Fay Grim

• Fay Grim (Parker Posey) is afraid her son Ned (Liam Aiken) will turn out like his father, Henry, who has been a fugitive for seven years. Fay s brother, Simon, is serving a prison sentence for helping Henry escape the country. Adding to her trials, Fay is approached by a CIA agent (Jeff Goldblum) to help find Henry s missing notebooks in exchange for Simon s freedom. The mission escalates into a g

HENRY FOOL - DVD MovieSimon (James Urbaniak), a shy garbage man, lives with his sister (Parker Posey of Party Girl and Waiting for Guffman, among dozens of other movies) and mother, who both treat him with minimal respect. Into Simon's life comes Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), a heavy-drinking self-proclaimed great writer who goads Simon into writing an enormous poem. The poem becomes the source of great controversy, proclaimed by some as a great work of art, denounced by others as pe! rverse trash. As Simon's star rises, he tries to draw attention to Henry's work as well, to little avail. Though the premise seems simple, Henry Fool takes on something of an epic sweep as it follows the effects of fame on Simon's and Henry's lives. This rumination on art and inspiration was hailed by some critics as the best film yet by writer-director Hal Hartley (Trust, Simple Men, Amateur), while others felt it brought out his worst self-indulgences. All of Hartley's movies defy easy interpretation, and Henry Fool is no exception. Still, it's a rare film that even tries to tackle such subjects, let alone does so with a combination of intelligence and humor (ranging from verbal quirkiness to scatological embarrassment). Hartley's films, surprisingly enough, feel warmer and more accessible on video; perhaps watching them in one's home makes them seem more intimate and less abstract. --Bret FetzerFAY GRIM - DVD MovieFay Grim is Hal Hartley's version of the espionage thriller. Conseq! uently, it's more peculiar than pulse-pounding, but that's what makes his films appealing--to those who appreciate their off-kilter rhythms, that is. In Hartley's world, dialogue is often delivered with a straight face, no matter how funny the line or farcical the situation. In Fay Grim, he picks up seven years after Henry Fool left off, but this time the writer/director shifts focus from novelist Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) to his seemingly scattered wife, Fay (Parker Posey). Their son, Ned (Liam Aiken), is now in his teens, but Henry remains at large, and Fay's "garbage man poet" brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), remains in prison for aiding in his escape. Then two CIA operatives, Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) and Fogg (Leo Fitzpatrick), inform her that Henry is dead, so Fay agrees to track down his complete set of diaries in exchange for Simon's freedom. Apparently, Henry's incoherent ramblings contain state secrets. Joining forces with stewardess Bebe (Elina Löwensohn), Fa! y travels from Queens to Paris to Istanbul to fulfill her mission. In the end, Fay Grim resembles Hartley's noir parody Amateur, which featured Löwensohn, more than Henry Fool. It has less to say about talent and celebrity and more about mystery and intrigue. For the filmmaker, it also represents an opportunity to reunite a strong ensemble and to recover, at least for the time being, from a string of disappointments, like No Such Thing and The Girl From Monday. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Journey to the End of the Night

• ISBN13: 9780811216548
• Condition: New
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Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

This book is another sterling recommendation from the Saltzman workshop. The under-appreciated Fante's second outing details the adventures of his alterego, Arturo Bandini! , as the struggling young writer tackles Los Angeles in the late 1930s. And take it from personal experience, tackling L.A. as a destitute young scribe some decades later isn't much different. In other words: Fante gets it right and sets it down in his Chianti-steak-and-potatoes style, with prose both simple and rich. This Black Sparrow edition has a bonus: Charles Bukowski's great preface on how Fante stacks up against writers that were at once more famous--and far more anemic.

I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn’t sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn’t any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tob! acco.

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by ! an influ ential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

This book is another sterling recommendation from the Saltzman workshop. The under-appreciated Fante's second outing details the adventures of his alterego, Arturo Bandini, as the struggling young writer tackles Los Angeles in the late 1930s. And take it from personal experience, tackling L.A. as a destitute young scribe some decades later isn't much different. In other words: Fante gets it right and sets it down in his Chianti-steak-and-potatoes style, with prose both simple and rich. This Black Sp! arrow edition has a bonus: Charles Bukowski's great preface on how Fante stacks up against writers that were at once more famous--and far more anemic.

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

He came along, kicking the snow. Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in th! at box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed t! he cardb oard inside his shoes.

Colin Farrell is Arturo Bandini, a young would-be writer who comes to Depression-era Los Angeles to make a name for himself. While there, he meets beautiful barmaid Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican immigrant who hopes for a better life by marrying a wealthy American. Both are trying to escape the stigma of their ethnicity in blue-blood California. The passion that arises between them is palpable â€" if they could only set aside their ambitions and submit to it. Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown) directs this outcasts’ tale of desire in the desert, co-starring Donald Sutherland (Pride and Prejudice).Adapted from the acclaimed 1939 novel by John Fante, Ask the Dust represents a 30-year labor of love for Robert Towne, the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Chinatown. It's easy to see why Towne was drawn to Fante's classic tale of ill-fated romance in Depression-era Los Angeles: It's a tenacious, hard-scrabble valentine! to Towne's beloved city, to the lonely craft of writing, and to the elusive whims of love. Towne must have been inspired by the challenge of capturing the inner life and outer environs of Fante's literary hero, struggling writer Aturo Bandini (played by Colin Farrell), as he arrives in L.A. circa 1932, sells occasional stories to legendary American Mercury editor H.L. Mencken (heard only in voice-overs provided by film critic Richard Schickel), lives in the seedy Alta Loma hotel in the dusty neighborhood of Bunker Hill (where a fellow resident is played by Donald Sutherland), and falls into a stormy relationship with Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican waitress who shares Bandini's immigrant dreams for a better life in sunny California. There are good times and bad in this passionately combative romance (and Hayek has never been more sensuously appealing onscreen), and Towne has done a perfect job of capturing an arid combination of hope, depression, and artistic ambition, wo! rking in fruitful collaboration with celebrated cinematographe! r Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion) on meticulously authentic Depression-era sets built on location (of all places) in South Africa. Ask the Dust never fully succeeds as an emotionally involving drama (the lives of writers are notoriously difficult to translate to film), but there's something undeniably seductive about this curious and great-looking film... and we're not just talking about Farrell and Hayek cavorting naked in the ocean. Even that memorable scene is infused with the threat of broken dreams, as if Towne were reminding us (and himself) that nothing good comes without sacrifice.--Jeff Shannon

The dark side of On the Road: instead of seeking kicks, the French narrator travels the globe to find an ever deeper disgust for life.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Fill! ed with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.When it was published in 1932, this th! en-shocking and revolutionary first fiction redefined the art! of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-Century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.