Last night I received on my phone the Christmas issue of The Spectator, the annual double issue with a beautifully illustrated cover. My delight at being able to read the magazine during the holidays, which I was never able to do when I received the paper edition, is tempered by my regret at not being able to hold in my hands, and then save in a drawer, the aesthetically pleasing product.
I was disappointed with “A Man on the Inside,” especially after hearing an interview with the award-winning writer. What is it about American shows, especially comedies, that makes them such unsatisfying fantasies? I measure them against the brilliant German comedy “The Last Word,” which also had a slightly absurd premise – a woman is hired as a eulogist by a failing funeral home – but was steeped in the reality of the human condition.
Also, I stopped watching the highly acclaimed “Black Doves” after one episode. It’s not a comedy, but it displays an equally distant relationship to reality.
Friday evening we went to Regal Oakwood in Hollywood to see A Real Pain. Numerous commercials preceded the coming attractions, including the longest car commercial I had ever seen. It began with a woman informing her husband that she was pregnant and ended with her nearly getting run over by a car, on a strangely empty street. Finally, the coming attractions began – that dismaying, de rigueur montage of shootings and crashes – though in the middle of them a commercial was thrown in.
I was in a very bad mood when the movie began. My spirits lifted when the two protagonists arrived in Poland, then they plummeted again as it became clear that this was not a road movie, it was a buddy picture. It’s not about cultural differences, it’s about relationships. Of course it is; who in today's Hollywood would make a movie about the former?
Arthur Frommer died yesterday at the age of 95. Best-known at the author of Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, and founder of the Frommer travel guides, he was also the only person who ever called me out of the blue to offer me a job.
It was in the late ’90s. I had met Arthur once, when he spoke at the Barnes & Noble in Plantation to talk about his new magazine Budget Travel. I ended up writing a column about the evening, in which I said: “What Dr. Spock was to child rearing in the ’50s, and Masters and Johnson were to sex, Arthur Frommer was to travel.” Shortly after, a travel writer at the LA Times, who heard him speak in Los Angeles, told me Arthur used that line in his introduction.
So one afternoon, while I was sitting at my desk in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom, the phone rang and Arthur was on the other end. He said that he was stepping down as editor of Budget Travel and wanted to know if I would be interested in the job. Everything about the offer was appealing – editor of a glossy travel magazine in the media capital of America – except the nature of the publication. As its name suggests, Budget Travel was a practical magazine of tips and information, far from the evocative travel writing that I loved and, surprisingly, was allowed to do at the Sun-Sentinel. I told Arthur I’d think about it – Hania was intrigued by the idea of living in New York – but I eventually decided to stay in the provinces, putting out the kind of travel publication that gave me joy.
I think I made the right decision. After The Best American Travel Writing anthology debuted in 2000, the Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared in the first nine editions. Its last appearance came in 2008, the year I got laid off.
My favorite films from the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, which concluded yesterday, were Black Dog (China) and Junks & Dolls (Iran). Dissimilar in many ways, they both depict people finding purpose, and connection, in inhospitable settings.
The movie last night was a French comedy, Robot T-0, in which a single mother obtains a personal robot. The robot cautions the woman about her heavy consumption of carbohydrates but says nothing about her smoking.