Author Topic: In the New Yorker...  (Read 1922595 times)

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1810 on: November 17, 2017, 06:24:51 pm »
I have a vague memory of that article. That was in the hard copy, wasn't it?

But, anyway, I like her stuff, too.

Yeah, I couldn't find it on a regular web page and I hate reading their online thing.

My favorite part was how Grazer, essentially a surfer dude, was working in a studio mail room or something and started contacting every single person with power in Hollywood he could think of. Of course, 98% of them ignored him, but the 2% were enough to start him on his way to multiple-Oscar producer.





Offline Jeff Wrangler

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,165
  • "He somebody you cowboy'd with?"
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1811 on: November 20, 2017, 02:44:30 pm »
Anybody read the article about Sen. Tom Cotton ("Trump's Inheritor," Nov. 13)? The senator's parents run "a cow-calf operation."

So it appears to me that when Jack spoke of "a little cow-'n'-calf operation," it really was a thing, not just his own personal way of expressing himself.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1812 on: November 20, 2017, 03:41:48 pm »
I didn't read that article. I do know that lots of small ranchers get heifers, use artificial insemination and raise the calves with the cows until they are of marketable size. I believe both the cows and calves then go to be "finished". Or, the cows get inseminated again. Don't want to know the details. But, it's a lot like the sheep/lamb industry, except with cows.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1813 on: November 24, 2017, 05:45:10 pm »




The screenplay of “Call Me by Your Name,” adapted from André Aciman’s novel of the same title, is by James Ivory. He has done a remarkable job, paring away pasts and futures, and leaving us with an overwhelming surge of now.  On the page, events are recounted, in the first person, by an older Elio, gazing backward, but Timothée Chalamet’s Elio lacks the gift of hindsight. In any case, why is it a gift? Who wouldn’t prefer to be in the thick of love? The book is a mature and thoughtful vintage; in the film, we’re still picking the grapes.




https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/call-me-by-your-name-an-erotic-triumph

The Current Cinema
Call Me by Your Name, An Erotic Triumph
Luca Guadagnino’s latest film is emotionally acute and overwhelmingly sensual.

By Anthony Lane   December 4, 2017 Issue


Luca Guadagnino’s sensuous film evokes the transformations of young love. Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli



The new film by Luca Guadagnino, “Call Me by Your Name,” begins in the summer of 1983, in a place so enchanted, with its bright green gardens, that it belongs in a fairy tale. The location, the opening credits tell us, is “Somewhere in Northern Italy.” Such vagueness is deliberate: the point of a paradise is that it could  exist anywhere but that, once you reach the place, it brims with details so precise in their intensity that you never forget them. Thus it is that a young American named Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives, dopey with jet lag, at the house of Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his Italian wife, Annella (Amira Casar), whose custom is to spend their summers there and also to return for Hanukkah. (Like them, Oliver is Jewish; a closeup shows a Star of David hanging from a chain around his neck.) The Professor, an American expert in classical archeology, requires an annual assistant, and Oliver is this year’s choice. “We’ll have to put up with him for six long weeks,” Annella says, with a sigh. Not long enough, as it turns out. You can pack a whole lifetime into six weeks.

The first words of the film are “The usurper.” They are uttered by the Perlmans’ only child—their son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), who is seventeen. He stands at an upstairs window with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel) and watches Oliver below, fearful that the American may break the reigning peace. The Professor is more welcoming, and he proposes a kind of free trade, both spatial and emotional, that will resound throughout. “Our home is your home,” he says to Oliver. “My room is your room,” Elio adds, a few seconds later, like an echo. He has moved into the adjoining room for the duration of Oliver’s stay, and they must share a bathroom. The sharing will deepen, from handshakes to confidences, and from cigarettes to kisses and other mouthly charms, concluding in the most profound exchange of all, whispered from a few inches’ distance and proclaimed in the title of the movie.

