Booker T. Washington: "You will receive a speedy trial and a swift execution."... "Mr. Washington, you speak like an angel. It's too bad we're down here on earth"--Ragtime
Yesterday I did my first watch party with the History Meetup group, screening Milos Forman's movie of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (which I was seeing for the second time). The group wasn't all in the Toronto vicinity; there was one from Brooklyn and another from Austin, Texas.
The movie's a handsome production but it doesn't really work. It removed a lot of the sprawling book, including Sigmund Freud and Emma Goldman and the Peary expedition and the Zapatistas and the Lusitania, but what's left seems less streamlined than spotty. What seemed "kaleidoscopic" on paper comes across as hit & miss on the screen. (Maybe it could work better as a miniseries. I have heard good things about the Broadway musical version.) Among other things, the story's central bourgeois family manufactures fireworks, yet we never see any pyrotechnic displays! Randy Newman's central theme is graceful, but it's a waltz rather than ragtime.
As lady of scandal Evelyn Nesbit, Elizabeth McGovern seemed to me more teenager than sex goddess. I noticed a lot of future big names in small roles, including Dominic Chianese (Junior Soprano), whom I recognized from his voice! The best performance is Howard Rollins as Coalhouse Walker, though his storyline struck me as the novel's most dubious. (An African-American heads down the road to radical terrorism because bigoted firemen vandalized his car?? I guess that's supposed to be the sort of black militancy middle-class white readers can identify with.) Doctorow got away with stuff like this in the book because there was so much else going on, but that sort of thing is harder to pull off in a movie. Earlier on they'd considered hiring Robert Altman to direct it, and his style might have worked better.
I've started learning music theory on Friday afternoons on Zoom with some people from my singing group. Level 1 was no challenge for me: so far it's all stuff I remember from my piano-playing days.
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