Happy Thursday, everyone! Daffodils are coming up here in Virginia (sorry for those in the US who are still snowbound). I'm getting back the Invisible Man series next with with 1940's The Invisible Man Returns, but we're going thrift store stuff this week. Let's get to it!
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Helene Hanff is kind of a fascinating figure to me; a writer of plays that somehow never got produced and especially as a writer from the early days of television dramas in the US, she's best know for her book about her correspondence with London book dealer Frank Doel, 84, Charing Cross Road. It's a very charming collection of their correspondence over 20 years, ranging from the just post-WWII days until his death in 1968. Talk about your book that is infused with a love of literature and physical books. There's a raft of nice little adaptations, particularly a 1987 movie starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.
So I was happy to run across this little book, which is more of an autobiography of Hanff and how she came to be a television writer and memoirist and what some have called a quintessential New Yorker (frankly. I'm terrified to see what her former apartment in Manhattan is worth now, 26 years after Hanff passed away). Flipping through it I'm already charmed by her talking about working on political campaigns (for instance, working for the successful nomination of Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg), dealing with fan mail and phone calls for 84 and so on. It's a fun slim volume I plan to dig into more this weekend.
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I think Ingmar Bergman gets a bad rap for being always gloomy and sad and Scandinavian. Which, to be fair, he can be. But he can also be funny and joyful and weird (seriously, watch The Seventh Seal sometime; it has a ton of goofy jokes and the Bill & Ted version of Death is not a million miles away from the Death of Seventh Seal).
That said, this movie is...weird and gloomy and sad as two women go through a summer. Liv Ullmann is a stage actress who has gone mysteriously mute and Bibi Andersson is a nurse caring for her in a remote cottage. It's a beautiful piece of work as they start to merge into each other in their personalities. It's honestly hard to describe what happens in this movie; is one of them a parasite? Are they both? Is it a love story? It's one of those things that you just need to see and experience and decide for yourself.
Persona is currently streaming on HBOMax and the Criterion Channel
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Finally, just a recommendation this week. Kristen Lopez has written a delightful book about books adapted into movies, But Have You Read The Book?; she goes through 52 movies adapted into or inspiring movies and it's a really fun read. And it's also quite thoughtful; my favorite Scorsese movie is The Age Of Innocence and I love Lopez noting that it might seem like an outlier for him but it's also a quintessentially New York novel, which fits for him. I totally recommend tracking a copy down.
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