The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013). Hm, I’m surprised to see the copyright date on this one, because I feel sure I bought it fairly recently after seeing a good review somewhere. Anyhoo, it’s a novel about the romantic travails of a youngish guy called Nate. He’s not exactly an everyman: he’s a Harvard grad living in New York City, he’s the son of Jewish immigrants (from Romania, I think), and he’s a professional writer about to get his first book published. As the title suggests, this is the story of (some of) his romantic entanglements. I think I was attracted to the book because the blurbs bill it as a modern “comedy of manners” (yes, one blurb even invokes the divine Jane Austen), and I was curious to get a recent novelistic take on dating etiquette. It’s a pretty good read, although by the end (and it’s only 240 pages) I did get a little tired of Nate’s internal argument with himself about the root causes of his string of unsuccessful relationships.

Heaven Over the Marshes

New DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Heaven Over the Marshes  (B).  This is an Italian production from 1949 about the life of Saint Maria Goretti, one of the youngest saints ever to be canonized by the Catholic Church.  From what I could gather through intense Wikipedia research, the film tracks her life very closely.  Maria was born in 1890 to a large, poor Italian family. She was a sweet and pious girl.  Her father, a tenant farmer, died of malaria when she was only nine.  And when she was eleven, a twenty-year-old man who lived in the same house as the Goretti family attempted to rape her and then stabbed her to death when she resisted.  She survived long enough to be taken to a hospital and to say that she forgave her assailant, who eventually repented and became a lay brother at a Capuchin monastery after his release from prison.  Ines Orsini (La Segnora de Fatima) gives a winsome performance as Maria, and I’d say the movie is especially effective at portraying the lives of the very poor farmers who toiled in the marshes south of Rome.  Worth seeing.

Blade Runner

The Movie Snob finally sees a classic.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut  (B+).  I had seen bits and pieces of Blade Runner over the years, but I only recently watched it from beginning to end.  This is “The Final Cut,” which Wikipedia says is a digitally remastered version released in 2007 for the film’s 25th anniversary.  The disc has a clip of director Ridley Scott saying this is his preferred version of the film.  It does look very good for a film from 1982, and it omits the unpopular voiceover by Harrison Ford’s character, Deckard, from the theatrical version.  Anyhoo, you must already know the story: in the near future (2019!), Earth has colonized the solar system, and a big corporation has invented almost-human androids to do much of that dirty and dangerous colonizing work.  But sometimes these androids, or replicants as they are called, develop minds of their own, and when they go rogue, special cops called blade runners (like Deckard) “retire” them with extreme prejudice.  Here, the action starts with the unwelcome news that four very dangerous replicants have made it back to Earth and are roaming the streets of a crowded and rainy Los Angeles.  Deckard is pressed into service to hunt them down: the brute Leon (Brion James, The Fifth Element), the lithe Zhora (Joanna Cassidy, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead), the deceptive Pris (Daryl Hannah, Splash), and the extremely dangerous Roy (Rutger Hauer, The Hitcher).  He also visits corporate HQ and meets the very latest model replicant, the beautiful Rachael (Sean Young, Dune), who can almost fool the psychological tests designed to catch replicants.  Other recognizable faces pop up—M. Emmet Walsh, who I just saw for the first time as the slimy P.I. in Blood Simple, Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver) as a weird cop who’s into origami, and William Sanderson, who was so memorable as the bumpkin Larry (with two brothers Darryl) on TV’s Newhart.  Anyway, Blade Runner is a classic of dystopian film, and it works pretty well as a sci-fi/cop movie.  Harrison Ford (Star Wars) kind of sleepwalks through his role as a world-weary cop, but Sean Young was pretty good as the replicant who doesn’t know she’s a replicant.  I thought her career kind of stalled after this, but I see on the internets that she has worked pretty steadily—she even had a recurring role on The Young and the Restless for a while!

P.S. I can’t believe I forgot to include a cross-reference for the Philip K. Dick story on which Blade Runner is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And while I’m at it, a cross-reference to my review of the recent sequel Blade Runner 2049.