Ira and Leta passed this one on to me: Jonathan McDowell's Spelling Flame Page. There's not much that hasn't been decried elsewhere, but this is the first place where I've seen it identified as the Greengrocers' Apostrophe.

posted: 11:08:04 PM  

Menno Meyjes's Max dares to ask the (admittedly highly improbable) question, "What would have happened if Adolf Hitler, a fledging painter, back from the war in 1918, had come under the influence of an art dealer, someone to say to him, 'Put as much energy into your art as your politics, and you might become an artist'?" Meyjes ultimately says that nothing much would have changed, but it's an interesting film nonetheless.

I was taken by the art direction in this film. The apartment of Max (the art dealer), with its mix of old world elegance and hard-edged de Stijl primary colors, is fabulous. At times the sound editor appeared to be dozing, and the print was in terrible condition. And whose idea was it to anachronistically use "Happy Birthday to You" for Max's son's birthday party?

But Noah Taylor does a great job with a role (Hitler) that many actors would shun, because, frankly, most actors want to be liked. John Cusack, as Max, appears in an proto-performance art piece that winks at his puppeteer's role in Being John Malkovich.

So I dunno. Maybe demagoguery is performance art. Maybe Hitler was an avant-garde retro-Futurist.

posted: 10:57:23 PM