Spectator Life

Your last impression, as the sages tell us, is your lasting impression. Nowhere is this truer than the digital world, where email signatures – the little phrases or miscellanea that sit under each message proper – leave a particular taste in the mouth. You can file these flavors under the good, the bad and the baffling. (And the deadly; but we’ll get to that.) Let’s start with the good. One of my semi-regular contacts ends their missives by highlighting the book they’re currently reading. That’s a touch a rampant bibliophile can get behind. It allows me to coo “Aha, that looks like something I should add to the to-be-read pile,” or sneer at their taste as midwit piffle.

Tom Cruise must be the most divisive big star in Hollywood. For everyone who salutes him as the last old-school movie icon, who has brought joy to millions, even billions, worldwide over a 40-year career, there are others who sneer at his Scientology faith, his supposed weirdness and many of the pictures that he has made.   But his latest film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is something else altogether, and a rare example of where a picture’s obvious flop status does not mean that it is an uninteresting piece of cinema. Quite the reverse.

It’s a shame that Jane Austen can’t profit from selling the adaptation rights to her novels. In her own lifetime, she made but a modest living as a writer. Today, she would be fabulously wealthy.   As it is, the copyright has long expired, so it’s all fair game. In the last three decades alone, Austen’s stories have spawned over a dozen adaptations.

For millions of Americans, September not only marks the beginning of fall, it marks the beginning of college football season. The fans pack enormous stadiums, watch on TV by the tens of millions, cheer for their favorite teams and boo their traditional rivals. There are very few fans supporting both Ohio State and Michigan, and neither is supporting Notre Dame. It’s the great American sport.  And it is in deep trouble.  The problem stems from the usual suspects: a few far-reaching court decisions affecting the players, the comatose response of the sport’s ruling body, the NCAA, and the looming threat of government action if private actors can’t solve the problem themselves. So far, those private actors have failed.

Things are tough for French museums right now. A dawn raid on Tuesday at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer resulted in the theft of two paintings by Renoir worth $10.5 million (another two were stolen but swiftly abandoned). On long term loan from the Musée d’Orsay, the paintings were seized when thieves sliced through the museum's garden fence with an electric saw. Following a spate of thefts from French museums in July, France’s patrimoine is undeniably under threat. The Louvre heist was inspirational While British museums (The Horniman, Pitt Rivers, Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam and occasionally British Museum) busy themselves with the return of their artifacts, the French, it would seem, struggle to keep hold of theirs.

It turns out that this summer’s cinematic hero is not Spiderman or even Odysseus, but the French wartime leader Charles de Gaulle who has knocked both Marvel and Homer into a kepi (the French military hat he favored).   De Gaulle, a two-part, six-hour epic directed by Antonin Baudry has been a surprising hit in France and is in demand from all the major international markets, including those of Latin America, India and China. The buzz is remarkable for a foreign-language film starring a person who, although a national hero in his homeland, is not a global household name.