“Call Me by Your Name” is, among other things, an exercise in polyglottery, and Elio chats to his parents and friends in an easy blend of English, French, and Italian, sometimes sliding between tongues in the course of a single conversation. (Who would guess that a household, no less than a city, can be a melting pot?) His father and Oliver enjoy a clash of wits about the twisted root of the word “apricot,” tracing it through Arabic, Latin, and Greek, and mentioning that one branch leads to the word “precocious”—a nod to Elio, who listens to them with half a smile. He is a prodigy, voraciously bookish, who plays Bach al fresco  on the guitar and then inside on the piano, in the manner of Liszt and of Busoni, with Oliver standing in the background, contrapposto, with the elegant tilt of a statue, drinking in the sound and the skill. “Is there anything you don’t  know?” he asks, after Elio has told him about an obscure, bloody battle of the First World War.

Prodigies can be a pain, onscreen and off, and Elio—fevered with boyish uncertainties and thrills, though no longer a boy, and already rich in adult accomplishments, yet barely a man—should be an impossible role. Somehow, as if by magic, Chalamet makes it work, and you can’t imagine how the film could breathe without him. His expression is sharp and inquisitive, but cream-pale and woundable, too, and saved from solemnity by the grace of good humor; when Oliver says that he has to take care of some business, Elio retorts by impersonating him to his face. Chalamet is quite something, but Hammer is a match for him, as he needs to be, if the characters’ passions are to be believed. Elio is taken aback, at the start, by Oliver’s swagger—the hesitant youth, steeped in Europe, confronted with can-do American chops. Hammer doesn’t strut, but his every action, be it dismounting a bicycle, draining a glass of juice (apricot, of course), slinging a backpack over his shoulder, rolling sideways into a pool, or demolishing a boiled egg at breakfast until it’s a welter of spilled yolk suggests a person almost aggressively at home in his own body, and thus in the larger world. Hence the abrupt note that he sends to Elio: “Grow up. See you at midnight.”

You could, I suppose, regard Oliver as the incarnation of soft power. Certainly, his handsomeness is so extreme that the camera tends to be angled up at him, as if at one of the ancient bronze deities over which the Professor enthuses. When Oliver wades in a cold stream one glorious day, you stare at him and think, My God, he is  a god. And yet, as he and Elio lounge on sun-warmed grass, it’s Oliver who seems unmanned, and it’s Elio who lays a purposeful hand directly on Oliver’s crotch. Now one, now the other appears the more carnally confident of the two. They take a while to find parity and poise, but, once they do, they are inextricable, rendered equal by ardor; the first shot of them, at dawn, after they sleep together, is of limbs so entangled that we can’t tell whose are whose. As for their parting, it is wordless. They look at one another and just nod, as if to say, Yes, that was right. That was how it is meant to be.

The screenplay of “Call Me by Your Name,” adapted from André Aciman’s novel of the same title, is by James Ivory. He has done a remarkable job, paring away pasts and futures, and leaving us with an overwhelming surge of now. On the page, events are recounted, in the first person, by an older Elio, gazing backward, but Chalamet’s Elio lacks the gift of hindsight. In any case, why is it a gift? Who wouldn’t prefer to be in the thick of love? The book is a mature and thoughtful vintage; in the film, we’re still picking the grapes.

It’s tempting to speculate how Ivory, who, as the director of “A Room with a View” (1985) and of “Maurice” (1987), showed his mastery of Italian settings and of same-sex romance, might have fared at the helm of the new film. The rhythm, I suspect, would have been more languorous, as if the weather had seeped into people’s lazy bones, whereas Guadagnino, an instinctive modernist, is more incisive. He and his longtime editor, Walter Fasano, keep cutting short the transports of delight; the lovers pedal away from us, on bikes, to the lovely strains of Ravel’s “Mother Goose Suite,” only for the scene to hit the brakes. “Call Me by Your Name” is suffused with heat, and piled high with fine food, but it isn’t a nice  movie; you see it not to unwind but to be wound up—to be unrelaxed by the force with which rapture strikes. There is even a gratifying cameo by a peach, which proves useful in an erotic emergency, and merits an Academy Award for Best Supporting Fruit.

