The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe

You would think that this is a book one would enjoy in their angsty youth and grow to despise as they got older, but funnily enough, it seems to be the opposite in my case. I used to think that Werther was annoying, melodramatic, and silly, but reading the book again now, I found him strangely lovable. More importantly, however, I was completely blown away by the novel itself. It is so brilliantly constructed; these little random bits of observations (that make the epistolary trope genuinely convincing) that fit together in such amusing ways, as when Werther marvels at how a man could have been deluded by his wife for years, and begins the next paragraph with "No, I am not deceiving myself!" and explain his conviction that Lotte loves him. Reflections about nature and children and literature form this wonderful tapestry of ideas that provides a broader sense of a worldview full of idealism and contradictions. Werther is brimming with passion and zest for life, while also being arrogant, hypocritical, and blind to his own privilege. But he manages to be mostly charming nonetheless. You'd expect the enjoyment you get from the book to be of the campy, cynical variety, but it's actually not--there is something genuinely winning about its earnestness and funny little thoughts. I was discussing it with a friend today, and I think he kind of nailed it when he said that it's a novel that could very easily have been a total flop, and that it took someone like Goethe to make it work. It's actually a pretty incredible book, and really interesting as a clearly very carefully and thoughtfully constructed work of fiction.

Haute Cuisine

This is a surprisingly understated movie, in many ways. Like many foodie films, it's true raison d'être is arguably the incredible footage of delicious meals prepared by the main character, loving shots of pastry-encased meats and roulades, or a mouth-watering open-faced truffle sandwich. But, barring cinematic masterpieces like Tampopo or Like Water for Chocolate, many of these culinary-oriented films justify that footage with a rather clunking story about a hard-luck chef trying to save the family business, or neglected woman whose cooking brings passion back to her life. Haute Cuisine could very easily have gone in that direction, but it pulls short, and in the process, runs the risk of minimizing narrative satisfaction altogether. There are two threads -- or rather, settings -- in the film. One is the Presidential Palace, where Hortense, the main character, is put in charge of the President's private kitchen. The other is Antarctica, where, 4 years later, she is preparing her final meal as head of the cafeteria before returning to France. A documentary filmmaker, who I think was want to be from Australia, but whose accent didn't seem to be, is trying to get footage of Hortense, who remains elusive. I'm not sure if this is a clever reference to the film's refusal to tell an over-simplified tale, or a half-baked attempt to explain the story's narration. I prefer to think the former, but that might be giving the movie too much credit.

In any case, the Antarctica scenes are pleasant, carousing moments of community. The French scenes are full of jealousy, animosity, and sexism, leavened with the pleasures of a budding friendship between the fellow private kitchen team, and occasional chats with the President himself, a great adorer of traditional French food. Budget cuts, dietary restrictions, and a nasty Main Kitchen team ultimately make the long hours and grueling work at the Private Kitchen head less pleasure than frustration, and that's that. Hortense's more personal struggles--particularly with the sexism that is constantly rearing its ugly head--are alluded to but left unexplored, which I think was the perfect way to make their existence clear but avoid trivializing them. I found myself enjoying the film's subtlety as much as I relished its gorgeous images of food. It's a quiet film, but a tasty one.

Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith

I first read this back in 2007 (those lists of books I read in the year do end up being useful; I should stop not doing them) and enjoyed it then, and re-reading it now, I find it just as delightful as before. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but to me, the book is a totally bizarre combination of irony and sincerity. There's plenty of snark in eighteenth-century writing, but this book seems unique in its utterly unstable shifts between seeing its characters as idiots or heroes. I'm still not sure whether we are meant to admire the main character's cheerful equanimity and willingness to forgive those who hurt him, or think he is insane. Is he a wise man, a pretentious blowhard, or just a lucky fool? There's also the novel's form, which on the one hand seems fairly carefully constructed with a 3 part tragic structure and an intricate web of fortuitous coincidences and revealed mysteries, but it is also breezily laden with sermons, political disquisitions (one of which, amazingly, turns out to be delivered by a butler pretending to be the master of the house!), poems, and other random bits of fluff. Time passes in uneven ways; 3 weeks, or even years, will blow by without notice, and then two days will be carefully chronicled. It's a chatty, humorous, and utterly charming book.

Mourning Diary, by Roland Barthes

Not exactly a diary, because it was written in an occasional sort of way, on index cards. Most entries are only a sentence or so. The book is a chronicle of Barthes' grief following the death of his mother. The fragmentary nature -- though I found myself reading it compulsively, rather than in slow, reflexive fashion -- means that rather than a sense of wallowing or self-indulgence, you have the idea of an iceberg of sorrow thinly covered by a veneer of day-to-day coping, with this book being a kind of ice pick chipping at the mass beneath. It's quite moving, though not a work I found myself relating to (the way you absolutely do -- or at least I did -- to Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking.

I picked this up after reading Michael Taussig's I Swear I Saw This, which is an extended reflection on the field notebook as a genre. He entertains the idea of it as a modernist text, and is specifically interested in the role drawings play. I was not particularly taken with his thoughts on drawing -- overall, many of his ideas seemed somewhat derivative, though at least he gives plenty of credit to people like Barthes and Benjamin -- but the idea of the notebook as a fetish, and of anthropology as a space of contact rather than observation, I really enjoyed. Both the Taussig and the Barthes were useful to me as works that reflect on the process of writing, helping me get over my own strange blockage about it.

