Trebay writes: "In his 20s, when he sought a life beyond the straitened circumstances of his upbringing, he became a favorite of the London tabloids that relentlessly chronicled his relationships with the model Jean Shrimpton and the actress Julie Christie. His romantic life was at one point so well known that he and Ms. Christie inspired the 'Terry and Julie' in the Kinks song 'Waterloo Sunset,' released at the height of the mid-1960s music and fashion scene known as Swinging London."
If we go over to Genius.com to find the lyrics, we see:
Ah, I know I could not understand it in 1965 when I was 14, and I could barely understand movies at all. I hadn't yet accustomed myself to cinematic storytelling. I was continually confused. Why are they going there? Is that the same guy? It took me a while to face the fact that it was my job to pick up the clues and put things together. If you're drifting along waiting for things to make sense, wondering what you're looking at that and why are they doing that, a 3-hour-and-39-minute movie is an awful slog.
And it was a slog the second time around too. Even with better understanding of the grammar of film, I wasn't patient with the filmmaker's approach to storytelling, the long lingering on images — branches of trees waving in the wind, a corpse inside a grave, the gray sky, the balalaika, the expanses of snow, the frosted-up windows, the lovers' eyes. It was only thinking about it the next day that it occurred to me that all those shots represented the poetry that formed inside the head of Dr. Zhivago. We were told time and again that he was a great poet, but not one word of his poetry was ever heard. Instead, we got the poetry of the filmmaker (David Lean). I don't believe his shots were wonderful enough to stand in for great poetry, but then, if we'd heard the words, they probably wouldn't have sounded so great either. So let the big brown gazing eyes of Omar Sharif represent ART!
The line that reveals the meaning of the movie is: "The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it." The revolution has taken place and Zhivago is confronted by the Bolshevik commander Strelnikov (Pasha Antipov):
Pasha: I used to admire your poetry. Zhivago: Thank you. Pasha: I shouldn't admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don't you agree? Feelings, insights, affections... it's suddenly trivial now. You don't agree; you're wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.
I had trouble in 1965 — and I had trouble in 2019 — understanding why I should care about Dr. Zhivago's romantic life. He has a wife, and she's perfectly fine (Tonya, played by Geraldine Chaplin), but he's fixated on another woman (Lara, played by Julie Christie), and we're supposed to root for Lara, apparently because her eyes are fakely lighted up and a balalaika tune plays every time Zhivago feels drawn to her.
Actually, when I decided I was going to blog this little interview, I planned to feature this line about why our drilling for more oil isn't a good solution to high gas prices:
When you consider that the oil we pump goes into a global oil market, offshore drilling makes no sense. We take the environmental risk, but we’d have to share the negligible price gains with Chinese consumers and every other user around the world.
He's right about that, isn't he? I love the way lefties sometimes get bracingly chauvinistic. Suddenly, it's screw the rest of the world!
Oh, I know... the gains are only negligible anyway. But read the whole interview. Reich is obviously happy that the high gas prices are pushing people into mass transit at long last. If the environment is your primary concern, of course you don't want more domestic drilling, and, what's more, you welcome the high gas prices that make people consume less.
I'm calling Reich a lefty, but I note that he lives in Berkeley (where he's a professor of public policy) and he says "here I am on the right of most arguments."
And this is good. He's asked about whether he dated the college-age Hillary Clinton:
To call it a date is an exaggeration. She and I went out to see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” The only thing I remember is that she wanted what seemed to me to be an extraordinary amount of butter on her popcorn.
Yes, very tasty! Yes! I like it! I like it! Go on!
You know, if a woman indicates she wants extra butter, that means something:
Only an economist could go on a date and study trends in butter consumption. Isn’t that a kind of wonky thing to remember?
Yes, it is. I recall the extra butter costing more.
If the man balks at giving her extra butter on her popcorn, if he seems to calculate the expense, I think she can make some predictions about what any sexual relationship will be like. Later, when Bill took Hillary to the movies — maybe it was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" — I bet Bill was all come on! Double extra butter! And Hillary fell in love. I wish I could find a clip of that scene where Julie Christie pigs out on eggs in front of Warren Beatty and he therefore knows she's quite the woman.