The film’s release could not be more propitious. So assailed are we by reports of harmful pleasures, and of the coercive male will being imposed through lust, that it comes as a relief to be reminded, in such style, of consensual joy. “I don’t want either of us to pay for this,” Oliver says. By falling for each other, he and Elio tumble not into error, still less into sin, but into a sort of delirious concord, which may explain why Elio’s parents, far from disapproving, bestow their tacit blessing on the pact. More unusual still is that the movie steers away from the politics of sexuality. Elio makes love to Marzia, on a dusty mattress, in a loft like an old dovecote, only hours before he meets with Oliver at midnight, but you don’t think, Oh, Elio’s having straight sex, followed by gay sex, and therefore we must rank him as bi-curious. Rather, you are curious about him and his paramours as individuals—these particular bodies, with these hungry souls, at these ravening moments in their lives. Desire is passed around the movie like a dish, and the characters are invited to help themselves, each to his or her own taste. Maybe a true love story (and when did you last see one of those?) has no time for types.

Not that anything endures. Late in the film, the Professor sits with his son on a couch, smokes, and talks of what has occurred. We expect condescension, instead of which we hear a confession. “I envy you,” he tells Elio, adding, “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty.” He once came near, he admits, to having what Elio and Oliver had, but something stood in the way, and he advises his child to seize the day, including the pain that the day brings, while he is still young: “Before you know it, your heart is worn out.” Much of this long speech is taken from Aciman’s novel, but Stuhlbarg delivers it beautifully, with great humility, tapping his cigarette. After which, it seems only natural that so rich a movie should close with somebody weeping, beside a winter fire. The shot lasts for minutes, as did the final shot of Michael Haneke’s “Hidden” (2005), but Haneke wanted to stoke our paranoia and our dread, while Guadagnino wants us to reflect, at our leisure, on love: on what a feast it can be, on how it turns with the seasons, and on why it ends in tears. ♦

This article will be published in its print form in the December 4, 2017, issue.



Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”   newyorker.com.




Also, FYI:






“A happy ending was imperative,” Forster wrote, in 1960. “I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows. . . . I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly.”



http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/james-ivory-and-the-making-of-a-historic-gay-love-story

JAMES IVORY AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIC GAY LOVE STORY


For many gay men coming of age in the eighties and nineties, James Ivory’s “Maurice” was revelatory: a first glimpse, onscreen or anywhere,
of what love between men could look like.
  PHOTOGRAPH BY TIM KNOX / EYEVINE / REDUX




[EXCERPT]


The house in Claverack, bought in 1975, has nineteen rooms, with high ceilings and huge windows. Its eleven acres have a pond and several small buildings; “A Room with a View” was edited in a former apple-storage barn. At one point during my visit, Ivory brought me into the parlor where the interview with Merchant from the “Householder” DVD had taken place. The murals, which Ivory commissioned, are of imagined Hudson Valley landscapes circa 1800. He opened a cabinet topped with baftas to reveal a collection of elegant dioramas, one of them in a former pralines box. He handed them to me one by one and let me look through each tiny doorway: into an 1820 New Orleans boudoir; a 1761 Mt. Pleasant, Philadelphia, drawing room. He made them when he was thirteen.

That weekend, in a convivial Forsterian scenario, he had three houseguests. All of them had worked on Merchant Ivory films. Jeremiah Rusconi, the art director for “The Europeans,” has also directed, over the years, the restoration of the house; now a restoration consultant, he currently lives there. Melissa Chung, a friend who began working for Merchant Ivory as a production assistant right out of Yale, in 1992, is there most weekends. That day, she and Benoît Pain (camera loader, “Le Divorce”), both in black-and-white striped Breton shirts, made lunch, as Ivory directed (“Have we started the asparagus?”). The group ate around a table in a sunny, windowed porch bursting with geraniums.

“Led by the maestro—the captain of our ship,” Chung said.

“I invented this pepper soup,” Ivory said. It was a bright-red purée. “But Melissa, and Benoît, too, knows all about hollandaise.”

This year, Ivory had a hand in another gay coming-of-age romance—“Call Me by Your Name,” directed by Luca Guadagnino. Ivory adapted the screenplay from the novel by André Aciman, in which Elio (Timothée Chalamet), seventeen, is wary of, then attracted to, Oliver (Armie Hammer), a twenty-four-year-old scholar who’s assisting Elio’s professor father at the family’s Italian villa for the summer. The film has the Italian-countryside pleasures of “A Room with a View,” and mirrors that and “Maurice” ’s journeys from awkwardness to connection and joy. But it’s also set in the eighties—so, like Clive, our hero’s first love marries a woman and breaks his heart.



