magiadoreal

Rarely do you encounter a woman who commands as much admiration as does the painter Vanessa Bell in Priya Parmar’s multilayered, subtly shaded novel, “Vanessa and Her Sister.” The sister of the title is, of course, Virginia Woolf, who understood how hard it is for a novelist to capture a character. “Few catch the phantom,” Woolf said in a lecture at Cambridge in 1924, the year before the publication of “Mrs. Dalloway.” “Most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.” Parmar’s portrait brings Vanessa out of the shadows, into fully realized, shining visibility. The world remembers Virginia better than her enigmatic older sister: Parmar restores the symmetry of their relationship in the familial landscape, showing how essential Vanessa’s steadying force was to Virginia’s precarious balance. Though Vanessa was only two and a half years older than Virginia, she took on a maternal role for her and their two brothers in 1895, after their mother’s death, when

I grew up in West Virginia as a Catholic in a Protestant culture, the kind we would today describe as evangelical. We Catholics had the pope — but he was a distant and, to be blunt, foreign figure. Our Protestant neighbors had Billy Graham, the friend of presidents, business magnates and celebrities, who through the magic of television was a frequent, familiar guest in the homes of ordinary people; and he was as American as apple pie. We didn’t admit it in those days, but we Appalachian Catholics — like, I suspect, many of our coreligionists throughout the land — envied those Protestants. We figured that Billy Graham made being a Protestant in America something like what it was to be a Catholic in Italy. And while we weren’t quite sure it wasn’t a little bit disloyal to watch, listen to and even like and admire a Protestant preacher, watch and listen many of us did — sometimes against the warnings of our parish priests or the nuns who taught us in parochial schools. It was ha

PARIS — For more than four decades, Hollywood insiders, financiers and dreamers have been obsessed by the quest to recover “The Other Side of the Wind,” the unfinished last film of Orson Welles. Cinema buffs consider it the most famous movie never released, an epic work by one of the great filmmakers. Endless legal battles among the rights holders, including Welles’s daughter, kept the 1,083 reels of negatives inside a warehouse in a gritty suburb of Paris despite numerous efforts to complete the film — a movie within a movie about the comeback attempt of an aging, maverick director played by John Huston. The quest may be over. A Los Angeles production company, Royal Road Entertainment, said on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with the sometimes-warring parties to buy the rights. The producers say they aim to have it ready for a screening in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles ’s birth, and to promote its distribution at the American Film Market in Santa Monica

Coincidência...no dia em que nos emocionávamos vendo (ou revendo) "Paris, Texas", na sala do São Luiz, morria um de seus co-roteiristas, pai "na vida real" do garoto do filme. A bem da verdade, sua morte foi último dia 20, mas publicizada no dia que vimos o filme. *** L. M. Kit Carson, an actor and writer who earned a following among devotees of independent film with his magazine journalism about movies and his own quirky films, died on Oct. 20 in Dallas, while visiting. He was 73. The precise cause was uncertain, but Mr. Carson had been ill with pneumonia, said his wife, Cynthia Hargrave. Within the independent film world, Mr. Carson was well known. As a writer for Esquire, Rolling Stone and other magazines in the 1960s and ’70s, he was an early advocate of young American directors like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. In 1971 he was a founder, with G. William Smith, a film professor at Southern Methodist University, of the  USA Film Festival,  base

“Scratch John Bull . . . and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dip deep into a murder and devours the details of a hanging,” The Pall Mall Gazette wrote in 1887, a year before Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” became a stage play. People packed the theater night after night, some fainting after witnessing Richard Mansfield’s performance, which included an extraordinary onstage transformation from monster to doctor. This appetite for gore as entertainment spawned a major industry in print, theater and artifacts in 19th-century England. Lucy Worsley’s lively book, “The Art of the English Murder,” traces the growth of this industry through some of the era’s most avidly followed killings. Her goal isn’t to provide a history of crime or crime writing, but to show how “the British  enjoyed  and  consumed  the idea of murder.” The interplay of urban growth, a rapid rise in literacy, the development of a professional p

‘Lila,’ by Marilynne Robinson Regionalism has always played an important part in American literature, with, say, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County the iconic Southern example. Those who have read Marilynne Robinson’s radiant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Gilead,” will remember that imaginary town in southernmost Iowa, near the conjunction of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska — Plains country, partially Southern in spirit and looking west, thereby broadly embodying the essential rural Midwestern America at a seminal period, from the Depression to around 1950. Although American literature isn’t usually known for its religious and philosophical novels, we might think of certain essential works, particularly of Melville and Hawthorne, that concern grace and redemption. Robinson’s new novel, “Lila,” combines these regional and spiritual strains of American writing. Two families are of special interest in the town of Gilead, the Boughtons and the Ameses, each having several gener