{ Tuesday, July 8, 2003 }
• Spellbound, a documentary that follows eight kids from vastly different backgrounds to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC, and which led to Stewart being struckdown by Nupurmania. Few docs are as good as this one.
• Confusion by Stefan Zweig. High-flown emotion prevails, sober consideration withdraws in this ode to the seductions of literature. Told retrospectively by an aging author, we discover our protagnist as a reformed 19-year-old Lothario, who finds himself drawn into a passionate love affair with Elizabethan English by a magnetic professor. Melodrama? Perhaps. Contemporary mores have changed to such an extent that the dramatic "reveal" at the end of the story hasn't much impact. And having anticipated the conclusion by the end of the first chapter, I was impatient with the withheld information. But I'd never read any Zweig before, who fled the Nazis and died in 1942, a double suicide, with his wife, in Brazil. It was an absorbing short read.
• Let Me Die a Woman directed by Doris Wishman. A "documentary" about transexualism, with weird gratuitous sex scenes, a collection of inarticulate transexuals, an inadvertently hilarious doctor and the most awkward direction imaginable. What's not to like? Well, the unsparing documentation of the penis-removal surgery was really hard to watch.
LINK | 6:26 PM | TB
Isn't that called Taxicab Confessions, on HBO?
tim | July 9, 2003 2:57 AMI highly recommend Rivers and Tides... f/Andy Goldsworthy's art.
becca | July 9, 2003 6:08 AMIsn't Spellbound great? Where did you see it? I caught a screening this spring but I haven't noticed it playing anywhere since.
Songdog | July 9, 2003 6:25 AMTest
| July 22, 2003 4:24 PM{ Post a comment }
By far the most sensational documentary I ever saw was one whose name I can't remember.
Cameras were hidden inside New York taxis, and it's a series of confessions by the passengers.
There's a gorgeous tipsy lesbian hitting on one of the drivers (and the driver considering it), an adrenaline pumped guy who'd just run into the man he'd been waiting to kill for the past 10 years, two cheapskate French "wienies" out on the town, looking to get lucky, a policeman recounting the most harrowing thing he'd ever seen... and more.
It haunted me for weeks.
Oh, and, happy birthday, girl!
I'd send you a copy of the video, if only I could remember the name of it. Damn it.
Gail | July 9, 2003 1:29 AM