June 26, 2022

Watched Emma Thompson’s Effie Gray on Netflix last night. Like Bright Star, a way to enlarge the role of a woman who may have been significant–or may have been incidental–in a great man’s life. Ruskin gets, I think, a raw deal. Regarding women, I always believed he was more squeamish than cruel. Thompson was clearly handing opportunities to her star, with long, lingering close-ups that allowed–rare in contemporary cinema–for actual plays of emotion. The night before, I watched one with Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and Christopher Plummer. It was a werewolf movie, so its solidity did not lie in the plot so much as in the sheer pleasure of watching really good actors work and interplay. Where everybody is piloting jets or throwing thunderbolts, you don’t get that so much. Nicholson could portray the edge of violence by raising an eyebrow. He could portray equanimity by failing to raise that eyebrow. Pfeiffer was a steel dagger in a silken scabbard. 

Pulled Dreamflight at least temporarily out of mothballs after ten years. An extraordinary portion of the energy of the text was spent in excoriating the then much-hated David Godine.