The Hours: I saw this film on Monday afternoon, and I found it profoundly moving. It is certainly the most outstanding film I have seen in quite some time. Part of what you might infer from that--given that I just saw North by Northwest over the weekend--is that I value emotional and intellectual complexity, literary allusiveness, and good acting more than cinematic effects. Why else would I consider My Dinner with Andre among my favorite films? Like Andre, this film is philosophical and reflective, it is about art and the function of art, but it is also about making sense of life, coming to terms with pain and loss and moving on from there. Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf remarks at one point that one of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway has to die so that the rest of us will value life more. That line nicely expresses the whole function of this literary film: it is art as catharsis, the kind of drama which evokes not so much fear and pity, but an equally compelling range of emotions.

The acting in this film is quite extraordinary. Kidman's performance is most likely the best of her career (or what I know of her career), and if I were going to wager, I would say that it is easily the hands on favorite to win the Oscar for Best Actress. That's not to say that Kidman is the brightest star in this film, however. Though amazingly strong, Kidman's performance was eclipsed by that of Meryl Streep, who proves once again why she has earned her reputation as the greatest actress of her generation. As Clarissa Vaughan, Streep is as luminescent as her remarkable skin, which seems amazingly flawless, even though Streep is now in her early 50s. The other leading lady here, the lovely Julianne Moore, does her best work since her performance in Andre's little-known relative, Vanya on Forty-Second Street. Moore is likely to receive her Oscar nomination not for this film, but for Far from Heaven where she also plays a 1950s housewife. In some ways that's too bad, because her performance here is stronger. The supporting cast here--especially Ed Harris as Richard Brown--is equally remarkable.

I could write much more about this film, and I may yet do so, but before I close I wanted to say that at least one of the reasons that the film resonated with me as much as it did is that so many of the characters are bisexual. (The other night Jay Leno joked that in Far from Heaven, Julianne Moore learns her husband is gay when she seems him emerging from a movie theatre where The Hours is playing.) Although most printed reviews refer to Clarissa Vaughan as a lesbian and Richard Brown as a gay man, and while the odd review here or there might refer to some of Virginia Woolf's affairs with other women, I find it striking that reviewers seem to shy away from even using the term bisexual to describe the characters here, as though the category was somehow suspect or inappropriate. What I think this film illustrates, though, in a subtle and powerful manner is that love and sexuality can be intertwined in ways that the conventional language of sexual orientation doesn't always adequately describe.

North by Northwest:  I had never seen this Hitchcock classic until last night, but now that I have seen it, I find myself intrigued by its standing in the canon of film classics.  I could say much about what I perceive to be the shortcomings of the film, from its apparent inconsistencies (for instance: the large lake or river to the left of the westbound train in upstate New York for most of the journey, and the road along the water in Glen Cove which looks more like something on the California coast than like any road I�ve seen on the North shore of Long Island) to its overly pat resolution.  But I�ll leave it simply to saying that I�m not particularly impressed by the narrative of the film. In fact, as stories go, North by Northwest seemed almost familiar, but perhaps that�s a result of the fact that so much of what might have been original here has now become cliche:  the turns and twists of the spy drama have been played out so much since then, that it�s hard for me to tell where others owe a debt to Hitchcock and where Hitchcock�s film was itself derivative.  In general my reaction to it is similar to my reaction to Vertigo, another late Hitchcock film with a resolution that I find less-than-compelling.  Leaving aside the fact that both films feature scenes of people falling to their deaths from great heights near the end, the similarity that stands out in my mind is that both films represent what might be called �stylized Hitchcock.�  What stands out to me about both films is the look and feel of them, the composition of their images, and their masterful use of the medium.   North by Northwest is at its best in its use of camera angles, particularly the wide-angle shots and the many scenes shot from above.  I imagine that this film would be a very different experience viewed in a cinema than it was on my TV screen.  But it�s not just the camera work that is interesting, it�s the carefully-constructed style of the people, places, interiors, and objects in the film.  In many respects, the world of this film, though remarkably different from our current world, seems almost contemporary.

Of course the treatment of sex in this film is very far from contemporary, and yet it seems bold and daring for its age.  What strikes me is how far it goes and how much it suggests in the late 1950s, an era not known for casual encounters.   And it is the suggestion of sex rather than the depiction of it that makes some of the scenes between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint seem racy.  Where its two stars are concerned, I can understand and recognize their appeal, but in watching them, I feel no sort of reaction to either one.  Cary Grant exudes a cool charm; his character constantly makes wry, witty remarks and never really seems to lose his composure.  His cool lacks a certain heat of intensity, though, which may be why--despite the relatively racy content--some of the scenes alone with Eva Marie Saint struck me as almost forced rather than natural. Eva Marie Saint's character is certainly unusual: an active seductress who is neither vamp nor tramp, a would-be femme fatale who turns out to have a good heart after all. There's so much weight on her character to embody a positive moderation that it is almost too much. As a result, her character seems almost as composed, coifed, groomed and polished as her carefully-styled platinum-blond hair.

Another point about Grant is simply how the standards for men�s bodies in the movies have changed in the past four decades.  Grant is lean and fit, but not particularly muscular;  the scene where he has his shirt off in the hospital reveals a physique that probably wouldn�t provoke too much of a response from today�s film audiences, used to seeing pumped men who look more like Michelangelo sculptures than like the movie idols of long ago.  Maybe I'm over-reacting:  after all, Grant was in his mid-50s when this movie was made, and he was incredibly fit-looking for a 50-something man of that era.  (By a complete coincidence, it turns out that yesterday would have been Grant's 99th birthday, if he were still alive.)  Nevertheless, seeing Grant in this movie reminded me of an Annie Liebowitz book I leafed through in a bookstore a year or two ago.  What intrigued me in the Liebowitz book was simply how skinny so many of the male pop stars and artists from the 1970s seemed in her photos, and how much things have changed since even the early 1980s.  One wonders if the change is due simply to the increasing popularity of working out and to the increased flow of information about fitness in the mainstream, or if it is also partly due to the gay liberation movement.  In the 1950s, after all, muscle mags were a form of soft porn most often perused by gay and bisexual men, but today they are everywhere.  In fact, publications like Men�s Health are fascinating for the way they employ homo-eroticism to convey a message about what it means to be a man.  The content of Men�s Health is decidedly heterosexual, and yet, unlike Maxim, the �beer and babes� magazine, Men�s Health always features a grinning, muscularly chiseled man on its cover. Of course, the omnipresence of such images of sculpted male bodies is surely also related to the way the male body is used in advertising--from Jim Palmer in the late '70s to Soloflex in the '80s to Calvin Klein in the late '80s and early '90s to Abercrombie and Fitch today--but I would argue that it is not a coincidence that such images have proliferated at the same time that gay has become more a part of the mainstream. Whether it is a result, a symptom, or a cause, I cannot discern, but it is certainly a subject worthy of more reflection.