The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Did you watch the Academy Awards last Sunday? It wasn’t the best show, as these things go—but maybe I couldn’t appreciate it as much because I hadn’t seen the movies that were nominated everywhere like Hugo and The Artist. One of the night’s prizes did catch my attention, however. The Oscar for the Best Animated Short Film was awarded to a movie about books: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. My ears twitched at the word “book.” The film is only a couple of bucks on iTunes so I bought it the next day—I wasn’t disappointed.

In the case of this film, a kind of cross between The Wizard of Oz, Buster Keaton, and those kids stories about magical books, less truly is more: it only lasts 15 minutes, but it packs quite a punch. Visually, the creators have cleverly melded different animation styles to create attractive textures: warm, dusty interiors and crisp, lush exteriors. They also use both black & white and colors, often in the same shot, as a way of portraying the magical effect that books can have on the dreariness of everyday life, turning boring gray into vivid colors (The Giver, anyone?). Because that’s what this film—as the title certainly suggests—is all about: a book’s magical ability to bring joy. The story is a little naive, maybe, and the theme, though pleasant, gets repetitive, but overall it’s a charming, luminous work. 

The highlight of Mr. Morris (it feels weird to write this, since Mr. Morris was also the name of my college English professor) is seeing the books of the title come to life. Because yes, the books that Morris Lessmore meets in the film, and eventually comes to take care of (for example, feeding them alphabet cereal in the morning or putting on their dust covers when they go outside) really do fly. They also dance and play the piano and have emotions. Oh, and the best way to make them come to life is to read them—just like real books. In fact, the books are shown with such tenderness and humanity that I felt like going to hug my own books after watching the movie, and adopt all those that are left at the bottom wardrobes or on the highest shelves, sad and unread. 

Watch Mr. Morris — it’s a beautiful film — and go give your books some love afterward. They’ll fly, and so will you. 

Shakespeare and Company and Films

Mourir auprès de toi is a short stop animation film by Spike Jonze, featuring the felt book cover characters created by Olympia Le Tan.

First of all I have to excuse myself for not posting anything on the blog in the last couple of months. My life has become a little less hectic now so I should be able to write here more often. For the time being, I want to share a short film I found via the The New Yorker‘s Book Bench. The film is related to the blog in more than one way. Directed by Spike Jonze, it was created in collaboration with Olympia Le-Tan, who made the book-clutches I mentioned a few months back. The film, called Mourir auprès de toi (To Die By Your Side) is also set in the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop, in Paris, which I’ve also blogged about. It features Le-Tan’s stitched book covers coming to life at night after the bookshop has closed, and an unlikely love story between the characters on two of the covers… Watch it here! 

P.S. A few weeks ago, G. came across this perfume ad for Lancôme’s impossibly named Trésor Midnight Rose, featuring Emma Watson (aka Hermione Granger). The entire video is awful, by the way, but we’re pretty sure the bookshop at the beginning, where Watson meets her beau, buys a copy of a fictitious book called Midnight Rose, and loses her hat, is also Shakespeare and Company. 

REVIEW: The Film Club by David Gilmour

Admit One: David Gilmour offers his son an entirely different kind of education in his heartfelt memoir, The Film Club.

I’d heard about The Film Club, written by Canadian writer and critic David Gilmour, through a friend who’d read it and recommended it to me. I told the friend in question I was interested, but soon pushed the book back in my head and forgot all about it, until I heard it mentioned again when the author was interviewed on a French morning show on Radio-Canada. Gilmour, an anglophone from Toronto, expresses himself wonderfully in French and must have charmed more than one listener that morning — and he did, my Mom called me a few minutes after the interview was over to tell me about it herself. I was leaving for a weekend at my family cottage the next day so I bought the book and read it over the weekend. It’s that kind of book. 

 The Film Club is a true story of Gilmour and his son, Jesse, who had lots of difficulty in school as a teenager, so much so that his self-confidence reach alarmingly low levels. Things couldn’t go on the way they did so Gilmour proposed a bargain to his son: he could drop out of school and continue to live in his house for free and obtain pocket money on the condition that Jesse watched three movies selected and introduced by his father every week (oh, and also not do drugs). 

There have been a lot of these kinds of memoirs in recent years where people try to get over something difficult by binge eating, binge running, binge reading, or bingeing on something in a way that is organized enough that it actually gives a new purpose to their lives. I’m sure it works well for all these people, but does it necessarily make a good book? Well, in this case, yes. What makes The Film Club so successful as a narrative is that it doesn’t simply enumerate all the movies watched by these two guys over several years. In fact, the movies are quite secondary. What Gilmour sets in the foreground is the relationship between the father and the son, and more specifically the absolute, unbearable love the father bears for his son. The film club in question became an opportunity for them to take a break from the torments of their lives and spend quality time together, during a period in a child’s life when time with your father is about the last thing you want to have, but potentially one of the most important things you need. 