« Last Edit: November 24, 2017, 10:28:11 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1814 on: November 24, 2017, 06:23:57 pm »
Thank you, friend John. Won't be long now! I'm looking forward to the cameo by the peach!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1815 on: November 26, 2017, 12:03:33 am »
John, you probably saw the New York review calling it a masterpiece? I'll have to say the description of the plot alone would not necessarily make me see it (but then, neither did BBM, and I had even read, and liked, the short story!!). I'm looking forward to it.



Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1816 on: November 26, 2017, 02:42:06 am »
Thank you, friend John. Won't be long now! I'm looking forward to the cameo by the peach!


Thanks Lee! I'm so sorry that you still have to wait for the Denver release, but--time does seem to be flying anyway, isn't it? Thankfully!




John, you probably saw the New York review calling it a masterpiece? I'll have to say the description of the plot alone would not necessarily make me see it (but then, neither did BBM, and I had even read, and liked, the short story!!). I'm looking forward to it.


Hey, Katherine! I've seen the movie twice now, and I like it a lot (well, obviously--  ::)  :laugh: ) but my personal thumbs-up recommendation is, at least, sincere.  (  :laugh:  :laugh: )

NYMag's David Edelstein is not  my favorite film critic--he can be,  quite often, a bit sloppy (or is it just that he isn't all that smart ?) as with this quote (and see the full review below): "Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor--." Er, NO. Archaeologist  maybe, but definitely  someone who works with old Greco-Roman sculpture  and is clearly involved with the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and history, i.e., the Classics. His (kind-of, 6 weeks duration) graduate student/doctoral candidate/amanuensis (Oliver/Armie) is writing his own (Oliver's) dissertation and/or book about HERACLITUS, fer chrissakes. But that's Edelstein: "Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor--." Argh!!  Sloppy or dumb (at least in this instance).

HOWEVER, my own Anthropologist/Archaeologist bugaboo-bugbear aside, the Edelstein review isn't altogether bad  (although I've certainly read much better ones). There are a lot of points he could have mentioned, but he did not. I will mention a few:  Luca Guadagnino's movie is not only FUNNY, it is as WRY as it is KIND. it is insanely INTELLIGENT without ever (or, ok, almost  never) showing off, NEVER self-admiring nor self-satisfied. It is SMOKING HOT, yet at the same time not as EXPLICIT as one might have expected, considering, yes, fellatio and masturbation with the aforementioned peach. Most of all: it is hugely emotional without being at all maudlin or (in the worst way) cheaply sentimental--it is NEVER cheap. It is DISCREET, even TASTEFUL, and I am not damning it with faint praise, far from it. The opposite of COY, it is HONEST. Nothing is ever TELEGRAPHED, but absolutely nothing is hidden. The movie is visually gorgeous. The music score is beautiful. (We are shown Timmy/Elio's musicianship in short snippets, and it is shown to be lovely, often intense but in a way that is graceful and nonchalant--we, the audience, are as proud, often amazed, and sometimes a little bit as worried, as his parents are--quietly. Quietly worried, quietly amazed, quietly proud. There is NEVER any fuss (or very little), NEVER any insistence of overt 'specialness' or genius. Elio is just Elio.)

