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Streaming Recommendations
Streaming Recommendations
A few weeks ago, I watched a TCM rebroadcast of Robert Osborne’s 2014 interview with Academy Award-winning actress Eva Marie Saint, whose career began in 1947, when she was twenty-three years old and, at eight-eight, was still acting. Her intelligence, warmth, candor, and openness were extraordinary, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It’s available to stream on YouTube.
One of her most famous films is Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in which she stars opposite Cary Grant Released in 1959, it is widely known as one of the best films ever made I’d seen and enjoyed the film two or three times over the years; Saint’s comments about it and the clips I saw interspersed with her interview made me want to see it again, and I’m very glad I did. It was suspenseful, beautifully written, directed, and acted, and totally absorbing. Hitchcock’s screenwriter was Ernest Lehman, whose dialogue is superb. North by Northwest is available to stream on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and other streaming platforms.
A few weeks before, I decided to watch another movie I’d seen and liked, Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicholas Cage, directed by Normal Jewison, and written by John Patrick Shanley. Released in 1987, Moonstruck is a romantic comedy like no other, and I relished every minute of it. Like North by Northwest, the writing, directing, and acting are flawless Moonstruck is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and other streaming platforms.
After laughing my way through Moonstruck, I was ready to see a drama, and I chose the 1989 film My Left Foot, a true story based on the autobiography by Irish artist and writer Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy.
Thinking about the film, which was directed by Jim Sheridan and adapted from Brown’s autobiography by Sheridan and Shane Connaughton, I found myself recalling moments of Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as Brown, who could only control the movement of the toes on his left foot and nevertheless achieved what he did.
I also remembered liking Brenda Fricker’s performance as Brown’s mother. Seeing the film again, however, I was blown away by Brown’s complex, challenging, and inspiring story and the way Day-Lewis and Fricker brought it to life. Not surprisingly, both of them won Academy Awards, Day-Lewis for Best Actor and Fricker for Best Supporting Actress. My Left Foot is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Paramount+, MGM+, and other streaming platforms.
The other night, following a friend’s recommendation, I saw the 2023 film She Came to Me, written and directed by Leslie Miller and starring Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, and Marisa Tomei. The story Leslie Miller has crafted is unusual, involving, and surprising; her direction is outstanding, and the acting is remarkable.
One of the choices Miller made that impressed me the most is that she cast Dinklage, who is a dwarf and gained worldwide fame for his role in Game of Thrones, to play the male lead, a composer in the midst of a creative crisis whose size is never mentioned. The role could have been played by any good actor in his forties or fifties; Dinklage’s talent makes him the perfect choice. Hathaway’s and Tomei’s talent make them the perfect choices for their highly contrasting, distinctive roles, too. She Came to Me is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Hulu, Apple TV, Disney+, and other streaming platforms.
Another film on my recommended list is Rustin, directed by George C. Wolfe, written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, and starring Colman Domingo. Rustin is the true story of Bayard Rustin, an out gay African Amerian who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to achieve Civil Rights non-violently and, among other accomplishments, was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. Throughout his decades as an advocate, Rustin had to combat homophobia as well as racism, and the film’s dramatization of this is powerful and moving. Rustin is available to stream on Netflix.
Last night I watched Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino, which I’d seen it in 2008 when it was released, and it touched me deeply. Its treatment of its themes—bigotry and grieving over a lost loved one—involved me from beginning to end. Eastwood’s work as an actor and director is flawless. The rest of the cast’s performances are first-rate, too. If you’re in the mood for an emotional experience, see it tonight on Amazon Prime, HBO MAX, Apple TV, or one of the other streaming platforms on which it’s available!
Reading Recommendations
I recently worked with two authors of memoirs, and an author of a fantasy novel. Since each author is unique, every experience is unique, and because I choose projects I find interesting and worthwhile, I enjoy the process.
Regardless of how busy I am during the day, I put aside time at night to read novels, non-fiction, short stories, and poetry, and I have recommendations in all four genres.
My first is the novel James by Percival Everett, who wrote Erasure, the novel on which the film American Fiction is based. James is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave, Jim, who runs away from his owner who wants to sell him, and joins Huck, a boy who runs away from his brutal father on a raft on the Mississippi River.
