A modern classic
"Don't you just take the past and put it in a room in the basement and lock the door and never go in there."We all have favorite movies to which we keep returning during our lives, ones that seem to us to get better with age. One of mine is "The Talented Mr. Ripley," a 1999 creep-fest from Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, based on the 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith. With "Ripley," the late Minghella builds on the film tradition of Hitchcock in the same way that Polanski enriched the noir films of Howard Hawks and John Huston with "Chinatown."
The film stars Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Cate Blanchett, who became the stars of their generation in the decade that has followed. All but Law have now won Oscars, and he certainly deserved one for his role as the magnetic force of "Ripley." In the first half of the picture, they're beautiful people living la dolce vita in the stunningly-beautiful locales of Italy. The second half features Damon's title character cleverly improvising his way through the cover-up of his crime(s), inspiring sympathy for the devil as a murderer who was either in love with his victim or who simply wanted to assume the man's identity so that he might love himself.
Check out again, or for the first time.
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The baseball season opens tonight with a game in Boston between the Red Sox and Yankees. I've spent much of the day watching memorable World Series games of the past on ESPN Classic, reminding me again how simple and magnificent the summer game is. But Jesus, this network television obsession with the New York/Boston rivalry gets so tedious.
The real season begins tomorrow, as it traditionally has, with the Reds' home opener in Cincinnati. This year, the home team has to cope with Chris Carpenter and the Cardinals.
posted by CM @ 4:16 PM
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