Amazon Prime van in Milan. Photograph by Saggittarius A, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Kinsey (2004)
dir. Bill Condon
★★★☆☆
Biopics Are Always a Little Disappointing …
February 10, 2005
No matter how well scripted, they’re hidebound by having to stick to the outward facts of their subject’s life. I haven’t seen a good one since Lady Sings the Blues and even that wasn’t awfully good, though it was fascinating. So is Kinsey, I expect, though people don’t seem to want to go to it. My friend Wayne and I went last night and three women sitting behind us and to the left were laughing at themselves and their own naïveté because, as it turned out, they had come to the theater thinking they were seeing Kinsey Millhone, the Sue Grafton heroine, brought to life by Laura Linney. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when they discovered they were in for a picture showing how America gradually opened up to the idea of sex when supported by science.
Another rule of thumb is most movies starring John Lithgow and Veronica Cartwright as the parents are probably going to be pretty overplayed. This was the case here. Seeing this movie was like going into a time tunnel of the cinema—so many of the actors haven’t been in an A movie in ages. Timothy Hutton, Lynn Redgrave, John Lithgow, Katharine Houghton (the young girl from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, now looking unimaginably aged), and even Chris O’Donnell from the Batman movies. How did he get another job? He’s looking good. But Peter Sarsgaard provokes most of the attention by slipping out of his clothes in a cheap hotel room and heading for the shower. Kinsey doesn’t know which way to look but you can see where his eyes are straying to. Peter Sarsgaard isn’t the luckiest guy in the size department, but he’s got nothing to complain about, and once his pants come down, you can predict what’s going to happen through the rest of the movie. I wonder if the real Clyde Martin is still alive? If so you’d think he’d ask for someone with a bigger endowment to play him. Oh well, he (Sarsgaard) is extremely good in the movie and many fans will beat a path to his door.
Linney and Neeson are good, too, but they are often harshly lit and made up to look awful. Laura Linney in particular has been given some nice hairdos and ’30s and ’40s dresses, but then they blotch her skin with a disgraceful aging makeup that makes it hard to believe she’s not supposed to be playing a homeless person without access to moisturizer or even soap. As for Neeson, how old is he anyhow? Playing a young man he looks older than Walter Huston, and he doesn’t get any better as he ages.
All in all the movie is too ambitious and tries to cover too much territory. Gods and Monsters, Bill Condon’s previous biopic, took the subtler approach of limiting the story to the events of the last days of James Whale’s life. This story might have worked better with a little restraint, though I can see Condon pushing for that epic feel which he just misses—what a pity.
Airport Planning & Management
by Seth B. Young and Alexander T. Wells
★★★★★
The Book of Choice for Students and Dreamers
August 22, 2005
Like many young men, and I daresay women, I was drawn to airport management after exposure to Burt Lancaster’s sterling portrayal of a harried airport manager in the Ross Hunter classic Airport. Lancaster showed us that a man could handle a million problems all at once, if he had the right combination of grit and gray cells. It wasn’t only the glamour, it was the idea of helping people get through their day—even when the people in question were six or seven miles up in the air—that made me consider airport management as a major at school.
Other factors prevented me from achieving my goal, but I continue to pick up textbooks and manuals to keep abreast of the way airports have changed over the last thirty-five years. From a technical point of view, one of the best resources for the lay manager is the Seth Young book Airport Planning & Management (AP & Management) coauthored with Alexander Wells, both of them prominent in the field—and the airfield—today. This book brings you thoroughly up to date on the way the skies (and the terminals) have changed since the day of infamy, 9/11. Their information is laid out with dispatch, not a wasted word between them. In addition, they know their stuff, that’s for sure. Over five hundred pages and I could detect only a few minor inaccuracies.
If you were assigned to develop your own airport in some understaffed part of the world, this would be the volume you would bring with you. If you were limited to bringing one textbook with you. Of course, the old joke among airport-planning students is, What CD would you bring? Why, Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, of course.
