Quote of the Day (Oprah Winfrey, on Knowing ‘All the Right Moves’)

“You don’t have to know all the right moves, you just need to know the next one.”— American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor Oprah Winfrey quoted in “Oprah Winfrey Laments ‘Death of Civility,’ Lauds ‘Two Justins’ in Woke TSU Commencement Speech,” The Tennessee Star, May 8, 2023

The image accompanying this post, showing Oprah Winfrey at a pre-inaugural reception gathering hosted by Governor Elect Wes Moore at the Government House and the State House, was taken Jan. 18, 2023, by Maryland GovPics.

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Happy People)

“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.”— French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), Père Goriot (1834)

Quote of the Day (René Leriche, on the Patient’s ‘Contact With His Surgeon’)

"The individual on whom we operate is more than a physiological mechanism. He thinks, he fears, his body trembles if he lacks the comfort of a sympathetic face. For him nothing will replace the salutary contact with his surgeon, the exchange of looks, the feeling that the doctor has taken charge, with the certainty, at least apparent, of winning." —French surgeon René Leriche (1879-1955), Foreword to “La philosophie de la Chirurgie” (Philosophy of Surgery) (1951), translated by Roberta Hurwitz

The image accompanying this post comes from Calling Dr. Kildare (1939), the second of a nine-film MGM series starring Lew Ayres (far right) as the idealistic titular character in a big-city hospital.

Though these movies date back more than 80 years, it’s probably easier to find them (courtesy of TCM) than episodes of the 1961-66 NBC medical drama Dr. Kildare, with Richard Chamberlain in the role of the intern and Raymond Massey as his veteran surgeon mentor Dr. Gillespie. And the 24 episodes of the 1972-73 syndicated series Young Dr. Kildare might as well be on the endangered species list.

Nevertheless, Dr. Kildare (who began, incidentally, as a character in a 1936 short story by Max Brand, better known for creating Westerns), remains the ideal caring doctor that patients yearn for—the same kind that pioneering vascular surgeon and pain-management specialist René Leriche hailed, in the above quote.

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on Office Parks at the Turn of the Millennium)

“Office park buildings are five- to eight-floor layer cakes of tinted glass and composite stone. They have labor-unintensive flower arrangements out front and dwarf-trees inside their deserted lobbies. There are take-out cafes near the atrium, FedEx drop-off boxes just off the main driveway, and rows and rows of open parking. Airport shuttle vans cruise by throughout the day, and there's usually one of those suburban strip mall restaurants like Chi-Chi's or Outback Steak House a short drive down the road.

“Office parks are very quiet. There's no street life except for the huddles of smokers by the front doors. All the action is inside, among the scientists, the techies, and the entrepreneurs. Office parks represent the marriage of science and commerce, and the withering away of just about everything else. And when you hang around them, you sometimes wonder, what is this office-park culture doing to the American character?” —Conservative commentator David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” The Weekly Standard, October 23, 2000

Sometimes, you can’t help re-reading something from some years ago and wonder what happened in the interim. That was my sense when I came across David Brooks’ speculation about which Founding Father would feel most at home in suburban office parks.

Let me give you a hint: it’s in that phrase, “the marriage of science and commerce.” If you’re thinking of Ben Franklin as the Founding Father in question, you’d be correct.

But trends of the past two decades put paid to any notion that the office park indicated anything much about the changing American character. Nowadays, it looks less like an instinct towards bringing people together for work in the suburbs than a real-estate bubble reaching its zenith just when the market need for such space was outstripped by the rush toward this outlet for capital investment.

More or less starting in the early postwar period, the office park reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s. But the rise of the computer and the Internet meant that sole-proprietor businesses, for instance, could function just as well at home as in a larger space outside, and COVID-19 left many of these corporate boxes empty.

We’re going to see whether the accelerating back-to-office movement picks up momentum. But my guess is that new environmental and demographic trends—some in only the barest of outlines at the moment—will mean that the office park (including several out here by me in New Jersey) will not flourish as it once did.

Movie Review: ‘Coup de Chance,’ by Woody Allen

There was a time when the release of virtually any Woody Allen movie would be enough to lure me into a theater. But I began to feel queasy after the messy fallout from his relationship with Mia Farrow, over three decades ago. I became even more reluctant in the last decade, as his films grew wispier and less original.

When the MeToo movement made it harder for Allen to line up stateside investors and outlets for his work, he looked abroad for countries that asked fewer questions about filmmakers’ private lives. He settled on France (home to Roman Polanski, whose legal and ethical difficulties with young women have been even worse than Allen's).

