I canceled my cable TV subscription because it was costing an insane amount and honestly I didn’t get the point of it. It was this anxiety inducing entity, like a wheel of fortune that won’t stop spinning. Nauseating (physically but also from the indecision) but still offering the mirage of a reward. This week’s column is short not by choice but by circumstance. I’ve watched, or maybe witnessed as in “I witnessed a horrible car crash,” a fair amount of straight to TV movies (“perks” of working from home). Aside from being the only way you can watch Lindsay Lohan in action these days there are occasional diamonds in the rough, gems hidden in the mounds of heaping shit.
1. Lolita
I know it’s essentially blasphemous to speak ill of Stanley Kubrick but fuck it — his version of Lolita was horrible. It’s an understandably difficult text to adapt to a movie but you shouldn’t take it on if you’re going to blow it all to shit anyways. The movie reads like some bizarre PSA about the perils of dating weird old British men with fake names (see: Humbert Humbert and Claire Quilty). It’s shoddily done and skims the surface of the text without really dedicating itself to an actual avenue of representation or even plot.
In 1997 Adrian Lyne (of Flashdance fame) directed the movie starring Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and it’s basically amazing. I’m not sure that Lyne could have got any closer to the text without dealing with some really difficult moral issues. It’s disturbing and grotesque and sat in the back of my throat for days, as if I had been a passive bystander to some horrible event. That is basically the feeling that Lolita should give you — at the risk of being reductionist it’s about a self deluded man and the normalization of his sexual relationship with a 12 year old girl using his eloquence and writing ability.
2. James Dean
I usually forget that there was a period when James Franco was enough to get me interested in a movie. He had played Hart Crane in a self-directed short film, he played Allen Ginsberg in Howl and he played James Dean in a James Dean biopic. I watched it late one night when it came on TNT (I know) and it occasionally still haunts me. A young James Franco first of all has an extreme likeness to James Dean, but he also nails all of Dean’s mannerisms and quirks both tonally and physically. James Franco’s portrayal of James Dean is heartbreaking, he manages to convey Dean’s supposed internal turmoil, emotional instability and ultimately, talent. It’s a TNT original so you can always try to catch it that way, or you can watch this low quality version that’s up on youtube.
