December without January

Still suffering from Mad Men withdrawal. N*vel proceeding apace. Nearly finished. I. Think. Or as someone else put it:

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

That's Henry James quoted by Bertolucci quoted by Manohla Dargis in the NYT. And over at NY Magazine Bertolucci dissects scenes from his movies. The director's reminiscences are not easy going – his comments about Last Tango in Paris alone will probably be deemed unacceptable – but they chime with his complaint at the BFI earlier this year about modern cinema not being "menacing" enough.

Where is the real danger nowadays? Sitting in a TX booth over the weekend I had to watch The Human Centipede and really did fall asleep. Then John Carpenter's The Thing came on and freaked everybody out. (I love it when a first-time viewer asks, 'Hey – what's up with the dog?') I wonder if movies like Tango will survive self-appointed corporate censors when distribution goes totally digital.

(Image c/- GQ)