I don’t think anyone there had ever read his poetry; I had barely been introduced a few days before. http://vimeo.com/6013960
Compared to any staged, stacked or emceed poetry reading, well, it was kind of like learning you hadn’t ever had good sex.
Granted, he’s a more engaging poet than many, and he reads poems that should be read aloud, like they should sound. I still think that a lot of the intimacy would have been lost in any a more austere setting.
As a listener, it had a profound and searing impact; if I could speak for the non-poetry-reading kind, I’d say they could not help but connect with this living poetry that was funny and sad and sweet and took you somewhere.
– Emily
on “Would He Do it Again?”
Awesome! I always loved Sontag’s ‘Notes On Camp’. Lucid and concise.
http://e6n1.blogspot.com/
– Eeleen Lee
on “Not an Intellectual, but a Writer, a Reader, and a Dreamer”
