Compare and Contrast
Which version of "Dragostea Din Tei" (the "Numa Numa" song) should I buy? And I will I listen to it lots? A couple of weeks ago, I was telling Ms Nola that I'm completely out of touch with today's pop music, and she offered to burn a CD of current favorites for me. Which she did, and I fell like a ton of bricks for the Rufus Wainwright at the end. That would be the first two songs from Want One. Mr Wainwright certainly has an interesting voice, with more bottom than you'd think, and although his manner is somewhat affectless, it's clear that he's working his tail off.... I got to the appalling part of Chechnya Diary yesterday, about the massacre at Samashki, a drug-fueled rampage only a few short steps away (for the immature and terrified Russian soldiers who perpetrated it) from one of your more violent arcade games. In an instant, the book ceased to be about Thomas Goltz, who up to this point had been the most interesting figure in the story; suddenly I saw why he goes to these places. Personalizing faraway ghastliness that, for once, doesn't involve any finger-pointing at the United States, Mr Goltz forces me to look at the worst face of mankind, the gleeful killer on a spree. How can grown-up, responsible men who are safely installed in government offices unleash this horror, which lurks somewhere within each of us?.... I watched The Big Clock at dinner (Kathleen worked really late again) and naturally fell into the compare-and-contrast thing with No Way Out. Conclusion: the more recent picture would be the hands-down winner if it were not for the magisterial nastiness of Charles Laughton, who plays a sort of highly refined even-more-evil twin of Orson Welles's Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. The close-up of Laughton's nostrils quivering just before he loses his self-control gives real meaning to "in your face." Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester, is the movie's other saving presence, as a seemingly scatterbrained artist who roots for the right guy. The right guy is played by Ray Milland, and this is not one of his best pictures. The pace is too fast for him; since it has no time for his complexity, he's left sounding stagey. And for a setting, I'll take Washington and the Pentagon over a Hollywood cartoon version of Henry Luce's empire any day. And how can you prefer the movie that doesn't have Gene Hackman in it? So: no hands-down winner. You've got to watch 'em both.
