Daily Archives: July 15, 2010

You may remember back a few months ago when I announced that I was ending my “News of the Day” column to pursue other writing ventures.  Well, I didn’t quite know exactly what I was going to write about, but I knew something would strike my fancy.

Well, consider my fancy struck.  After I participated in that ESPN Zone Sports Spelling Bee, and had so much trouble piecing together study materials in preparation for it, an idea popped into my head.  (I also happened to be reading “Cardboard Gods” at the time).

I’ve adopted the “case study” approach of Josh Wilker’s blog/book, mixed it in with my love of words/spelling and encompassed that within the world of sports.

Behold . . . Spellczechs, a blog dedicated to the stories behind and about  hard-to-spell athletes names.  I’ll be discussing the likes of Yaz, Coach K, Mientkiewicz.  The origins of their names.  Tricks to remember their spelling.  Their values in Scrabble.  Original poems about them.  Whatever comes to mind.

I hope you “Czech” it out . . . and don’t worry . . . “Bantermetrics” isn’t going away.

Cool blog.

Plus, accompanying article in the Times…

What else?

After visiting with Danny Rose, Woody Allen’s most optimistic creation, perhaps it’s best to begin our exploration of The Purple Rose of Cairo with Woody’s take on the film, from Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax:

When I first got the idea, it was just a character comes down from the screen, there are some high jinks, but then I thought, where would it go? Then it hit me: the actor playing the character comes to town. After that it opened up like a great flower. Cecilia had to decide, and chose the real person, which was a step up for her. Unfortunately, we must choose reality, but in the end it crushes us and disappoints. My view of reality is that it is a pretty grim place to be, (pause) but it’s the only place you can get Chinese food.

This should prepare you for the sadness that accompanies a viewing of this film and the sorry state of the lead character, Mia Farrow’s Cecilia.

Set in New Jersey of the 1930s Cecilia is buried beneath a country-wide Depression that has claimed the humanity of her husband Monk, a dastradly Danny Aiello, and, with the help of Allen’s longtime collaborator Gordon Willis, drained the color from the world around her. Woody recollects:

I deliberately wanted her to come out [of the theater] to a very unpleasant situation for her. Gordon was able to do that. I described to him coming out of the movie theater and it suddenly being the real world in all its ugliness.

Cecilia waits tables and trods beaten paths to broken door frames amid drab New Jersey browns. She finds solace at the local movie theater, where, in a neat reversal of the color-coding of The Wizard of Oz, the black-and-white of the fantasy world on screen is a veritable wonderland of richness and possibility and the colors of reality are stifling.

Woody Allen doesn’t appear in this film, and if you squint really hard, I guess you can see some of him in Cecilia. But I think that “looking for Woody” in the films in which he does not appear is sometimes a mistake. And it does a disservice to Mia Farrow’s performance. Woody Allen does not hold a patent on neurotic behavior – I found Mia’s Cecilia to be an original. Her beaming recollections of the previous night’s cinema smoothly countering her fumbling dishes at the diner.

But you can’t break dishes during a Depression. Her job lost and her two-timing abusive husband a constant oppression, she returns again and again to the cinema to lose herself in the latest bit of romantic escapism on display: The Purple Rose of Cairo, featuring an explorer named Tom Baxter, of the Chicago Baxters, whose import to the film is of some contention. Regardless, Cecilia fixates on him to the point that he notices. Upon her fifth viewing, Tom decides to approach her – by walking out of the screen and into the theater.

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