That’s not to say we don’t hear about a few good movies along the way. Gilmour is a true film fanatic, and a wonderful guide into the world of cinema. He is careful never to kill a movie when introducing it, and always warns his son (and the reader) to look out for iconic scenes. From Truffaut’s Les 440 coups to Rocky III, loads of movies get their chance to shine, but as a whole they really do form their own kind of education. By the end of the experiment Jesse — countless movies seen and discussed, able to define the Nouvelle Vague, give precise examples of Hitchcock’s use of suspense, and name Bergman’s favourite cameraman — has received what certainly amounts to a degree in film studies. Of course, the battle against teenage rebellion is won in the end and Jesse also returns to school of his own accord. That’s the great thing about teenagers: they grow up. 

The other great thing about The Film Club is that it’s compulsively readable. Gilmour is a master of pace, and he intersperses the actual movie watching in the book with bits and pieces of his and Jesse’s life. The rhythm he achieves is pitch-perfect. Where he sometimes goes over the edge and risks losing the reader is in the emotional intensity and sensitivity of the son, who descends into very very deep black holes whenever he has girl problems, and eventually breaks one of the rules of the film club. Of course, as these things go, a father’s love (especially one ready to write a memoir about his son) is unconditional, and as memoirs go the plots itself is hard to criticize because, of course, the author can defend himself by saying that it’s all true. In the end The Film Club is another heartfelt and moving reminder that art can bring people together and change lives for the better. I sincerely recommend this book to fathers and sons everywhere, and anyone else who may get between them. 

 

REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris, the most recent film by Woody Allen, is about a writer who looks back on a mythical golden age: Paris in the 20s.

I promise I won’t make a habit of reviewing movies here, but when a movie is as literary as Woody Allen’s most recent addition to his already impressive oeuvre, I think a review imposes itself. Furthermore, I’ve been interested in the legendary era the movie deals with explicitly — Paris in the 1920s — for years, and can’t hold myself from picking at what Woody Allen did with the abundance of material we have on that mythic decade. The problem with any movie or book that now turns its attention to Paris in the 20s is just that: the era has become so legendary that little can be added to it without falling into the trap of further mythologizing a golden age that is already largely fictitious. What has greatly contributed to the popularization of Paris in the 20s is books like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast or John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, which are cleverly disguised as memoirs, but are in fact reconstructions of long-past events written in the 1950s and 60s.

Woody Allen approaches the subject of Paris in the 1920′s with characteristic humor in Midnight in Paris, but also by cleverly shifting the movie’s attention away from the 20s themselves (although that time and place is visited multiple times) and into the broader concepts of the Golden Age and artistic anguish. In my opinion, however, Allen takes his point about romanticizing the past and not enjoying the present a little bit too far — or perhaps he just repeats it so much that it loses its value. Indeed, if you haven’t caught on to the fact that the main character is nostalgic for a lost time (the only thing we know about the novel he is writing is that it focuses on a nostalgia shop), or obsesses over a fantasy of Paris as it was in the imagined golden age of the 1920s, you don’t need to worry because the movie will bang you on the head with it until you get the point. 

Still, the film soars in the scenes that take place in the past, in which the protagonist, on the stroke of midnight, is able to climb aboard a vintage car and travel back in time in order to party with the Fitzgeralds, tell T. S. Eliot that people in the future measure their lives with coke spoons, get advice on women from Hemingway, discuss rhinoceroses with Dali, and ask Gertrude Stein for an opinion on his novel-in-progress. Unfortunately the characters sometimes fall into caricature (especially Hemingway, who I’m pretty certain did not talk like he wrote), but that’s okay because we’re given access to this fantasy world through the eyes of someone from our time. We are, in effect, not really visiting Paris in the 1920s, but rather the cultural construct we imagine Paris in the 20s to be. 

Le Dome, in Montparnasse, Paris, circa the 1920s, was one of the favorite haunts of the Lost Generation.

Where the film fails more obviously in its believability is in the modern-day Paris scenes, especially in the exchanges between Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, in a mixture of dead scriptwriting and horrendous acting. There are also quite a bit of loose ends in the dialogue, and like so many writers who are left to their own devices by the sheer force of their fame and age, Allen simply needs an editor to clean up the guns he leaves lying around and never fires. Luckily a beautiful Marion Cotillard, at once bouncy and mysterious, saves the day as a muse from the 20s who is obsessed with her own Paris golden age, la Belle Époque. The Paris of the 20s is also beautifully shot in dark interiors, glittering party places, and faded sepias (compared to a hot and bright modern-day city). I also liked Allen’s attention to detail in depicting the Lost Generation, since he gives us glimpses of Belmonte — the Spanish toreador Hemingway raves so enthusiastically about in Death in the Afternoon — and the shy Alice B. Tolkas, Gertrude Stein’s housemate and lover. Midnight in Paris is therefore a pleasant summer divertissement, especially enjoyable for its gorgeous parisian scenery and fun literary references, but for me it remains a little bit shallow. 

It's a good thing Marion Cotillard and her smoldering eyes made a remarkable appearance in the movie.