James is brilliantly conceived and executed, and I admired every word. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I don’t like spoilers, so I’m not going to include any here. Just take my word for it, James is well worth reading.
I also recommend Everett’s short story “In Medias Res” in the Winter 2023 Yale Review. “In Medias Res” is distinctive in its take on a noir plot and narrative style. As a fan of noir novels and an admirer of Everett’s writing, I loved it.
I recommend the following short stories as well. Some are haunting, others are disturbing and provocative, all of them engaged me and held my attention.
“Bridling” by Nadia Davids, “Reading” by Devon Geyelin, “Renovation” by Chin-Sun Lee, “Very Good Subjects” by Ani Cooney, and “The Statute of Limitations” by Jane Delury, in the Fall 2023 Georgia Review.
“Winner” by Ling Ma, in the Winter 2023 Yale Review.
“No Fury” by Jane Walton, “Prolonged Exposure” by Lacey Jones, “The Tornado” by K-Ming Cha, “Bus to Saigon” by Brian Ma, “If I Tell You This is Fiction,” by Jenny Lecce, “Where Are the Littles?” by Kathleen Postma, “Thin Air” by Aria Beth Sloss,” and “Entropy” by Melissa Yancy in the Fall 2024 Kenyon Review;
“Rosaura at Dawn” by Daniel Saldana Paris and “A Mild Irreversible Form of Enlightenment” by Anna DeForest in the Spring 2024 Yale Review.
“Last Time We Spoke” by Lydi Conklin in the Summer 2024 Yale Review, and
“The Hadal Zone” by Annie Proulx in the July 8 & 15 New Yorker.
My favorite nonfiction that I read this summer is I Wonder as I Wander, the second volume of distinguished poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography. Published in 1955 when he was fifty-four, its primary focus is his earlier experiences as an African American child and young adult living and traveling in the United States and other countries. It includes his memories of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early ‘30s when the arts flourished until the 1929 stock market crash devastated America, especially Black and other minority communities, as well as the rest of the world.
The most fascinating part of the book to me was Hughes’s trip to the Union of Socialist Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. The U.S.S.R. brought him there as part of a group of African Americans to make a film, “Negro Life,” about the injustices Black people faced in America.
When the government decided not to make the film, Hughes remained in the U.S.S.R. to see it from one end to the other. The experiences he writes about, especially the improved opportunities for Black and other poor people after the Bolshevik Revolution, are enlightening.
My wife, actress and author Cynthia Hoppenfeld, introduced me to Hughes’s work when she recommended The Weary Blues, an impactful collection of his poems about racism, ragtime, jazz, Harlem, the South, Africa, and people in his life. Published in 1925when Hughes was twenty-four, it won awards that enabled him to complete his college education. The sensitivity, insight, and beauty of the poems is remarkable, and, like Cynthia, I highly recommend it.
Books I’ve Read During the Pandemic
In the last few months, I’ve read several books that I highly recommend.
The first is Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel by African American author Zora Neil Hurston. I heard about it on a PBS series The Great American Read when Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African Research at Harvard University and an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, recommended it. I like and respect Gates from years of watching Finding Your Roots, a PBS series on which, as host and producer, he traces the genealogy and genetics of well-known people in various fields with fascinating results. Given my respect for Gates, I immediately ordered a copy of Hurston’s book.
As a reader, I don’t like knowing much about a novel before I read it, I’m annoyed when reviews contain spoilers that give away plot points or lessen the pleasure of gaining insight into a character as I read. So, I’m going to follow the edict of Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who famously said, “Less is more.” All I’ll tell you about Their Eyes Were Watching God is that it takes place in Florida in the first decade of the twentieth century, it’s about the life of African American Janie Crawford, and it’s one of the most emotionally involving, revelatory, and surprising novels I’ve ever read. I hope that’s enough of a recommendation that you’ll take a chance to read it.
