Essay · Film & Lives The Woman Who Would Not Be Placed Helena Bonham Carter has spent forty years systematically refusing the career that her face, her name, and her early notices seemed to have arranged for her. That the career she built instead — stranger, darker, funnier, and more various than anything the corset-dramaContinue reading “HBC”
Category Archives: Film
Roger Hargreaves’ The Mr. Men
Essay · Literature & Ideas Little Books, Absolute Selves Roger Hargreaves set out in 1971 to answer his son’s question about what a tickle looks like, and in doing so produced one of the stranger philosophical projects of the twentieth century: a universe populated entirely by beings who are identical to their own single quality,Continue reading “Roger Hargreaves’ The Mr. Men”
Filth Is My Politics: John Waters, Divine, and the Cinema of Glorious Bad Taste
For six decades, the Pope of Trash has been making films that Baltimore’s respectable classes would prefer not to exist. In doing so, he and his muse created something that outlasted respectability entirely — a body of work that is simultaneously the most offensive and the most loving in American cinema. By Bergotte There isContinue reading “Filth Is My Politics: John Waters, Divine, and the Cinema of Glorious Bad Taste”
Katharine Hepburn
Essay · Arts & Lives A House That Made Her Possible Katharine Hepburn did not invent herself. She was manufactured — lovingly, rigorously, sometimes mercilessly — by two of the most unusual parents that Progressive Era New England ever produced, and she spent the rest of her life living out the experiment they designed. ByContinue reading “Katharine Hepburn”
Cher and the Art of Outlasting America
Cher has lasted so long, and in so many forms, that she can seem less like an entertainer than like a permanent feature of the culture itself. She belongs to that tiny class of figures who have ceased to be merely famous and become symbolic: instantly recognisable, endlessly referential, somehow both singular and omnipresent. Singer,Continue reading “Cher and the Art of Outlasting America”
Alan Parker and the Brutal Energy of Modern British Cinema
Alan Parker belongs to that increasingly rare category of British director whose work was at once popular, ambitious and unmistakably personal. He was not a miniaturist, nor a specialist, nor a filmmaker content to remain within one tonal register. He moved restlessly between genres and scales: from the stylised bravado of Bugsy Malone to theContinue reading “Alan Parker and the Brutal Energy of Modern British Cinema”
The Little Man in the Big House: Hercule Poirot and the Strangeness of England
Agatha Christie gave the world’s most famous detective a moustache, a foreign accent, and a profound dislike of the English countryside. It was, in every sense, the point. By Bergotte There is a village in the English imagination that has never quite existed and has never stopped existing. It has a church with a NormanContinue reading “The Little Man in the Big House: Hercule Poirot and the Strangeness of England”
What We Lose When We Love: The Way We Were and the Myth of the Perfect Compromise
It was sold as a love story. It was actually an argument about America — about politics, memory, and the terrible cost of choosing comfort over conviction. By Bergotte There is a moment near the end of The Way We Were, Sydney Pollack’s 1973 film, that has lodged itself in the cultural memory with aContinue reading “What We Lose When We Love: The Way We Were and the Myth of the Perfect Compromise”
Ways of Being Seen: John Berger and the Art of Paying Attention
Eight years after his death, the critic, novelist, and storyteller who changed how we look at art remains the most generous — and the most radical — writer England ever produced. By Bergotte There is a moment in the first episode of Ways of Seeing — the 1972 BBC television series that made John Berger,Continue reading “Ways of Being Seen: John Berger and the Art of Paying Attention”
Ripley Part II: The Many Lives of Tom Ripley: From Highsmith’s Novels to Screen Legends
When Patricia Highsmith published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, she created a new kind of antihero: elegant, amoral, adaptable, and disturbingly successful. Tom Ripley not only survives but thrives, slipping into identities, murdering when necessary, and always convincing us — against our better judgment — to follow him. Over five novels (collectively known asContinue reading “Ripley Part II: The Many Lives of Tom Ripley: From Highsmith’s Novels to Screen Legends”
My World of Interiors 