The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad

Conrad's prose is reliably gorgeous, but I didn't find this novel particularly compelling. All the things you might expect -- suspenseful double-crosses and deceptions, or penetrating insights into the mind of the terrorist, or the tensions between his political and domestic life -- are completely absent. In fact, one has the sense of a fog hanging over the book. It's the same kind of thing you get in Heart of Darkness, but there, it's the arises and part of a meta-reflection on knowledge and storytelling. Here it's indirection and vagueness. Events are almost never related outright, but usually rough a prism of secondhand information or newspaper reports. The minds of the characters are amorphous and confused; this initially makes them seem complex, and later does the exact opposite. Specific scenes, such as the descriptions of Stevie, the musings of the Chief of Police, or the anguish of Winnie, are completely incredible, but overall, the story drags and seems clumsy in its construction.

Incidentally, I also re-read Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday today, and it remains a totally fantastic metaphysical story about being a double agent. Such a great book.

Gravity

This was both better and worse than I expected, knowing almost nothing about it. It perhaps helped that I spent two hours discussing Deleuze and film theory beforehand -- I was primed to really appreciate thoughtful cinematic composition, and oh boy did this movie deliver. Especially good, because I did not realize that I was going into a movie that was largely monologue (and by monologue I mean Sandra Bullock saying oh shit oh shit oh shit), and might have been annoyed if I were in a less pensive mood.

So, the flaws first. The dialogue is pretty weak. The characters are pretty annoying, to the extent that you don't quite care enough about them. The plot is kind of one damn thing after another: essentially, it's a movie about flailing around. You can't help but feel vaguely frustrated that the only woman (admittedly, there aren't many people period, but it's still notable to have a female astronaut after all) is sickly, complaining, anxious, emotional, uptight, and basically everything a stereotypical annoying girl would be, in space. And of course, whenever possible, she strips down to her skivvies, and we watch her (quite attractive) butt float around. Meanwhile, the movie also gets quite sappy in the most American, Hollywoody way, and seriously why did it need to do that.

But! But. Wow. What a brilliant meditation on space. Both outer space, relative space, the way that film portrays space... Best use of the 3D medium ever, perhaps. Absolutely ingenious use of sound. I actually want to watch the movie again, and pay attention to it more carefully. Fantastic, for instance, the way the focus shifts, and gives you a sense of the enormity of space through a kind of reverse relativization: here you have Sandra Bullock, who is freaking out, literally in an echo chamber of her own panicked voice, and suddenly, the focus pans to a single tear she is crying, wobbling through the gravity-free area before her. So clever. And the movie does it a few times, jumping between the vast space around her, the claustrophobic space immediately around her, and the microcosm of an entirely uninterested object in its own little world beside her. It's really, really interesting. So that's what I mean by relative space; how the movie manages to evoke entirely different scales and shift between them.

Relatedly, there's outer space, and just how amazingly vast it is, and how that gets into a level of unknowability/abstraction that you kind of start to drift, and who knows what the rules are any more. And the only thing that can even compare is the labyrinth of your own mind, and the two start to collapse into each other.

And then, there's the way film portrays space, namely, the way the 3D makes you feel all floaty and weird, and like things are coming at you, and you're awkwardly fumbling for them.

Yes, it's sappy, and yes, the characters are annoying and the dialogue is dumb. But you need to see it, and you should do so in a theater.

Rush

Fun fact about me: I will see any movie Daniel Brühl is in, on general principle. The dude is fantastic, and most of the movies he's in are too. And even if they're not, they're worth watching just for him. So yup, off I trotted to check this one out. Overall - it's a so-so movie. But you should go see it anyways, because he's great.

The premise is made for cinema - the rivalry between two Formula 1 race car drivers, one the classic bad boy, the other an anti-social nerd who knows how to drive good. The bad boy character is pretty much the same one we know from many many other movies, though good ol' Thor is certainly pleasant to look at and manages to play it reasonably well, with only the occasional eye-roll-inducing descent into utter cliche. The filmmakers are canny enough to give him a genuinely interesting scene that serves to completely redeem and humanize his character and make you root for him, but it comes rather late in the film.

Brühl, meanwhile, is a character we are less familiar with, and not quite sure what to make of (and oh man his Austrian accent is SO spot on, both in German and English). A genius of sorts, but also thoroughly unpleasant, personality-wise. We can't quite decide whether or not to like him, and attempts to humanize him are shaky and not entirely convincing. He also throws a real wrench into the typical trope of sports biopics. What is it that drives him, really? It's hard to say, but Brühl manages to make this seem complex and subtle rather than undeveloped. What I really liked about the movie was how it managed to deliberate between the nerd and the popular guy in what to me at least was a genuinely compelling way.

Unfortunately there's a fairly lengthy bit in the middle that is way more gruesome than necessary -- one really wonders why the filmmakers insisted on such wrenchingly grotesque stuff; to shock? To make us realize what we're really dealing with here? Just 'cuz? -- and his wife is shamefully undeveloped personality-wise. But I will say this for the movie -- it actually gave me a glimpse of how Nascar might be genuinely interesting. It definitely captures both the thrill and the terror of racing, but also the utter stupidity and the wreckless disregard that the organization has for the people involved. As a bonus though, they do something at the end that I really like in this type of film, namely, they let you see what the real people look like, which is neat.

Overall, I'd say it's worth watching, but as should be clear, when it comes to Mr. Brühl, I am not even a little bit objective.