As a result, the Brooklyn native has gone far beyond merely filming in France with a largely English-speaking crew (as occurred with Midnight in Paris). Instead, he has directed an entirely Francophone set of film professionals—and without knowing any French.

So I paid scant attention last year, when Coup de Chance was pulled from the Cannes Film Festival for fear that allegations that Allen had molested stepdaughter Dylan Farrow in 1992 would distract attention from the artistic merits of the entire lineup. 

Though it eventually premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September, viewers did not have a chance to see it stateside until this spring, either streaming or in selected theaters. Start-to-finish subtitles didn't help in breaking out to a wider audience.

(I saw it at the Barrymore Film Center, a haven for revival, art-house, and independent cinema aficionados like me in Bergen County, NJ. You would be very lucky to see it anywhere else; it has come and gone in selected theaters in the blink of an eye.)

Predictably, Allen’s notoriety has colored how his new film would be perceived even before most people have had a chance to look at it. “Did he have any 13-year-old girls in it?” a close relative snickered. (The answer: no.)

Coup de Chance, translated into English as “Stroke of Luck,” counterparts the different attitudes toward fate held by the two men who vie for the love of Fanny (played by Lou de Laâge), a beautiful auction house worker: Her middle-aged husband Jean (played by Melvil Poupaud) believes there is no such thing as luck, and his own status—an affluent financial adviser who won the hand of Fanny—seems proof enough for him.

In contrast, the writer Alain (played by Niels Schneider) has encountered Fanny years after developing a crush on her while they were high school classmates in New York. His spontaneity and openness to experience appeal to the long-dormant bohemian instincts of Fanny, who has become bored with the carefully scheduled urban parties and country weekends of Jean.

Much of the film contains the kind of quiet foreboding (e.g., Jean’s love for hunting, and the mysterious fate of his onetime partner) that also characterized Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. 

With few of the memorable lines that fill so much of Allen's other work, I grew concerned that he might be simply regurgitating motifs from these earlier entries in what might be called his “Desire, Murder and Guilt” trilogy.

Even within this film, Allen repeats images and references, as if he didn’t want the least attentive viewer to overlook any symbolism.

Once wishes that Allen might have worked with a collaborator on the screenplay, as he did with Marshall Brickman on Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan, to rescue him from such redundancy, as well as various implausible plot developments.

But, though the screenplay doesn’t glitter, the production moves nimbly, carried along by the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, the highly competent French cast, and Herbie Hancock’s cool, understated jazz standard “Cantaloupe Island.” 

And the ending still goes to show that Allen, long fascinated with magicians, still knows how to pull a welcome surprise on audiences.

Coup de Chance may well be the last film that Allen completes. Though he told Roger Friedman, in an April interview, that he has two other projects just waiting for someone to finance it, he does not seem to be pressing hard for it.

If this 50^th film in his nearly six-decade career onscreen does turn out to be Allen’s finale, it’s not a bad one to bow out on. Against the odds, he’s come up with a French souffle counterpart to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point: light, delicate, and sensual.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ As Ted Protests His On-Air Embarrassment)

Ted Baxter [played by Ted Knight]: “Why are you giving a fifty-dollar-a-week raise to someone who told me to shut up on the air?”

Lou Grant [played by Edward Asner]: “It's all I could afford, Ted.” —The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Season 3, Episode 1, “The Good-Time News,” original air date Sept. 16, 1972, teleplay by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, directed by Hal Cooper 

Quote of the Day (Rick Rubin, on Overcoming Procrastination)

“Remember that the maker almost never knows exactly what they’re making in advance. The great works often appear when we’re aiming toward something completely different. Start as soon as you see a way in. I [also] find it helpful to work on multiple things at the same time. Not in the same moment but during the same general time period. The beauty is that different projects are at different stages, so you can avoid getting burned out on any one [thing]. We can step away, work on something else and come back with new eyes, as if we’re seeing it for the first time. Tunnel vision’s easy to fall into when working on a single project for a long period. We can end up getting lost in details nobody else will ever notice, while losing touch with the grand gesture of the work.” — Music producer Rick Rubin, interviewed by Kate Guadagnino, “Advice on Beginning: Ten Creative Minds on How to Start, Pivot and Productively Procrastinate,” T: The Style Magazine of “The New York Times,” Apr. 21, 2024

The image accompanying this post of Rick Rubin was taken Sept. 24, 2006, by jasontheexploder at https://www.flickr.com/photos/26251139@N00.