The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Sayat Nova, USSR, 79 minutes

Director: Sergei Parajanov

Writers: Sayat Nova, Sergei Parajanov

Photography: Suren Shakhbazyan

Music: Tigran Mansuryan

Editors: Sergei Parajanov, Marfa Ponomarenko, Sergei Yutkevich

Cast: Sofiko Chiaureli, Spartak Bagashvili, Gogi Gegechkori, Melkon Alekyan, Medea Japaridze, Vilen Galstyan

This art film curiosity from late-‘60s USSR was intended by director Sergei Parajanov as a kind of intuitive biography of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova—to be sure, not a literal straightforward bio but more of an “inspired by” type of thing, indulging all poetic impulses however extravagant. Indeed, mimes are involved. The Color of Pomegranates delivers on the implied promise of the title, with vibrant color and often quite strikingly beautiful images. There is almost no dialogue or even that much of a discernible through-line, though keyed in many ways to a bio’s chronology.

Soviet censors worried that it was not literal enough and that it fell far short of a fair biography of anyone. They demanded the original title be changed and all specific reference to Sayat Nova removed. A headnote was added: “This film is not the story of a poet’s life. Instead, the filmmaker has attempted to recreate the world of a poet—the modulation of his soul, his passions, and his torments—broadly utilizing the symbolism and allegories of medieval Armenian troubadors.”

The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las (2019)

With this 33-1/3 volume I had the impression author Ada Wolin was more interested in researching and writing about girl groups generally, and the Shangri-Las specifically, than anything about any album. One expectation or hope I brought with me is that a best-of in this series would address the ongoing simmering controversy about the validity of best-of collections versus more intentional or “authentic” album releases. Instead, and this surprised me, I found myself once again hearing out arguments about rockism and poptimism. Well, OK, I guess. Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las has the distinction of being the first of many Shangri-Las collections, released in 1966 and marking (amazingly) the de facto end of their career. As Wolin points out, many of them were not even 20 yet in 1966. Golden Hits also has the advantage of being succinct: 32 minutes, 12 songs, not even that many of them genuine top 40 hits. The Shangri-Las are a decidedly strange beast—a girl group, yes, of course, but distinct and apart, somehow anticipating punk-rock convulsions years before impact. Wolin has a number of bones to pick with narrative history and consequences (as do we all, at least those of us suffering under material contrarian instincts). I thought some of those bones contradicted one another. She objects, for example, to the performers in girl groups getting attention only behind the songwriters and producers. More specifically she objects to Shadow Morton getting so much credit for the Shangri-Las. She cites critics—and by name: Saul Austerlitz, Ted Gioia, and others—on their quick dismissals of performers in favor of producers. Yet elsewhere she gives Morton his due, which is not negligible. “Leader of the Pack” was a staple of radio and commercials for decades and even has a certain amount of fatigue attached to it now. “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and some of the others I know well and still enjoy for various details. The one I love best is the domestic drama “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.” Wolin keeps her distance from it and seems reluctant to credit it as more than sentimental and manipulative, which may be fair enough but left me not entirely trusting her views. But she’s out there fighting for the legitimacy of the Shangri-Las and that’s the good fight.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Sao Paulo Confessions (1999)

Suba was born in Serbia in 1961 and emigrated to Brazil in the 1990s, already a producer and purveyor of the downtempo, acid jazz, you-name-it style. Mellow and lulling, with lively and compelling strains and rhythms, I found I could go all day with the stuff. Sao Paulo Confessions, perhaps Suba’s best-known album, was released shortly before his death. He was working postproduction on the Bebel Gilberto album he produced, Tanto Tempo (reportedly the bestselling Brazilian album of all time outside Brazil), when the studio caught fire. He saved the Gilberto material but was overcome by smoke and died. I didn’t know any of this when I bought the CD from that little shop in Vancouver that used to be so good. At the time I was plunged into downtempo anthologies such as the Buddha Bar, Café del Mar, and Hotel Costes series, each of which ran to many albums. In fact, Sao Paulo Confessions now elicits nostalgia and a little sadness for those times, along with a constant buzzing sense of déjà vu—I feel sure I’ve heard many if not all of these tracks and/or guest artists on various anthology albums but I haven’t been able to track down any specifics. I’m not sure I can count that as a good thing but, well, “chill” is the first thing you would have to say about this concept album recounting Suba’s Sao Paulo adventures. Some might say soporific, but I’m into it. Maybe slow-burn? Does that sound right? Sao Paulo Confessions is one of those albums that get better for me as I go, establishing a mood and finding ways to elevate the intensity, rewarding multiple plays. Play it now and play it often. It wanders pleasantly afield for its first half and then goes up a notch with the seventh of 12 tracks, “Um Dia Comum (Em SP)” (in English, “A Normal Day [In Sao Paulo]”), which delivers a stirring, nicely done “portrait of a city” groove with musical effects and helpless forward momentum. With “Sereia” (“Mermaid”), featuring Cibelle, now we’re rockin’. “Samba Do Gringo Paulista” (“Paulista Gringo’s Samba”) has a nice sense of false live performance and the album finishes on “A Noite Sem Fim” (“The Endless Night”) at 7:02. You might prefer rounding off your Buddha Bar or Hotel Costes sets, but Suba’s last album is nonetheless a worthy addition to any downtempo collection. Available on streaming too.

