Word: mattering
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This is not a matter David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) particularly likes to dwell on. And why should he? He's a fit man in his sixties, a Columbia professor and a minor "public intellectual" (hateful phrase, that one) in New York. (Indeed, the film opens with him in conversation with Charlie Rose, who does an excellent imitation of himself.) Dave has a convenient, purely sexual relationship with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), who gives a lovely, knowing performance as a woman of a certain age. He has a good friendship with a poet named George (a wise and excellent Dennis Hopper). Polymathically...
This is a matter both film and book leave ambiguous. Because, in some sense - and I know this is going to sound strange - it is really no more than a plot point, something that plausibly carries us to the matter that, in recent years, has most obsessively concerned Philip Roth. Even his most casual readers know him as our only great erotic novelist, a man who spent his early career both hilariously and heartbreakingly exploring the contortions of the spirit that our sexuality imposes on us. Truly, to borrow the title of an earlier Roth novel, he has been...
...amiably ambling, if just barely competent, pace by Miller and his agreeable, if something less than exciting, cast, with lots of screen time devoted to beauty shots of the Napa Valley basking expectantly in the summer sun. That the Napa wines did well in the tasting is a matter of historical record, with a duly acknowledged TIME magazine story leading the reportorial charge...
...travelers realize, people are the same, too. Maybe they speak a language I don’t yet significantly understand, maybe their customs are something I have to work to emulate, but the things that matter aren’t different at all. The lines highlighting my host mother’s mouth suggest my own mom’s smile, and the hands of the shepherd’s wife remind me of my grandmother’s. As my Chinese lags far behind proficient, the facial expressions and gestures that I rely on for communication cross all kinds...
...Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the man charged with holding the Anglican church together despite huge internal differences over the issue of gay clergy, lay in tatters following the leak of letters to the London Times newspaper that show where Williams' own sympathies lie on the matter...