Now, Reich is also very short — 4-foot-10 1/2 — and he notes that he's "much more economically and environmentally sustainable."
I exhale less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I use up less space. I have a little house.
In the future, you will have to buy carbon offsets if you want to be tall or fat.
Anyway, it's at the end of the interview that we get to the quote that I highlighted above. Reich says that because he was short, he was bullied a lot as a kid.
People frequently tell me in interviews that they were bullied as children. But no one ever steps forward and says, “I was the bully.” They don’t want to admit to being a bully.
This provokes the questions-and-answer used as the title of this post.
As for Reich's answer, isn't it more likely that kids who were bullied grow up to be bullies themselves? You're very short and/or weak, but you're smart and you study... then you figure out how to crush your erstwhile tormentors by winning in business or politics. Right?
As my ex-husband used to say — maybe he's still recycling this line — "Life is 'Revenge of the Nerds.'"
UPDATE: The whole list should be here soon. I'll just say that I loved Julie Christie in "Away From Her" — so I'm glad to see she got nominated, though I hope she won't win just because she played a character whose brain was not functioning properly. (The Academites reward that sort of thing too much.) And I like seeing recognition for my 2 favorite actors — Daniel Day-Lewis and Johnny Depp. Let's make a short list of movies to see before the awards ceremony: "There Will Be Blood," "No Country for Old Men," "Juno," and "Atonement." I doubt if I'll bother with them all. And if they aren't going to put on a big show... well, there's so much less reason to bother.
Here. Any opinions? I especially like the recognition for Ricky Gervais and "Extras." I find it weird that all "The Sopranos" got was a nomination for Edie Falco. It's as if it's a conscious strategy to force all "Sopranos" support to go to her. I like the nomination of Julie Christie for "Away From Her," but I haven't seen enough of the movies to know who was really the best actress of the year. I see Cate Blanchett got nominated in two categories — and plan to catch "I'm Not There," the one where she plays Bob Dylan, very soon if not today. And this is giving me some other good ideas for movies to see while I'm in Madison, with easy access to many nice theaters. "No Country for Old Men." "Atonement." What else?
Ponti was married to his first wife, Giuliana, when he met Loren, who was almost 25 years younger than he, in about 1950.
They tried to keep their relationship a secret in spite of huge media interest, while Ponti's lawyers went to Mexico to obtain a divorce.
Ponti and Loren were married by proxy in Mexico in 1957 -- two male attorneys took their place. The couple only found out about their marriage when the news was broken by a society columnist.
Well, this is an interesting story problem for math class, but I'm just going to look up Sophia Loren's birth date. It's September 20, 1934. She was 16 when they met in 1950. He was 38. She was 23 when she married the 45-year-old Ponti. Now, he is dead, and she is 72.
Remember this cover of Life Magazine?
That was from 1966. It was about a year before Twiggy entered our brains and made Sophia look fat. Click on the image to see a page of all the Life Magazine photos from that year. I remember them so well. Everyone read Life then. On the covers: Bobby Kennedy, Ian Fleming, Melina Mercouri, Jean-Paul Belmondo, "LSD Art," a White House wedding, "young black militants," Claudia Cardinale, "Mod male fashions," Julie Christie, Elizabeth Taylor, TV's Batman, Jackie Kennedy, Louis Armstrong, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. So long ago. So vivid....
Prompted by a question from Senator Schumer, John Roberts let us know that two of his favorite movies were "Doctor Zhivago" and "North by Northwest." After he said that, it became strikingly clear to me how much his wife — Jane Sullivan Roberts — looks like Eva Marie Saint (not Julie Christie).
Yesterday, Jane Roberts wore a black suit, an interesting change from the pink suit worn on day one (when she was seated next to a woman in a green suit who was next to a woman in a blue suit, creating that row of Easter eggs look). What did it mean, going from pink to black?
Was she implicitly chiding the Senators? No more Mrs. Nice Wife. I'm pissed at you now for not giving my husband the respect he's going to get for the rest of his life once he gets done sitting through your demeaning ritual.
Or is she just trying to fade into the background and become invisible?
Or does she want us to look at her face, not her clothes? In black, she's becomes a pure face, floating just behind him, giving him dimension and feeling.
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