“The Hoard of the Gibbelins” (1911)

Here’s another good one from Lord Dunsany, also very short. Most of his stories are short, though he also wrote novels. It is typically biting in its mordant humor, opening with, “The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.” Their hoard consists of jewels and gold in vast amounts, a great temptation to humans living nearby. People are forever trying to rob them and forever failing. I’m giving nothing away when I say this is the story of another failure. But the knight making this attempt, Alderic, certainly gets the A for effort, among other things enlisting a dragon and getting himself past the Unpassable Forest. Something about the “Lord” in Dunsany’s name—he was authentically heir to an ancient Irish peerage—chips in to the work for me: he’s cynical and sophisticated in ways recognizably of the rich. Perhaps the title evokes some reflexive class deference. His stories are silly yet fun to read. Dunsany is better than the more uneven Saki, for example, because his stories are so well done, a light touch with the humor and always a straight face. “Cheeky” might be the operative term, but the violence can be abrupt and bracing. In my internet travels on Dunsany and his work I found an interesting forum called The Weird Tradition, with a weekly reading and discussion group called The Deep Ones. They chew over stories at about the rate of one per week. Dunsany is a regular focus of attention and I’ve learned some interesting things about him. He worked on his books and stories with illustrators, notably Sidney Sime, who created the image above and seemed to function as a sort of Jack Kirby to Dunsany’s Stan Lee. That is, many specific stories proceeded from Sime’s illustrations, which came first. The Deep Ones is very good about including these illustrations in their discussions. They illuminate the stories in interesting ways. The stories on their own, as I’ve seen with kindle products, lose a little something without the pictures. At the same time, Lord Dunsany is one of those writers who get better with more reading—you have to kind of tune into his world with a little practice. Thus, in this case, we can be pretty sure Alderic never has a chance. But he has an elaborate plan, and it’s working, and then: “... there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.” THE END. Beautiful.

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Black Bag (2025)

Like most spy thriller movies, I’m sorry to say, excellent or otherwise, Black Bag lost me with its many security levels, espionage protocols, and high-tech gizmos up the ying-yang. I got this far: There’s a leak at the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Counterintelligence officer George T. Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) has been put in charge of uncovering it. There are five chief suspects, two couples and Woodhouse’s wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). A husband’s suspicion of his wife is a Hitchcockian kind of premise that rarely fails to raise plot stakes quite high. George invites the handful of suspects to a collegial dinner party, dopes the food so their inhibitions are lowered, and plays psychological games looking for insight. He may or may not get much, but violence erupts as infidelities are confirmed. In general, Kathryn is starting to look better for it. Common sense about such plots also makes her more likely for the sake of drama. But that might be misdirection too as down the rabbit hole we go, the investigation deepening. Kathryn is seen meeting (via surreptitious satellite access) with a mysterious Russian in Zurich for reasons unclear. There’s also a mysterious Swiss bank account with millions of pounds in it. By the time of the second dinner party, I was pretty well lost, although, like keeping an eye focused on one cup in the shell game, I followed Kathryn’s movements and interactions closely. However, I still can’t say if I was right—partly because ensuing events became complicated and confusing for me, and partly because I’m dutybound anyway to withhold spoilers. Even mystified as I was, Black Bag was zippy and entertaining. Fassbender disappears into his role in his usual uncanny way, and Blanchett struts the frame and holds attention any time she is in it, as usual. The supporting cast is great too, notably Marisa Abela as Clarissa, one of the suspects. Director Steven Soderbergh has an affinity for this kind of pseudo-intellectual cat and mouse thriller, often involving spies and even more often complicated plots that people like me have a hard time following, even if we’re enjoying the way it rolls. I enjoyed the way Black Bag rolls even when I lost track of who was designing what on whom. It’s good to see Soderbergh coming out of retirement to make a couple of stalwart, flashy ones the past year or two, Black Bag and Presence. Good stuff.

