Gwyneth Paltrow

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Two Lovers (2008)

April 14, 2011 in Film | Permalink

James Gray’s beautiful 2008 romantic drama was largely lost in the wreckage of Joaquin Phoenix’s misguided, well-calibrated and public “mental breakdown,” which served as a test run of sorts for Charlie Sheen’s sadly real and much more interesting one. Making the stupid stunt even more maddening is that Two Lovers contains the best performance of Phoenix’s career.

Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) is recently out of a mental hospital but not nearly out of danger. A broken engagement led to a suicide attempt and once liberated from the facility Leonard spends time in between subsequent attempts to do himself in by working at his father’s Brooklyn dry cleaners and taking gorgeous black-and-white photographs of street scenes. Into his life come two very different women: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s business partner who yearns to tend to his wounded, sensitive soul; and his druggie next-door-neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is caught up in a destructive romance with a married man.

Leonard is trapped between what’s right and what feels right, dating the stable woman but longing for the one whose inner turmoil matches his own. But as he’s forced to make a choice he realizes that perhaps the choice isn’t his, and that the decisions made for us are almost always less satisfying than the ones we make ourselves, whether they’re for the best or not.•

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Still Famous In 10,000 Years?

February 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jesus Christ: Q rating off the charts.

Which people who are currently famous will still be famous 10,000 years from now? It won’t be Gwyneth Paltrow, that’s for sure. Her singing at the Oscars last night nearly made Quadaffi surrender. But that very difficult question is taken on by the fertile mind of economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. An excerpt:

“I’ll go with the major religious leaders (Jesus, Buddha, etc.), Einstein, Turing, Watson and Crick, Hitler, the major classical music composers, Adam Smith, and Neil Armstrong.  (Addendum: Oops!  I forgot Darwin and Euclid.)

My thinking is this. The major religions last for a long time and leave a real mark on history. Path-dependence is critical in that area.

Otherwise, an individual, to stay famous, will have to securely symbolize an entire area, and an area ‘with legs’ at that. The theory of relativity still will be true and it may well become more important. The computer and DNA will not be irrelevant. Hitler will remain a stand-in symbol for pure evil; if he is topped we may not have a future at all. Beethoven and Mozart still will be splendid, but Shakespeare and other wordsmiths will require translation and thus will fade somewhat. The propensity to truck and barter will remain and Smith will keep his role as the symbol of economics. Keynesian economics may someday be less true, as superior biofeedback, combined with markets in self-improvement, ushers in an era of flexible wages, while market-based expected nominal gdp targetingprevents a downward deflationary spiral.”

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