Watching the Golden Globes last night I wondered if the host's constant wardrobe changes were an attempt to distract us from the fact that he wasn't funny.
This week Robert Gottlieb was interviewed on Fresh Air, primarily about his decades-long collaboration with Robert Caro on Caro’s still unfinished biography of Lyndon Johnson. It was a rare moment, for NPR, of an old white man being interviewed about his work with another old white man on a book about a dead white man.
The Menu, the new film starring Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy, starts out as a biting social satire, poking fun at rich, pretentious foodies, and sadly descends into an exercise in violence. As I left the theater I wondered if the creator originally presented it as a social satire and was told that he had to add violence to it to get a green light, on the belief that audiences are not satisfied with the deft and the subtle.
A friend wrote a book that's been optioned for a TV series. The scriptwriter who was hired to do the adaptation changed one of the minor characters from heterosexual to homosexual.
I learned of the death of Sempé – one of my favorite contemporary artists, whose specialty was little men in big cities – last night while reading the current issue of The New Yorker, the magazine he drew over 100 covers for. Googling, I found an obituary from the Washington Post, written by my friend Brian Murphy, who quoted the artist in the third paragraph. “What I like so much about cartoons is the way they can express certain ideas discreetly. It is a way of talking about yourself without really seeming to do so.”
Of course, Sempé was more than a cartoonist. One of his brilliant illustrations shows a man standing on a busy street – traffic and pedestrians swirling all around him – and looking through the window of a gallery at a still life.
The first episode of The Dropout, the movie about Elizabeth Holmes, takes place partly in China, where the young Holmes spends the summer in a Mandarin immersion course. I watched it with delight and also a bit of disbelief, as I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a show or movie that depicted an American learning a foreign language abroad.