The Humiliated and Insulted (1861)

Humiliated and Insulted, The Insulted and Humiliated, The Insulted and the Injured, Injury and Insult
There are various problems with this novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, early and arguably his first true novel. That’s in part because it’s under influence of Charles Dickens, who Dostoevsky reportedly read in his years of exile. It’s his biggest to date, well over 300 pages by my estimate, managing multiple storylines with foreshadowing and cross-cutting. It’s still pretty crude and awkward, but it’s apparent he is absorbing and learning the craft. When I first saw the title I thought it was perfect for Dostoevsky, though it travels under various titles—some translators drop the “The,” which changes the sense too much for me. I’d even like another “the,” which appears in The Insulted and the Injured. But I prefer “Humiliated” and think it should go first. The Dickens influence is seen most clearly in the orphan girl Nellie, a 13-year-old suffering from epilepsy and homelessness, among other things. The first-person narrator is himself published, and now working on a second novel. His first novel roughly resembles Dostoevsky’s own first, Poor Folk. The best thing about The Humiliated and Insulted is probably Prince Valkovsky, who develops into one of Dostoevsky’s memorable villains. He’s even worse (or better), ultimately, than Foma Fomitch from the previous novel, The Village of Stepanchikovo. There’s a scene here that blew my mind in which this prince takes this narrator to supper and schools him on the depths of human depravity. Dostoevsky was particularly good at these evil souls. The reason I like the title as given above is because that’s how things generally go here. First these struggling poor folks are humiliated—given hopes for something, for example, that are subsequently dashed. Then followed by gratuitous insult, so it really stings. Again, this is what Dostoevsky can be particularly good at and he’s really coming into it here. The plots and subplots generally involve marriage and the grasping needs for money. An Englishman appears in Petersburg, as if to fix the Dickens influence. The structure, as I say, is somewhat awkward, but it is nonetheless compulsively readable, even as you can see the seams and how he is learning to write novels. It’s probably not necessary to read this for a better understanding of Dostoevsky, but it won’t hurt and it’s a good fix if you are jonesing for more of him.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Cries & Whispers (1972)

Viskningar och rop, Sweden, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Siv Lundgren

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Arlin, Ingrid Bergman

Cries & Whispers is the first movie I saw by director and writer Ingmar Bergman, largely on the strength of its Oscar win—I still believed in the Academy Awards then, even if this one was only for cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who deserved the accolades, of course). I was still a teenager, but aware of Bergman’s outsize reputation for art films. I didn’t like this one much. The heavy-handed extremes felt forced or showy and in general it was way too slow. I tried it a couple more times over the years but have never warmed to it much even as I fell in love with a bunch of Bergman’s other stuff: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes From a Marriage, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, etc.

So I was prepared for something like an hour and a half of tedium, a study in formal miserablism, when I sat down to look at it again. It’s heavy on the red. Red furniture. Red wallpaper. Red drapes. Fade to red. Blood, of course, but that comes later. The story involves three 30something middle-class sisters, one of whom is dying. That’s Agnes (Harriet Andersson), attended by her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). Maybe I finally grew up enough, but for the first time this death of Agnes and all her suffering and agonies that precede it finally reached me and I started preparing myself to backtrack and praise the movie. Harriet Andersson is stunningly good.

The Heart of the Matter (1948)

I’ve read a few Graham Greene novels along the way and thought I knew what I was in for with this highly rated one. But it was a disappointment, a cheap, sour, and bleak romance. It reminded me too much of Ernest Hemingway and his eternal stoic stone face intended to represent some kind of nobility. I thought of two other writers much better at what I expected from Greene: Georges Simenon’s so-called “hard” novels (e.g., Tropic Moon and I want to get to more) and South African J.M. Coetzee, a master at compressed language and terrible developments. Greene is not high on colonialism as a general rule, but he is by comparison with Simenon and Coetzee. In The Heart of the Matter a middle-aged policeman at an African outpost is in a loveless marriage and, improbably enough, finds himself in a lousy affair with a widow more than 30 years younger. I suppose these things happen, and speak to some of the basic problems with colonialism. The sweltering weather is often noticed—even light caresses start the sweat going. Our guy’s wife is also having an affair, with a junior officer who hates him. “Syrians” are all over the place, lying, blackmailing, smuggling. Unclear where they are in the World War II setting. Not particularly with the Allies. Another detail I found annoying was Catholic religion, taken seriously by our (philandering) guy and his (philandering) wife. For example, it’s a major crisis for him when he does not confess everything in a confessional but still takes communion afterward. This is a grave problem for him. His girlfriend doesn’t get it and neither do I, frankly. And you really should get it for the ending to land as hard as I think Greene wants it to, and apparently does for others. I appreciate how meticulously structured it is to deliver maximum bleak, but you have to buy the whole Catholic thread more than I could. Also, as these people seem to be WASPy Brits, I assume it must mean something specific that they’re Roman Catholics and not Church of England, but I don’t know what that is and am not interested enough at the moment to try chasing it down. I’m not even convinced this is one of Greene’s best, let alone one of the best novels of the 20th century as per Modern Library.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“What Was It?” (1859)

