Short, Back & Sides: Trim Reviews! Capote (2005)

2015 means it's been ten years since I first saw Capote (this year also marks the 50th year anniversary of Hickock and Smith's actual execution). I still remember being rooted to my cinema seat long after the credits had rolled, such was the power and twisted beauty of this film.  Seducing me with its opening shot of a depleted, saturated and somehow disturbing wheat field shuffling calmly in the breeze, for the next 110 minutes I was absolutely captivated by story, performance and direction in equal measures.

Capote himself was no doubt a tormented but terribly irksome individual, and if it hadn't been for Seymour Hoffman's extraordinarily empathetic performance, we might even have lost interest in Truman's tragically self-obsessive destruction over the writing of his finest book In Cold Blood...yet we never do.

As a writer it affected me greatly, to see how far one might have to go in order to achieve success and there is no doubt that the work is a masterpiece.  However as a human being, there was just something wholly sad about witnessing his desperate downfall.

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Short, Back & Sides: Trim Reviews! Ham On Rye by Charles Bukowski (1982)

Certainly in my top 10 books of all time due to its astonishing accuracy...has the charm, cruelty and complexity of childhood and adolescence ever been so truthfully and expertly observed?   Bukowski will have you laughing with him in one sentence and traumatised by the next. This book will upset you, irritate you, educate you, crack you up and cry you to sleep - as well as evoke memories of your own life, for better and for worse.  Bukowski was a difficult man to understand but he was also a victim.  It took him many decades to summon the strength to confront his past and publish this memoir...but thank goodness he did for essentially it is a story of triumph over personal tragedies.  I urge you to raise a glass to Ham and Rye.  After all, if you were Bukowski you would have raised "the whole goddamn bottle!" 

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Extract:

"Finally it was the day of the Senior Prom.  I don't know why but I walked over that night, the two-and-one-half miles from my parents' place.  I stood outside in the dark and I looked in through the window and I was astonished.  All the girls looked very grown up, stately, lovely, they were in long dresses, and they all looked beautiful.  And the boys in their tuxes, they looked great, they danced so straight, each of them holding a girl in their arms, their faces pressed against the girls hair.  They all danced beautifully and the music was loud and clear and good, powerful. 

Then I caught a glimpse of my reflection staring in at them - boils and scars on my face, my ragged shirt.   I was like some jungle animal drawn to the light and looking in.  Why had I even come?  I felt sick.  Where had they learned to converse and dance? Everybody knew something I didn't know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome.  I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one.  To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me."

Short, Back & Sides: Trim Reviews! Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Oh George and Martha - one evening with these guys and you'll feel like you'll need a weekend away!  Sadly we lost Mike Nichols last year, but it was his craft as director - as well as Burton and Taylor's genius - to be able to put us completely through the emotional ringer and yet never wholly resent spending two hours with such a revoltingly riveting, claustrophobic couple. Namely because throughout all the teasing, testing, games, rows, love, hatred and drinking we learn so much about this perversely unorthodox (or totally ordinary?) marriage - and most certainly something of our own relationships along the way. A fickle observation perhaps, but living through the tiresome perfection of 21st century CGI, I couldn't help but wonder if Burton's scarred skin would have been 'cleaned up' in post these days?  Great to see real stars used to be real people! 

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