The CAST is amazing. (The cliche that there are no small parts is certainly true here.) Elio's mother (Amira Casar), in a smaller role, IS AMAZING. A different--and better!--review noted that Elio's mother has the same facial expression, the same hooded eyes as her son when either of them (separately), with an appraising glance, looks at--well, at Oliver, of course. And I went: woah! Elio's friend/then girlfriend/then friend again, Marzia, is very good, and, momentarily, heartbreaking when Elio, momentarily, is a little shit. The housekeeper, the gardener, the old woman who gives the boys glasses of water on a hot day, are all so good, which is to say, natural.  (Elio's girlfriend and hard-working housekeeper are so different but are so alike in a sense, because they both inhabit the same universe, they are so REAL, so IMMEDIATE. Mafalda, the housekeeper, only speaks Italian--dialect?--and Marzia, the girlfriend mostly speaks French and Italian with only one short phrase, heartbreakingly, in English to Elio: "Am I not your girl?" when Oliver has his heart. All of this foreign dialogue is subtitled only when needed, but it is not distancing at all, it is natural and seamless.) My biggest complaint? At 2 hours and 10 minutes, it is way too SHORT. The last part of André Aciman's book (the two boys' last trip to Rome) was literally unfilmable because of the tiny budget. Yet, at $3.5 million, I cannot conceive how they managed to do as well as they did.

So--is it a masterpiece? Is it Perfect? Well, no, probably not. Me with yet another bugaboo-bugbear: Does (clearly super-intelligent) Oliver REALLY ask (in 1983!) about a war memorial statue--"Is that from WWII?" when the bronze soldier is wearing puttees and a WWI flat soup dish on his head? Mortifying! But Oliver didn't (creepily) feed the dopey line to Elio to allow Elio feel smart, the momentarily dopey SCRIPT made  Oliver feed Elio that stupid line. (Maybe for the 2017 audience this isn't an issue? Aren't WWI & WWII in the Middle Ages anyway? What's the diff!) But the stupid line made me cringe because Oliver IS smart and he wasn't trying to butter up Elio. And again, for me the removal of the book's Rome episode from the script rankles. For a fan of Aciman's book, replacing the Dantean weekend in Rome with a (literal) bus-and backpack holiday to Bergamo and bucolic environs is disappointing. But, in these degenerate, tawdry Trumpian times, compared to what else you'll see in the multiplex--yes. Yes, it is a masterpiece. And when the two boys with backpacks were climbing towards the pretty falls and were shouting their names at each other in glee, I shed tears.    :)

The three principals, Armie Hammer/Oliver, Timmy Chalamet/Elio and Michael Stuhlbarg/Prof. Perlman, are brilliant, in at least three different ways, but Timmy/Elio is far and above the most brilliant. He is the movie, all the way through, but two phone calls towards the end are tear-making. The first: after Oliver has finally gone, Elio, suddenly unable to make his own way home, calls his mother from the train station a considerable distance away, and asks her to pick him up with the family car. The fact that he is looking away  from the camera is kindness itself because the audible catch in his throat is heartrending. Then, the second: months later, it is hanukkah, a gentle, serenely snowy day, and a seemingly now happy, cheerful Elio picks up a ringing telephone, saying "I'll get it!" to his parents. It is Oliver, supposedly calling to wish the Perlmans happy hanukkah, but really to tell Elio that he, Oliver, is getting married in the spring. "Do you mind?" says Oliver. The conversation (only SEEN by Elio's end, in the hallway of the Perlman home) is devastating. Now think: when this scene was filmed, actor Timmy Chalamet was 19 years old. Unbelievable.

Sorry, I'm all scattered--but here are two photos of the cast not usually shown:



Luncheon under the trees: Mrs Perlman, Professor Perlman, Oliver and Elio
Amira Casar, Michael Stuhlbarg, Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet





http://m.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm3976289024

Mafalda, Marzia and Elio in the kitchen.
Vanda Capriolo, Esther Garrel and Timothée Chalamet





Anyway, here's the Edelstein NYMag: review:


http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/review-call-me-by-your-name-is-a-masterpiece.html



Call Me by Your Name
Is a Masterpiece
By David Edelstein
November 22, 2017 8:01 pm



Young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name




In Call Me by Your Name, the gifted young American actor Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, a 17-year-old who spends summers with his academic parents in their airy, rustic villa in Crema in northern Italy. In early scenes, the skinny, long-waisted Elio seems vaguely uncomfortable in his body, as if uncertain what to do with it apart from the de rigeur canoodling with teenage girls who swim with him in nearby lakes and ponds. It’s only when he stares from his bedroom window at the arrival of this year’s summer guest — a young scholar who’ll spend six weeks reading, writing, and working with the professor — that Elio seems to come out of his own head.