Fitz-James O’Brien was among the earliest writers of horror stories but died in the US Civil War at the age of 34 and didn’t leave many stories behind. I found this one in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell is typically effusive, calling O’Brien the heir apparent to Edgar Allan Poe. And it’s a pretty good story—I like O’Brien’s clean and straightforward language (for the 19th century). A couple problems, the first of which is foreshadowed in Hartwell’s intro, and that is that it is rotten with explanation. It’s also a typical early horror story in that it doesn’t try hard to scare and it does try hard to soothe. That is, merely mentioning strange supernatural details is considered sufficient to provoke anxiety. We are all generally more corrupted by now and need more effects to goose us up such as jump-scares. I thought the story’s most interesting point was the invisibility of the phenomenon, whether ghost or extra-dimensional creature or whatever. The idea was popular in the late 19th century, with Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, and others chipping in their versions. As an effect, interest in it seemed to be done by the early 20th century, perhaps marked by H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man (and the 1930s Universal movie based on it). As a kid, I ranked invisibility high among my desired superpowers, but the impulse was (and probably would be still) voyeuristic. As for encountering some invisible thing, yes, as described here, it would certainly be creepy and disturbing. But I can’t say it’s ever been the stuff of my nightmares, sleeping or waking. “What Was It?” covers most of its bases pretty well, but I thought O’Brien missed a trick by not using flour to make the thing more visible. Instead, they used the bedsheets to get a general idea of what they were dealing with, and later plaster for more specific details. I guess that works too. Hartwell also identifies O’Brien as a pioneer in science fiction at least as much as horror, and in many ways this story does feel closer to SF. My problem with taking it as horror is the whole invisibility thing. It’s just not something that seems very effective to me. In fact, the story reminds me a lot of Maupassant’s “Horla” stories, equally weak sauce or more so. “What Was It?” is probably the best of the invisibility-themed stories I’ve read so far—I still need to get to the Wells—and I think it may be the earliest of them all. Is invisibility as a horror idea all played out now or is that me? It’s hard to think of examples after about 1910. I don’t think H.P. Lovecraft even tried it.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

There are a number of things about On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that I’m not sure I understand, notably the title and some of the details in the opening scene. For me the picture falls into a genre of “film festival movies,” proved out by the awards it has won from Cannes, Chicago, London, and other film festivals. The opening scene is vividly, self-consciously visual: Shula (Susan Chardy) is returning home at night from a costume party. She wears a spangled helmet with dark glasses and an outfit that looks like inflated parachute fabric. She notices a body lying in the deserted and lonely highway. It is her Uncle Fred and he’s dead. Then Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) shows up. She appears drunk, knocking at the window of Shula’s car, but Shula ignores her. Lots of activity and visuals here, but the point of the movie has little to do with how Uncle Fred died on that highway, something we never learn. Instead, what we learn is that Uncle Fred was a rapist who preyed on female members of his extended family, often when they were underage. Guinea Fowl affirms how universal this type of domestic abuse is, reaching into Zambia, Africa, in much the same way that Women Talking witnessed it in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. It’s not just Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in the US—it’s everywhere. Some of the reasons it continues are shown in Guinea Fowl. The women of the extended family, all the aunties, blame Uncle Fred’s widow because she would not cook for him. It makes no sense, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Thus, director and writer Rungano Nyoni offers a panoramic view of these crimes and family responses. Shula knows better than the aunties that it is Uncle Fred who is responsible for what he has done and no one else. But she’s in the minority. As the movie goes along, more and more victims come forward with their stories. One of the girls, Bupe (Esther Sangini), tries to tell her mother in a video she records on her phone what Uncle Fred did to her, but her mother doesn’t want to hear it or believe it. For that generation, the sole tragedy here is that Uncle Fred has died. As for Bupe: “He’s dead now,” she says. “So it’s OK.” On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is marred slightly by distractions such as the opening scene that I don’t really see as necessary. But it has a familiar (and depressing) story to tell, it sticks close to the truths of sexual abuse, and the performances are great across the board, a winning ensemble. The picture won awards from film festivals because it deserves them even if it’s not the most artfully written screenplay. Check it out if it makes your local film festival. It’s also on HBO Max.