Look at Marilyn Monroe, about twenty seconds into the clip, when a journalist “asks,” without a question mark at the end of the sentence, “You’re a happy girl now.” The infinitesimal silence that goes with her dubious glance—a tightly controlled eye-roll—away from the interviewer, followed by her ironic verbal shrug (a melodic “uh-h” with a subtly derisive smile), suggests the equivalent of, “You have no idea.” It’s in that sudden abyss of true and horrific emotion in the midst of the most conventionally candied context that encapsulates Monroe’s art—and art it is…

Richard Brody on Lindsay Lohan and Marilyn Monroe, “happy girls”: http://nyr.kr/V98boa

(Source: newyorker.com)

In a recently published interview, Shirley Maclaine shares “tales told out of school regarding her peers (Marilyn Monroe attended the premiére of “The Apartment” wearing a fur coat— with nothing underneath it) and regarding herself (and, for instance, her “intense relationship” in the early sixties with Robert Mitchum)”: http://nyr.kr/N89tSc

Fantastic Voyages

“Hugo” is both a summing up of the cinematic past and a push forward into new 3-D technologies. James Cameron’s “Avatar” was a luscious purple-green spectacle—a fantasy of the natural world. “Hugo” is a fantasy of the mechanical world: much of it is devoted to the workings of a clock, a camera, an automaton, and a train station that functions like a huge machine. No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.

Magnum at the Movies

A new show at the National Cinema Museum in Turin, directed by Italian film critic Alberto Barbera, showcases the movie work of Magnum photographers, who leaned heavily on friendships with the stars, he writes, “to create images that are often surprising, always original, and almost never what one would expect.” Click through for more photographs featured in “Magnum Sul Set”: http://nyr.kr/rUSM5b