The Woman in Gold (1907) by Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter who lived from 1862 to 1918. The Woman in Gold is a portrait of a wealthy society woman that Klimt knew named Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881-1925). Her husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, was a wealthy industrialist who commissioned Klimt to paint the portrait of his wife. This painting was plundered by the Nazis during World War II and is the subject of the 2015 movie, Woman in Gold.
Genius ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
Like other geniuses before him, American writer Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) flamed brightly for a time and then burned out. He lived life exuberantly and was bursting with talent and creativity. In New York in 1929 he was just another failed writer. His massive first novel, which he called Oh, Lost!, had been rejected by every publisher in New York. He had a patroness, though, a woman named Aline Bernstein, who, through her connections, arranged to have the novel brought to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribners publishing house. Perkins agreed to give the manuscript a “quick look,” even though he was told from the beginning it wasn’t any good.
Max Perkins “discovered” Tom Wolfe, the writer. He would do for Wolfe what he had done for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. As soon as he began reading Oh, Lost!, he knew that it was a unique work. He saw in it what other editors had failed to see, or, more likely, hadn’t taken the time to see. The book needed massive editing, but Perkins believed it was a work of genius that needed to be brought to the reading public. He contacted Tom Wolfe and gave him a check in advance of royalties for five hundred dollars. Wolfe wept.
Of course, Wolfe was reluctant to make any cuts to the book. He and Perkins spent months whipping the book into shape, which included a title change to Look Homeward, Angel. When the novel was published, it was a huge success and Wolfe was hailed as a genius. He knew he would never have been able to do it, though, without the help of Max Perkins.
In the new movie, Genius, Thomas Wolfe is played by Jude Law. He is loud, has a prodigious Southern accent (from Asheville, North Carolina), and isn’t interested in social conventions. He says what he thinks, does what he likes, and spends a lot of his time in a drunken state. He also has some domestic problems. Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), his patroness, the “older” woman who left her husband, family, and respectability behind for him, is unstable and jealous. She is happy for Wolfe’s success, of course, but resents the many hours he spends on his writing. In one scene, she begins pouring pills into her mouth in the office of Max Perkins (Colin Firth) to get Wolfe to go home with her. She is a very unpleasant, bitter woman.
Wolfe’s next book, Of Time and the River, is even longer than the first. Perkins and Wolfe would spend many hours together, day and night, over two years or more, editing the book and getting it ready for publication. During this time, Perkins and Wolfe become close friends. Perkins comes to think of Wolfe almost as the son he never had (he has five daughters). The writer/publisher association develops into a close—at times volatile—friendship. Aline Bernstein tells Perkins that Wolfe will leave him as soon as he (Perkins) has served his purpose. She also threatens Perkins with a gun.
In 1938, at the age of 37, Tom Wolfe is stricken and taken to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore (the same hospital where his father died). When an operation is performed, doctors discover he has a “myriad” of tumors in his brain. He dies soon after.
Genius is based on a nonfiction book by A. Scott Berg. It is an “art” film for a niche audience that won’t get much attention or make much money. Those of us who have read the great books of Thomas Wolfe and know something of his life will find the story fascinating. There aren’t many of us. At the showing I went to last night, there were three other people besides me in the audience. I walked a mile in the heat (I’d always rather walk than drive) to see it and a mile home. It was worth it.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Alice Through the Looking Glass ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
In Wonderland, Time is a “he” with electric blue eyes, a mustache, and an accent. He tells the Red Queen that her head is looking “wery, wery large today.” The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), besides having an enormous head (out of all proportion to the rest of her body), has a tiny red heart painted in the middle of her lips (to show the smallness of her heart?) and a profusion of red hair. Nobody loves her, she says, but we know the reason for that is because she is so mean and loves to have people’s heads cut off. (“Off with his head!”, she shouts.) The White Queen, her fluttery sister, tells her that she loves her, if nobody else does, but the Red Queen isn’t having any of it. She hates being hugged.
The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) also has a profusion of red hair and enormous eyes that change color with his mood. He is rather androgynous and speaks with a lisping accent that is at times indecipherable. His friends (the Cheshire Cat, who floats in the air and disappears and reappears at will; Tweedledum and Tweedledee, rotund male twins; a dormouse, a dog, and a rabbit, all of whom speak English) are worried about him and think he might be dying.
