My filmmaker friend texted me yesterday that the festival to which he had been invited advertised itself as the Palm Beach International Film Festival – a well-known festival that closed in 2017 after 28 years. He added that the people at the Hilton, a reported partner with discounted rooms, had never heard of it.
Feeling a bit better yesterday I drove up to West Palm Beach to have lunch with a friend – a filmmaker – who was in town for the Palm Beach Film Festival. The festival, he said, was a complete bust; the theater that was supposed to host it had filed for bankruptcy and as a result the films were being shown online. This cut down on the number of viewers, obviously, but also the socializing and exchange of ideas. “We didn’t all come here to sit alone in our rooms and watch films on our laptops,” my friend explained. The new head of the festival, apparently, was acting quite oblivious to participants’ complaints.
I thought it would make an interesting story, but searching this morning I found no mention of the debacle – not even in the Palm Beach Post. Newspapers these days are as feeble as film festivals.
We started watching Beef, the new Netflix series based on the idea of road rage, and stuck with it for three episodes. Why are characters now so over-the-top? This is the same problem I had with Succession: nobody seems that believable to me. They all look like the products of writers’ rooms where the writers are having great fun coming up with the most outrageous characters, and giving them the most scurrilous lines, while ignoring the commonplace and the everyday. Of course, it’s much harder to make entertainment out of the quotidian, but people like Pinter and Mamet did it quite well.
Because I subscribe to The Spectator, I read a lot of criticism of the BBC, but it is one of a handful of stations I listen to while in the car (on SiriusXM). And Wednesday evening, driving home from dinner at Greek Islands Taverna, I heard an interview with Paul Theroux about his book Deep South. It is not his most recent book, not even his most recent travel book, yet someone at the BBC thought it would be interesting to have him talk about it now. Not for a few minutes, as might be expected here in the U.S., but for an hour. The host of the show had him read a few excerpts, and asked him questions, and then opened it up to questions from people around the world: New Zealand, Italy, the United States. Most were fans, but one caller suggested that Theroux came across as too negative in his books. “I’m one of the most affable people you’ll ever meet,” Theroux told the man laughing and, having met him, I nodded in agreement. He described himself, in his books, as “unsparing” – which seemed a very accurate description. I reached home before the interview had ended and listened to the last 10 minutes while sitting in our condo parking lot and thinking how I’d never hear such an exchange on NPR.
Every week I look forward to the new episode of Lucky Hank, the new AMC series starring Bob Odenkirk, and based on a novel by Richard Russo, and every week I'm mildly disappointed. Odenkirk plays an English professor at a small Pennsylvania college (I majored in English at a small Pennsylvania college) so the show has obvious interest for me. But as often with such shows - not that there are a lot of them - this one demonstrates a strained relationship with reality, particularly in its portrayal of the English faculty. College professors may be petty, but they're not juvenile - revving their car engines, for instance, under a colleague's office window so she can't have a consultation with a student; barging in on a colleague's class because of a need to talk. When scenes are so far out of the realm of possibility, they put the whole show into question.
I expected to be annoyed by the Oscars last night and instead I was charmed by the genuine emotion of the winners. Though when they mentioned the historic importance of their triumphs I had to remind myself that they were being rewarded for playing fictional characters, not for inventing a life-saving vaccine.