Hi-Tec-C Maica 0.4 mm Extra Fine Point Ballpoint Pen (12-Color Set)
by Pilot
★★★★★
A Breath of ’60s Air
June 9, 2015
As an American boy growing up in France, I got used to the French way of doing things very quickly—so quickly that my dad worried that French ways were taking away some essential kernel of “Americanness” from me. It wasn’t overnight, of course, for French ways are so different than those my parents had taught us on Long Island—but after a while I began to think of every French product as better than the one I had left behind in Smithtown. The game of Risk, for example, I preferred infinitely to the bourgeois American Monopoly with its sordid focus on capital. The Risk we played at home, of course, was itself a bastardized version of Albert Lamorisse’s French original. Luckily we could play both versions often on one bureau, sweeping our pieces madly in the French style and being more sedate and mannered when we went back to the American board. Anyhow, Dad was glad that there was at least one American staple I found superior to its French avatar, and that was the simple ballpoint pen. Though many of my classmates à l’école had, of course, beautiful pens that were almost family heirlooms, and many carried the Montblanc pen like it was a badge of cultural superiority, I was always so glad when cousins and merchants back home airmailed me et ma sœur the latest round of Pilot pens—the beautiful Pilot with its jaunty cap and its slim, yet strong, plastic encasement. “Encasement”—is that how you would say it in the U.S.?
They had to be strong, for I was a rough-and-tumble athletic teen, always ready for a gang fight or a rigorous round of pétanque, and the pens in my back pocket sometimes broke—if they were Montblanc pens—and a sharp collision with turf, or another garçon’s foot, might leave mon cul a hideous mess of blue or black ink. I ordered the twelve-pack of Pilot Hi-Tec-C Maica pens recently through Amazon Prime, and as soon as I unwrapped the brown paper of the box, my years in de Gaulle’s France came back to me like the madeleine that made Marcel swoon back to an earlier, simpler time, in Proust’s seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past. Of course with today’s sleek Japanese influence the pens themselves are rather different, and kind of clunky, wouldn’t you say, their encasements encumbered with useless protrusions—though the glittering jewel cameo laid into each pen top is charming, like a diamond almost in its brightness. Like other owners, I too am perplexed about the color range Pilot is giving us in the Hi-Tec-C twelve-pack. There are something like three or four oranges—from gold to apricot to a pale root beer—why so many, I wonder? It’s not like many people of any age or gender do much writing in orange shades, do they? Oh, maybe they do in Japan. I brought out some old French stationery that I kept, a stone blue, and when I tried writing a note to ma sœur with the “apricot orange” pen, I couldn’t even see any marks on it! Looked like invisible ink. Similarly there are a scarlet and two pinks, and I can’t tell them apart.
The caps are constantly being mixed up, but maybe that’s just me. Each twelve-pack should be issued with a separate, extra assortment of tops, just in case they slip onto the carpet while writing. My wife said, “Why not use the orange and black pens you complain about every day and every nuit, and make a pen-and-ink drawing of the San Francisco Giants’ stadium?”—our uniforms, you see, are orange and black. I think I will. She is toujours the one with the best ideas and knows her colors well, having had them “done” herself by a certified New Age color consultant. Boasting all those orange shades, the Pilot twelve-pack is what we in the New Age would call an “autumn” set. “They write beautifully,” my wife says, “and I love them.” She keeps stealing them to grade student papers with. We are bringing this pen set to our four-year annual color-palette review, and seeing if it makes the grade with our Franco American style. However, I will never lose my memories, not so long as these pens stay on my desk like beautiful reminders of the land of my birth.
From Selected Amazon Reviews, to be published by Semiotext(e) this month.
Kevin Killian (1952–2019) was a San Francisco–based poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, editor, artist, and critic whose reviews appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and elsewhere. He was a core participant in the New Narrative writing circle and coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997 with his wife, Dodie Bellamy.