Absolem, a blue, sometime-caterpillar/sometime butterfly, shows Alice (Mia Wasikowska) the way to return to Wonderland through the large mirror over the mantel. She is needed back in Wonderland after her earlier adventures there because the Mad Hatter, her “best friend in the whole world,” is in trouble. When she visits Hatter in his house shaped exactly like a top hat, she finds him in a low state. He tells Alice he wants her help in getting his family back and, when she tells him that getting them back is impossible because they are dead, he orders her out of his house. The Alice he knows, he says, never believed that anything was impossible.
Alice agrees to at least try to get Hatter’s family back, but she knows it will be very difficult, if not downright impossible. She must first manipulate Time (Sacha Baron Cohen), to be able to travel back to an earlier period when Hatter’s family was still alive. When she is finally able to travel back in time, she meets the Red Queen and her sister, the White Queen, as children, before the Red Queen became so mean. She also meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee before they were grown up and also meets Hatter as a child. Of course, he doesn’t have any recollection of Alice at this time because he hasn’t met her yet.
Alice Through the Looking Glass is a sequel to 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, both of them based on literary classics by English author Lewis Carroll. It’s colorful, imaginative and whimsical, full of bizarre characters and fantastic settings. For the child in all of us.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
London in the 1880s: Not only is Dorian Gray young, innocent, and fabulously wealthy (he doesn’t have to earn his daily bread), he is also extravagantly beautiful. When sometimes-mediocre painter Basil Hallward meets the beautiful young Dorian, he becomes obsessed and infatuated. “Gay attraction” and “love” are never mentioned, but isn’t that what we’re talking about here? After all, it’s Oscar Wilde.
Basil Hallward rises above his own mediocrity when he paints Dorian’s portrait. It is, everybody agrees, his masterpiece. He could sell it for a tidy sum but decides to give it to Dorian. Dorian mouths an innocent (or not so innocent) prayer to the effect that he wishes he could always remain young and beautiful, while his portrait would show the inevitable signs of aging and living. In a touch of “magic realism” (how else do you explain it?), he gets his wish.
Early in the story, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a character who could be Wilde himself. He’s worldly, cynical, intelligent, and in possession of a scathing wit. He speaks in epigrams (“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”) and doesn’t believe in goodness or much of anything else. He becomes an important character in the story because he is a corrupting influence on Dorian in his youth. Dorian admires him and is drawn to him and seeks to emulate him, even though he has a lot of the devil in him.
Dorian begins to live recklessly. He “falls in love” (or believes he does) with a young Shakespearean actress named Sybil Vane. Sybil’s biggest failing is that she doesn’t know what Dorian is all about or what she is getting herself into. Dorian believes she is a divinely talented actress and says he wants to marry her. When he brings his friends to the theatre to see her in a performance of Romeo and Juliet, she is terrible. She disappoints Dorian and embarrasses him in front of his friends. When he sees her after the performance, he is cruel to her. He tells her she is not what he thought she was and he can’t marry her and doesn’t want to see her again, while she says that her happiness at being his betrothed has robbed her of her “art.” He leaves her heartbroken and the next day discovers that she has committed suicide.
From Sybil Vane’s suicide, Dorian goes on to do other bad deeds. People are naturally drawn to him because he’s so attractive, but he turns out to be poison to everybody who comes into his sphere, male and female alike. Several young men are “ruined” because they acquire the taint of scandal from being Dorian’s “intimates.” (Homosexuality is still a crime in England at this time.) There are ruined careers and other suicides. Dorian immerses himself in a world of vice and degradation, frequenting opium dens and other low places of ill repute. Eventually he commits murder.
While Dorian becomes more and more immersed in sin, he remains young-looking and beautiful. At age thirty-eight, he still looks the same as he did at twenty-three. We (the reader) know what his secret is if nobody else does. The portrait that Basil Hallward painted of him (which he keeps locked away in the attic of his house) bears his shame and the marks of his vice and sin. It becomes more and more hideous while Dorian himself remains unscathed. The painting is, in a way, his soul and his conscience. We know this isn’t going to end well for Dorian.
There are elements of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in The Picture of Dorian Gray; also elements of Poe, although The Picture of Dorian Gray is generally easier reading than Poe. (We are told in the introduction that it started out as a shorter piece until Wilde expanded it into a novel.) It’s a readable classic, worth revisiting, if you read it once a long time ago, as I did, and want to experience it again now that you’re older and wiser. (If you’re interested in the life and too-early death of Oscar Wilde, the 1997 British movie, Wilde, makes for fascinating viewing.)
