A Room With a View, Pt 3: A lot of lying on the way to Truth, Beauty, and Love

Previously in our deep dive retrospective, Nathaniel visited Lucy Honeychurch at her idyllic pastoral home in England and her new engagement to Cecil Vyse, whose sneering fastidiousness is only matched by his complete inability to relate normally to other people. Things got delightfully complicated when the Emersons turned up unexpectedly as neighbors.  They’re about to get a lot more complicated in part 3, with Charlotte Bartlett, of all people, emerging as the unsung savior of truth, beauty, and love.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW
(a three part miniseries)
part 3 by Lynn Lee

I’ll be honest: although A Room With a View is one of my all-time favorites, for a long time the third act was my least favorite.  Too much lying and denial by Lucy, too much drawing out of the inevitable, not enough humor to make it go faster.  But as I grew older, I came to see it differently.  If the first act is the most romantic and the second the most comedic, the third is – pardon my French – when shit gets real.  We see the emotional consequences of our heroine trying to bury what’s in her heart, and in so doing we get to see her finally grow up. 

1:18:26  First-time viewers may not know it yet, but the library book Lucy’s mother admonishes her to pick up is a narrative grenade...

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Linking on Empty

• Washington Post reviews a new book on Elizabeth Taylor & Montgomery Clift's friendship
• TFE <--- in case you missed it we discussed every one of Clift's films for his centennial this past fall
• Vulture To say we're thrilled to hear that Todd Haynes will be reuniting with Julianne Moore for his next film, is an understatement. It's a psychodrama called May December in which Natalie Portman will play an actress who is playing Moore's character in a movie based on her scandalous love affair.
• IndieWire Why Brooke Smith is running an Emmy campaign on her own without the studio's blessing (I mean she has a point about paying your dues. But we know from years of experience and category fraud that Hollywood cares very little about non-leads.

Queer horror, Jane Campion's latest, Harrison Ford, fav musicals, Sex and the City, and more after the jump...

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Hugo Award Nominees

Let's take a brief look at the Hugo Award nominees. They're mostly focused on sci-fi and fantasy literature but they do have one movie category and the nominees go like so...

Long Form Dramatic Presentation" (aka movies)

• Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
• Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
• The Old Guard
• Palm Springs
• Soul
• Tenet

We hadn't thought of Eurovision Song Contest as a 'sci-fi fantasy' film but there are unseen elves so...

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93rd Academy Awards: A strong Adapted Screenplay race

by Eric Blume

We have our strongest list of contenders for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar that we’ve had in years…I’d argue one of the strongest ever.  These five films represent vastly different stories and emphasize different screenwriting strengths, and involve an array of intelligent decisions from the writers in delivering the best cinematic experience possible based on their source material...

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Highsmith @ 100: "Carol" is a perfect adaptation

by Cláudio Alves

Patricia Highsmith was born 100 years ago this week. The writer died when she was 74, leaving behind a collection of full of classics. Many of those novels were adapted to the big screen, her mellifluous psychological thrillers most of all. Strangers on a Train and the many stories of Tom Ripley being the most popular. It was through cinema that I discovered the author and ended up falling in love with her prose. I adore how she seduces and stabs, hypnotizing us with beautiful words, undercutting the splendor with her character's monstrousness. 

There was a mysterious softness to Highsmith's poisonous style, an insightful breath of romance that reached its apotheosis with The Price of Salt, later retitled Carol. First published in 1952, the novel was one of the first lesbian romances with a happy ending to see the light of day, making it a revolutionary text in many regards. By 2015, Todd Haynes and Phyllis Nagy finally told that story in celluloid, delivering what's arguably the best cinematic adaptation of a Highsmith novel…

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