The 24-year-old visitor, Oliver (Armie Hammer), has an easy, almost arrogant physicality. He’s broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, absurdly handsome. But he’s hard to read. Oliver gives the shirtless Elio a quick shoulder massage and then heads off to play volleyball. Was it innocent or a come-on? Whichever, Oliver’s touch lingers. Elio sneaks into Oliver’s room and sticks his nose into a pair of discarded bathing trunks, inhaling sharply. He puts them on his head. He’s in heaven.

Call Me by Your Name  takes place in summer, 1983. It has the feel of something recollected in tranquility, but the eroticism is startlingly immediate. The faithful adaptation of André Aciman’s novel is by James Ivory, but the movie has a different feel than Ivory’s own formal, somewhat stiff work. The Italian director Luca Guadagnino creates a mood of free-floating sexual longing. Oliver never wears long pants, only short shorts or swim trunks, and young men are always doffing their shirts and jumping into sparkling water or riding on bicycles along dirt roads. The flesh tones stand out against the villa’s pale whites and yellow walls — more tactile but on a continuum with the sculptures and oil paintings by men with similar longings centuries ago. Call Me by Your Name  is hardly the first film set in Italy to juxtapose youth and beauty and fleeting seasons with ancient buildings and ruins. But I can’t recall such a continuum between the ephemeral and the enduring.

I also can’t remember a filmmaker who has captured the essence of midsummer this way, lazy but so vivid that every sound registers. Sound floats in through windows — of insects and birds but mostly wind. The presence of Nature can be felt in every one of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s frames. It’s reflected in the bodies of the characters. Oliver is hard for Elio — and us — to read. Is he toying with the teenager? Or is something stirring in him, too? In this atmosphere, how can something not be stirring? There’s friction in the uncertainty, heightened when Oliver dances provocatively with Elio’s kinda-sorta girlfriend. The minutes go by and then we’re into the film’s second hour with everything maddeningly —but thrillingly — undefined.

The love scenes between Elio and Oliver aren’t explicit — they only feel as if they are. The title is said in a moment of passion. It’s Oliver’s fervent desire to dissolve his self, to become one with Elio. I should point out that Armie Hammer doesn’t look 24 — more like 29, which he was during filming, and that changes the dynamic. Make of that what you will (17 was above the age of legal consent in Italy), but it’s Elio who finally pushes Oliver over the brink — who calls the question.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor who gazes intently at his son, seems to know what’s happening — and doesn’t interfere. He and Elio have a revelatory conversation near the end, but it’s the very last shot that stays in mind, all but dissolving the boundary between viewer and actor. Everything in Call Me by Your Name  registers momentously, from the scene that definitively raises the question, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” to the ’80s dance numbers to the yearning Sufjan Stevens song over the stunning credits. Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.


« Last Edit: November 26, 2017, 11:47:36 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1817 on: November 26, 2017, 03:07:54 pm »
NYMag's David Edelstein is not  my favorite film critic--he can be,  quite often, a bit sloppy (or is it just that he isn't all that smart ?)

He's not mine, either. I don't know if you pay attention to TV reviews, but their TV critics are far superior. Matt Zoller Seitz, their lead TV critic, is also a good film critic who maintains Roger Ebert's website. Their next-in-line reviewers are good, also.

For film, I've always prefer Slate. But Dana Stevens, the regular film critic, is no longer reviewing many films for some reason, so most of their reviews have been written by assorted people.

Then there's The New Yorker, and while Anthony Lane is an intelligent and amusing writer I sometimes think he tries too hard for jokes at the expense of actually analyzing the movies. And he's far pickier than I would be.

So I guess that leaves the New York Times, which is usually pretty good, IMO.



Offline Meryl

  • BetterMost Supporter
  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 12,205
  • There's no reins on this one....
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1818 on: November 27, 2017, 01:42:16 am »
John, I must say that your review is spot on and far superior to Edelstein's. Thanks so much for sharing it here!  :-*
Ich bin ein Brokie...

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #1819 on: November 27, 2017, 10:33:17 am »
John, I must say that your review is spot on and far superior to Edelstein's.

Agreed!  :D