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
In this collection are twenty-eight short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, from the really well known (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”) to the less well known (“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Sphinx,” “The Imp of the Perverse”). Poe’s best stories are the ones where he gets right to the story and doesn’t theorize or provide dry, unnecessary information, as in the first couple of pages of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a fine story if you start reading about the third page. And, no, there’s no morgue in this story where dead bodies are kept. The “Rue Morgue” is a street in Paris where two women, mother and daughter, are brutally murdered, stumping police, especially since the body of the daughter is stuffed up inside a chimney. The 1932 movie version of the story, a vehicle for Bela Lugosi, bears little or no resemblance to the original story. Yes, there’s a killer ape in the story and also in the movie, but that’s where the similarity ends.
The movies have not been kind to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories just aren’t cinematic. Maybe some day somebody will make a movie from one of his stories that is faithful to the original story. In the 1960s, somebody thought it would be a good idea to make a series of movies based on the works of Poe starring that master of horror, Vincent Price. These movies were not serious attempts to translate the works of Poe to the screen but were mostly a way for filmmakers to make money, and I’m sure they succeeded in this goal, or there wouldn’t have been so many of them. To know what the stories of Poe are really like, you have to read them in their original form and not watch cheesy “B” movies.
Poe wrote on subjects that probably most other writers of his generation would have found too distasteful: mutilation murder, lunacy, drug addiction, being interred alive, being closed up in a wall to die, rotting corpses, rats, catacombs, disease, jealousy, revenge, etc. He was preoccupied with dying and death and the dark side of things; he probably suffered from some sort of undiagnosed mental illness. He didn’t write about monsters from another realm as H. P. Lovecraft did, but about monsters that exist right here on earth that you might just bring upon yourself if you’re not careful. In “The Imp of the Perverse,” a man commits a successful murder and has an easy life living on the money from the person he killed. Everything is going well for him, but he just can’t keep from confessing the murder and he ends up on the gallows. In “The Premature Burial,” a man who experiences catalepsy (trances that resemble death) has a morbid fear of being buried alive. In “The Black Cat,” an alcoholic who loves animals begins to have a consuming hatred for, and fear of, a certain black cat. In “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a “Mesmerist” hypnotizes a man who is on the brink of death from tuberculosis. As an experiment, he keeps the dying man in a state of suspended, hypnotic animation, neither alive or dead, for a period of seven months. “The Pit and the Pendulum” is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition being tortured in a fiendish and cruel way. In “Hop-Frog,” one of Poe’s best stories, a dwarf who is court jester for a cruel king exacts his revenge in the most dramatic way possible.
Poe elevated and legitimized the short story. In some ways, he is the father of the American short story. If you read his stories now, you will see why he endures. The best of his stories are the best ever written.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
In the early 1920s sound was still several years off, but the movies didn’t need sound; they were more popular than ever after the First World War. Even without sound, movies were becoming more technically advanced and were evolving into a truly American art form. Every town in America had its own movie theatre. Every movie-goer had his or her favorite star and was willing to plunk down hard cash to see them on the screen. Stars made huge sums of money and their movies reaped enormous profits for the movie studios. Overseas markets held huge potential for additional profits. What a business!
All was not sunny in sunny Hollywood, however. Movie stars lived extravagantly and were often seen by the world at large as unprincipled and immoral. Then, as now, everybody loved a juicy scandal. Just a hint of scandal involving a famous person elicited sensational headlines. Mabel Normand, for example, was a huge comedic star at the top of her game, but she was also a notorious party girl who became as well known for her appetites for booze and cocaine as for her screen performances. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a popular comedic actor even more famous than Mabel Normand. He hosted a wild party that didn’t turn out so well. A young starlet named Virginia Rappé was seriously injured at the party and later died. There were those who said Fatty Arbuckle raped her, although he vehemently denied it. Popular star Wallace Reid, known for his wholesome good looks, developed a morphine habit. He had morphine delivered to his home every day and died at a tragically young age in a sanatorium. Beautiful young star Olive Thomas died of an accidental poisoning in Paris after an evening of drug- and booze-fueled partying in Paris nightclubs. The effect of all these scandals was to galvanize reformers and do-gooders into calling for censorship and stringent regulation of the movie industry by the government.
The biggest scandal of them all, however, was the murder, in early 1922, of distinguished movie director William Desmond Taylor in his own home. People outside of Hollywood had never heard of William Desmond Taylor, but after he was murdered everybody heard of him. His murder and its solution became a national obsession. This scandal was just one more reason, reformers said, for measures to be taken to “clean up” Hollywood. If the things actors did on the screen weren’t bad enough, their own private lives were ten times worse.
