The Infidel and Furious Love: two reviews
Film: The Infidel, in which Toby Ziegler and Kalinda never meet, by which I mean their actors are in it and never share a scene. Fortunately, the film is good anyway. It's a British comedy, starring Omid Djalili as Mahmud Nasir, Muslim minicab driver and family man living a contented life until he experiences the twin blows of his son's fiancée acquiring a radical jihadist stepfather and finding out, via stumbling across his birth certificate after his mother's death, that he was born a Jew. Cue La Cage Aux Folles style shenanigans with the future in-laws while Mahmud simultanously goes through an identity crisis and is reluctantly tutored by his former arch nemesis, American black cab driver Lenny (Richard Schiff) in all things Jewish. The odd couple/Muslim-Jew-bickering buddies double act of Djalili and Schiff is the undisputed highlight of the film, but everyone else is great, too, including Archie Panjabi as Mahmud's long suffering wife, though sadly she hasn't got many scenes. The script gleefully makes fun of Muslims and Jews alike but in a laugh-with, not laugh-against fashion, and in the end is surprisingly optimistic. Mind you, subtle it is not. The closest thing to subtle in it is the fact that at one point we hear the radio playing a Cat Stevens song and the radio broadcaster after the song ends reminds the audience of something about Cat Stevens that foreshadows a key twist of the climactic showdown. But subtlety isn't what you watch a broad comedy for.
Book: Sam Kashner & Nancy Schoenberger: Furious Love. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the marriage of the century. I don't know about "marriage of the century", but this book about the Taylor/Burton relationship certainly makes a case for the larger than life epicness of its subjects without losing sight of their humanity. The writers have the advantage of being access by Elizabeth Taylor in the last year of her life to the Richard Burton's letters to her and the unplublished parts of her memoirs, and they know how to tell a good story. Amazingly, they also manage to remain bi partisan throughout (and never bash or demonize third parties, either). This isn't self-evident, because there are two extreme positions you can take on the phenomenon the paparazzi dubbed "Liz and Dick", and they were taken by some of their respective friends - that Burton ruined his chance to become the Heir-of-Olivier and the greatest British actor of his generation by entering a life of superstardom with Taylor, or that Burton was only after Taylor's fame and in the process managed to derail and ruin her film career. Meanwhile, our authors point out that Burton learned a great deal about screen acting from Taylor (if you compare his pre-Elizabeth films with his post-Elizabeth performance in Becket, you know immediately what they mean), while she would never have taken a role like Martha in Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? (arguably her greatest on screen performance) without his encouragement. That the book while delivering on the off screen antics never loses sight these two were actors and as passionate about their work (most of the time) as they were about everything else is one of its great qualities. Whatever was in their minds when they entered the relationship, they ended up absolutely besotted with each other and remained so arguably for the rest of their lives, in a real life case from can't-live-with-can't-live-without. Those letters and diary excerpts are intense, sensual (by no means only in the getting-to-know-you period but also when they were divorcing many years later - sex was never the problem) and in retrospect heartbreaking to read. Another thing the book does justice to and doesn't glamourize is the alcoholism (and that was a problem because they encouraged it in each other, and also because for the longest time they were in denial about it); but also to something usually overlooked in the Burton-and-Taylor saga, the fact they were parents (Elizabeth Taylor had two children from Wilding, one from Todd, she and Burton adopted a daughter together and he had two daughters from his first marriage) and crazy life style or not, this took a great deal of their attention, and they managed to make a reasonably good job of it. Then of course you have the fact these were two witty people in real life who didn't need scriptwriters to feed them good lines. When Burton, after being nominated for The Spy who came in from the cold, lost of all the people to Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, he quipped "What do you think they're trying to tell me? That Lee Marvin is a better class of drunk?" During the shoot of "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - a film where of the four actors only Elizabeth lacked a stage background - there was a set visit by Marlene Dietrich, who cattily remarked to Taylor: "Darling, everyone is so fantastic! You have a lot of guts to perform with real actors!", E.T. replied: "Yes, I do. And when I get home, Marlene, Richard and I are going to fuck like bunnies." And when she threw herself into campaigning for AIDS research (something she did at a point when AIDS was still being ignored and not being talked about by society and goverment alike), this included many visits at hospitals with AIDS patients; at one point she cheered one up with joking they should get together: "It's the perfect relationship! I don't want to get married again, and you're probably not interested in me."
In conclusion: a captivating book about two fascinating people.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/702859.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Book: Sam Kashner & Nancy Schoenberger: Furious Love. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the marriage of the century. I don't know about "marriage of the century", but this book about the Taylor/Burton relationship certainly makes a case for the larger than life epicness of its subjects without losing sight of their humanity. The writers have the advantage of being access by Elizabeth Taylor in the last year of her life to the Richard Burton's letters to her and the unplublished parts of her memoirs, and they know how to tell a good story. Amazingly, they also manage to remain bi partisan throughout (and never bash or demonize third parties, either). This isn't self-evident, because there are two extreme positions you can take on the phenomenon the paparazzi dubbed "Liz and Dick", and they were taken by some of their respective friends - that Burton ruined his chance to become the Heir-of-Olivier and the greatest British actor of his generation by entering a life of superstardom with Taylor, or that Burton was only after Taylor's fame and in the process managed to derail and ruin her film career. Meanwhile, our authors point out that Burton learned a great deal about screen acting from Taylor (if you compare his pre-Elizabeth films with his post-Elizabeth performance in Becket, you know immediately what they mean), while she would never have taken a role like Martha in Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? (arguably her greatest on screen performance) without his encouragement. That the book while delivering on the off screen antics never loses sight these two were actors and as passionate about their work (most of the time) as they were about everything else is one of its great qualities. Whatever was in their minds when they entered the relationship, they ended up absolutely besotted with each other and remained so arguably for the rest of their lives, in a real life case from can't-live-with-can't-live-without. Those letters and diary excerpts are intense, sensual (by no means only in the getting-to-know-you period but also when they were divorcing many years later - sex was never the problem) and in retrospect heartbreaking to read. Another thing the book does justice to and doesn't glamourize is the alcoholism (and that was a problem because they encouraged it in each other, and also because for the longest time they were in denial about it); but also to something usually overlooked in the Burton-and-Taylor saga, the fact they were parents (Elizabeth Taylor had two children from Wilding, one from Todd, she and Burton adopted a daughter together and he had two daughters from his first marriage) and crazy life style or not, this took a great deal of their attention, and they managed to make a reasonably good job of it. Then of course you have the fact these were two witty people in real life who didn't need scriptwriters to feed them good lines. When Burton, after being nominated for The Spy who came in from the cold, lost of all the people to Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, he quipped "What do you think they're trying to tell me? That Lee Marvin is a better class of drunk?" During the shoot of "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - a film where of the four actors only Elizabeth lacked a stage background - there was a set visit by Marlene Dietrich, who cattily remarked to Taylor: "Darling, everyone is so fantastic! You have a lot of guts to perform with real actors!", E.T. replied: "Yes, I do. And when I get home, Marlene, Richard and I are going to fuck like bunnies." And when she threw herself into campaigning for AIDS research (something she did at a point when AIDS was still being ignored and not being talked about by society and goverment alike), this included many visits at hospitals with AIDS patients; at one point she cheered one up with joking they should get together: "It's the perfect relationship! I don't want to get married again, and you're probably not interested in me."
In conclusion: a captivating book about two fascinating people.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/702859.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.