Another book I hope you’ll read is The First Man by Albert Camus. Many years ago, I read his novel The Stranger and his long essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Unlike these books, The First Man is not a work of existential philosophy; it is Camus’s autobiographical novel about his early life growing up in poverty in French Algeria. All I’ll tell you beyond that is that the book is engrossing and inspiring, and that Camus never got to complete it. The draft he was working on was found in the trunk of his car after he was killed in a traffic accident in 1960. Thirty-five years later, his daughter decided to publish it along with his notes. I learned from the notes that Camus had planned to continue refining it, but as a reader I found every page so involving that, as with Their Eyes Were Watching God, I felt privileged to read it.
Practicing Yoga at Home
I’ve been practicing yoga 3 to 5 days a week for over 22 years. Until March 2020, I went to 90-minute classes and had many wonderful teachers. The teachers would always tell us we should do a home practice as well, but I almost never did, and when I did, I practiced for only 5 or 10 minutes. Frankly, I lacked the discipline to do more on my own.
Going to class suited me perfectly: a teacher chose the poses (asanas), gave instructions and corrections, and provided the opportunity for my practice to be substantial. Of course, it was up to me to make it substantial, and being who I am–a man who tends to ruminate on issues (often writing and editing issues) that I feel I need to resolve as soon as possible–my mind would wander. The 90 minutes gave me time to let it wander, observe it wandering, gradually stop it from wandering, and focus my attention–or at least 70-80 percent of it–on whatever pose I was doing. At the end of every class, I felt lighter, more relaxed, more present than I felt at the beginning.
Then came the pandemic. By the end of that March, I was no longer comfortable going to class, and, with deep regret, I stopped. But having experienced yoga’s profound benefits for so many years, I knew I had to continue practicing. After 2 decades of hearing that I should do a home practice, this meant I would start doing one. And I knew it couldn’t be for just 5 or 10 minutes; I vowed that even though I’d never come close to it in the past, my home practice would be at least an hour.
I soon realized it was impossible for me to do a Zoom class; I couldn’t place my computer anywhere near the space I needed to clear for my practice. Clearing it was a challenge in itself: I had to move my computer table and other furniture to make room for my yoga mat, props, blankets, and me. Once I figured out how to do this, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed planning the home practice that I would conduct for myself. I was fortunate that 2 generous teachers I’d studied with talked with me on the phone and gave me guidance about adjustments I could make for poses that were problematic for me.
With their input, I planned sequences of poses in which some were strenuous and some were restorative, and I began an afternoon home practice, using a digital timer. Hearing a “beep, beep, beep” when poses ended wasn’t the same as hearing teachers telling me it was time to get out of poses, nor did the beeper remind me, as teachers always did, how to get out of the poses properly. Now that was up to me, just as it was up to me to get into poses properly, and to focus my attention on the parts of my body that I needed to work with in order to do the poses properly and experience maximum benefits.
Now my home yoga practice is part of my everyday life, and I look forward to it. I can’t say that my mind doesn’t wander at home as it did in class, but when it does, I observe it, I bring my attention back to the pose, and focus on the parts of my body that I need to fully engage and the ways I need to engage them to really do the pose. It’s challenging, and I don’t always succeed at practicing with 100 percent commitment, but I continue working on it, and I continue improving.
I find that developing the discipline to do my home practice regularly, to do the strenuous poses strenuously and the restorative poses so that they restore my body and truly calm my mind has made me far more aware as a yoga practitioner than I ever was before.
Shortly after I began my home practice, I reread BKS Iyengar’s Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom. Although I’d read it before–I bought the book in 2013 when it was published and Iyengar came to Los Angeles and spoke at UCLA and at the Institute where I took classes–it was as if I were reading it for the first time. His learned insight into yoga, his love of yoga, and the beautiful way in which he wrote about the asanas and the evolutionary spiritual journey we take when we practice with awareness inspired me and informs my daily practice.
I practice Iyengar yoga, a school of Hatha yoga, but Light on Life isn’t just about Iyengar yoga; it’s about the principles and philosophy of yoga, and if you practice any type of yoga, I believe that reading Light on Life will enrich your practice as it has enriched mine.
I hope that in the new year I will be comfortable going to classes again. In the meantime, it’s a blessing that I’ve finally found out why my teachers always recommended doing a home practice and that I’m experiencing its benefits.