The murder of William Desmond Taylor is the scandal at the center of Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William Mann. All the other scandals paled in comparison. What made the Taylor scandal so sensational and so intriguing to so many people was that it was all but insoluble. Did Mable Normand kill Taylor? She was his “best friend.” Because she was the last to see him alive, she immediately became a suspect. Or could it have been Mary Miles Minter, the little blonde star not yet twenty who was obsessed with Taylor and believed herself in love with him, even though he was almost thirty years older? More likely than not, it was Charlotte Shelby, Minter’s mother. She was known to have a raging temper and was vehemently against her daughter’s association with the much older man. How about light-fingered Edward Sands, Taylor’s former valet, who had a criminal past? Or maybe it was Henry Peavey, Taylor’s swishy valet at the time of his death. If he had a reason for killing Taylor, what might it have been?
And then there was Hollywood bottom feeder Margaret “Gibby” Gibson (otherwise known as Patricia Palmer), a would-be actress who struggled for years to become a star and never made it. She seemed to be willing to do almost anything to get ahead and was known to associate with low-life “bunco” artists who made a living by “shaking down” millionaires. (Just mention the Mann Act and they were almost certainly willing to pay any amount to stay out of trouble.) Did she kill Taylor as part of a scheme hatched by one of her nefarious friends?
Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood is a fascinating true crime story with a rich cast of real-life characters. For those interested in the dazzled and dazzling 1920s (before the bad old Depression) and specifically in the still-young movie industry, this book is going to be hard to resist. I could hardly put it down and that’s something I can’t say about very many of the thousands of books I’ve read in my lifetime. It’s not great literature, but it will transport you to another time and place for a while and there’s a lot to be said for that.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
At the Moulin Rouge, the Dance (1890) by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter of the Post-Impressionist movement (along with Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin) who lived from 1864 to 1901. He was known almost as much for his deformity as for his paintings. As a child, he broke both legs, the bones failed to grow after that as a result of a genetic defect, and he grew to only four feet, eight inches in height. Dance at the Moulin Rouge was painted in 1890 and is the second of a number of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec depicting dancing at the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris.
The Sympathizer ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
The Sympathizer by first-time novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen is this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It’s about the Vietnam War, the Vietnam era and, in particular, one man’s role in the whole mess. (What ever happened to the rule about novels having to be about American life to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize?) It’s 400 (almost) densely packed pages (no quotation marks; the dialogue is blended in here and there wherever it occurs). The Vietnam War and the Vietnam era would not be on my list of favorite subjects for fiction, but, for me, the saving grace of The Sympathizer is that it’s so good and such accessible, interesting reading.
The story of The Sympathizer is being told in the first-person by a narrator whose name we never know. We learn toward the end of the book that he is writing this whole thing as a confession while in solitary confinement as part of his “re-education” (another word for torture) at the hands of the communists. He is the bastard son of an illiterate Vietnamese woman and a French priest. Since he has spent part of his youth in America, he is “Americanized” and knows English well, but, in spite of that, he never feels like an American but always a bastard, the unwanted foreigner. After the fall of Vietnam and his narrow escape, along with many others, to America, he and many of his fellow countrymen want only to return to help liberate their country. What is more important that freedom and independence? The answer is nothing. (Nothing becomes a very important word to him at the end of the book.) Wait a minute, though! There’s something funny about this man. He claims to be on the side of the anticommunists, but the truth is he’s a secret communist agent. Where is he going with that? Is it safe to say he is conflicted? In the interview at the end of the novel, the author of the book, Viet Thanh Nguyen, says he deliberately wants to rattle the reader. I wouldn’t exactly say I was rattled, but only a little mystified.
For me the best parts of the book are the harrowing escape (by the narrator and his friends) from Saigon on the day it falls and the long section in the middle of the book where the narrator travels to the Philippines with an American movie crew to work as consultant on a movie that is being shot about the Vietnam War. (Ostensibly the movie is Apocalypse Now.) He wants to ensure that Vietnamese people are treated fairly in the movie but falls far short of that goal. There are a few lighter moments in The Sympathizer, as when the narrator is “dating” a much older Japanese woman who doesn’t care for him as much as he cares for her and, later, his infatuation with a beautiful Vietnamese girl named Lana (Lan); but there are also some horrible things, such as a couple of murders, a gang rape, people being dismembered by land mines, torture and other terrible things humans do to other humans in the name of some noble cause. This is a book, after all, about war. Did I need to read a book about Vietnam? Probably not, but now that I’ve read it through to the end, I’m glad to be done with it. If anybody ever asks me, I may be the only person in the room to have read it.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Penny Dreadful, Season 3 ~ A Capsule Review by Allen Kopp
Showtime’s gothic horror series set in Victorian London, Penny Dreadful, draws its inspiration from classic dark literature and horror films: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Wolf Man. If you think those themes have been done to death, well, Penny Dreadful puts a new spin on all of them.
