The Hours

After posting about The Reader, I thought I would delve further into the oeuvre of Stephen Daldry, a neglected great director who was responsible for the 2002 masterpiece, The Hours.

Dan shares his feelings about this film in his review on Cinemension: “This tale of three women easily trumps any of Woody Allen’s films that centre on women characters, such as Interiors or Hannah and Her Sisters. Meryl Streep is supernal as Clarissa, and the score by Phillip Glass is sublime. As an auteur, Daldry reaches the heights scraped by precursors such as Fassbinder, or that enfant terrible, Jean Cocteau; one might describe them as protoceratops to Daldry’s triceratops.”

He adds, “As a poet, I must also say that the scenes with Richard in NYC are personally resonant, both in how they capture the emotional truth of being a poet in an uncaring world & how they show Manhattan lofts to be the centre of artistic life, much as they were during my own youth.”

On her blog, Jessica remarked, “It’s well known that I admire artists with problems. Richard Yates was a big old drunk, Rilke had bad breath, and Sylvia…well, we all know what happened to her. So I enjoy The Hours because it depicts Virginia Woolf, who was swimming in problems…until she drowned herself, of course. She had to deal with some really difficult kitchen staff, there was all that stress of running her own press…and then of course, that schnozz of hers was just endless. In addition Woolf’s nose, I am an admirer of her prose, particularly To The Lighthouse, because of her incandescent sentences and her characters that represent the truth about women. Just thinking of this great novel, I can practically taste the boeuf en daube!”

She also remarks, “I love the scene in this film where Meryl Street breaks down wearing her dishwashing gloves; I often like to stand by my own sink and pretend to be a domestic wreck just like her character, Clarissa. When I’m not doing that, I like to lie on my bed and imagine the room filling with water, as I feel such is a powerful image that rings with truth about the female condition. With prosthetic noses, suicide, Claire Danes, AIDS and lesbianism, this film truly has it all.”

With endorsements such as these, how can you resist this film?

The Directors

On Reelz Channel, which is a cable TV channel devoted to movies, there's a lot of fan stuff, and a fair bit of fluff. But there's also a series called The Directors. This is a series worth watching, if you happen to have cable TV, as you get with each featured director's episode an overview and interviews. The director being featured is interviewed, but so are many people who work with them, and not just actors. It's always interesting to hear from cinematographers.

Not all episodes are created equally, and not all directors are geniuses, artists, or even auteurs. I find myself interested mostly in directors who have a body of solid work that I appreciate artistically. I usually skip the episodes about directors that do mostly fluff. Some of the episodes are a bit sycophantic, basically promotional puff-pieces; but some other episodes go quite deep, and one is left with a quote or two that one thinks about for days afterwards. Michael Mann had some thoughts that inspired a personal essay of my own.

Three of the best episodes I have seen from this series were on directors Michael Mann, Richard Linklater, and Ed Zwick. The Ridley Scott episode was pretty good, also. The Clint Eastwood episode, while not as profound as the Michael Mann episode, was one from which I learned a lot of new background that I hadn't known before.

It's interesting to learn about how each director works. I've learned some new ideas from more than one episode in the series, along those lines. I'm very interested in photographic style—I mentioned cinematography already—and certain directors excel at this, while for others it seems they barely pay attention to it.

The Directors is a series that can give you a taste of a director's work and style. A snapshot overview or summation, if you will. But each episode usually gives contextual clips from each film the director has made, leading up to an overview of The Work Thus Far. You can get a sense of what movies by a given director you might want go watch, or watch again.