Season three has shown the advent of a few new characters, namely Dracula, in the guise of a natural historian named Dr. Alexander Sweet; Dr. Henry Jekyll, a “wog” (half-caste Indian) who was Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s only friend going back to medical school; an “alienist” named Dr. Seward (played by Patti Lupone, forbidding but oddly comforting) who undertakes the job of “analyzing” and counseling Vanessa Ives with her many supernatural problems; a “girl of the streets” named Justine, taken up by Lily and Dorian as their new protégé in evil; and Mr. Renfield, a mousey young man who works as secretary for Dr. Seward and who is in thrall to Dracula. Mr. Renfield finds out all he can about Vanessa and reports back to Dracula. (Vanessa, if you will remember going back to the previous season, is much desired by the forces of darkness.) But, wait a minute, isn’t there something familiar about Dr. Seward? Didn’t Vanessa meet her in another place and another time and in a different persona? Vanessa is sure of it, no matter how much Dr. Seward denies it.
When season three begins, soulful, cleft-chinned Dr. Victor Frankenstein is still pining over Lily, who was Brona before she died of consumption and he “reanimated” her. When his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll arrives on the scene again, Victor is in a bad way with his obsession over Lily and his addiction to morphine, which he injects into his arm. Dr. Jekyll works with dangerous mental patients in Bedlam hospital. After Victor tells him the story of Lily, he says he can help make Lily what Victor wants her to be, by using the treatment he uses on out-of-control insane people at Bedlam. They can help each other. Victor knows how to resurrect people from the dead and Henry can make them docile and amenable.
Ethan Chandler, the wolf man, has been extradited back to America by a one-armed Scotland Yard man named Bartholomew Rusk. (Ethan, you will remember, butchered several people in England, but didn’t they, as the saying goes, have it coming?) In the wild New Mexico Territory, on a train enroute to the place where justice will be administered, the party is waylaid by a band of men who kidnap Ethan because Ethan’s father sent them. Have they saved him or is there something more sinister afoot? But—wait one damn minute!—besides the party who kidnapped Ethan, two other men are on his trail: a mysterious Indian named Kaetenay and our old friend Sir Malcolm Murray who has been recruited by Kaetenay to, as he says, “save our son.” What does he mean by this?
And then there is our friend, “the creature,” whom we met almost all the way back at the beginning of the series. Dr. Frankenstein “created” him, unhappily it seems, and he has been constantly dogging Dr. Frankenstein to do something to help him. His original intention of wanting a mate seems to have been superseded by other, more pressing, desires. He loves poetry and he seems to only want to be loved, but he will rip your head off if you give him any reason to do so. In season three, we are finding out more about his origins and how he came to be changed from a “normal” man into a monster. There is some connection between him and poor, tormented Vanessa Ives. As season three progresses, we will learn more about this.
A recurring theme in Penny Dreadful is the duality in human nature: every good that exists is counterbalanced by an equal or greater amount of bad; in every angel there’s a demon waiting to get out and in every demon an angel. It’s fantasy TV, not for everybody, of course, but for the thinking person who is fed up with raunchy sit-coms and mind-numbing commercials and drivel that TV serves up every minute of every day. It could have been schlock but it’s not. It’s intelligent and engaging, always a little surprising. (Some of the dialogue is brilliant, as in the exchanges between Dr. Seward and Vanessa.) Every episode is beautiful to look at, whether it’s the deserts of the American Southwest or the dreary, crowded streets of Victorian London. The acting is sincere; the actors never seem to think themselves superior to the material, even if it’s campy or overly familiar. I’m a big fan of Penny Dreadful and I have been since the very beginning. You can have Veep, Girls, and Game of Thrones. I’ll take Penny Dreadful.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Pussycat and Roses (1939) by Thomas Hart Benton
American painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) painted Pussycat and Roses, a still life incorporating different textures in one painting: a kitten, flowers, a basket, a blanket, a rug, a letter, a table and part of a tree. All these diverse elements form one harmonious whole.
Literary Fictions 