As cameras share equal time with computers or disappear from sets altogether, big franchise action movies increasingly rely on fluid camerawork to smuggle some of the visceral reality that has been slowly vacuumed out of moviegoing. Often, these “long takes” are more a metaphysical idea than an old-fashioned single shot, but they share one thing with their predecessors: They begin as a mad gleam in a director’s eye. Michael P. Shawver, who edited Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther as well as his 2015 Rocky reboot, Creed, says that Coogler “wanted to do that entire sequence, from the moment Lupita’s character fires a shot up into the rafters — as one continuous shot.” Coogler, in particular, seems to have a fondness for these “oners”; Creed contains a number of fantastic single takes, including the gripping, claustrophobic first fight sequence. “But with all the stuff going on — action happening on two floors, wires, multiple fights, guns firing — it just wasn’t possible.”
So they constructed a “single take” of at least seven or eight distinct shots with the seams erased. (If you’ve seen Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, you’ve seen this technique, the same one Alejandro González Iñárritu tripled down on for 2014’s Birdman). It’s a complicated process that blurs the roles of director, director of photography, editor, and even fight coordinator. Shawver, for one, found himself somewhere he almost never is the day of Black Panther’s “oner”: on set.
If you’ve never heard of the “Florida man” phenomenon, here’s a summary: the citizens of Florida people have become notorious for unusual crimes that often make headlines, thus spurring the internet to create a meme that has given Florida a reputation for the weird. The stories in Lauren Groff’s new collection Florida sit so perfectly within this context that it’s no surprise she lives in the state with such fame, absorbing the mythos and infusing her writing with characters fit for tabloids. The eleven stories in this collection not only capture this cultural identity, but they also overflow with imagery so powerfully tangible that it’s hard to believe the humidity and rainstorms aren’t truly escaping from the page to touch you.
Not every reader will find the dense, intricate mundanity of these interlinked monologues easy to appreciate. As in actual life, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether something crucial is happening, or nothing at all. But those who find connections among these disparate moments will be rewarded with a rare and fragile experience: a rediscovery of the strength of narrative bonds, impossible to dissolve and difficult to forget, a miraculous substance that links the characters to one another and holds them in companionable relation.
But Vodolazkin’s grip on this narrative is iron-tight, and what we take at first to be Innokenty’s pathology – or the working out of a literary method – turns out to be something much more important: a moral stand, of sorts. Innokenty knows, in a bitter and visceral fashion, that history is merely a theory abstracted from the experiences of individuals. So he chooses to care about the little things, the overlooked things, “sounds, smells, and manners of expression, gesticulation, and motion”. These are the things that actually make up a life; these are the true universals.
Throughout “The Practicing Stoic,” Farnsworth beautifully integrates his own observations with scores of quotations from Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and others. As a result, this isn’t just a book to read — it’s a book to return to, a book that will provide perspective and consolation at times of heartbreak or calamity. For the Stoic, as Farnsworth reminds us, “the work of life is to turn whatever happens to constructive ends.”
Say it’s a quiet Monday night, and you’ve just checked your coat in that swanky Art Deco update in the Flatiron district, and you’re looking to tuck into a thick slab of pepper-crusted yellowfin tuna or a twenty-ounce cut of certified Black Angus beef, well-done—what are you in for?
The fish specialty is reasonably priced, and the place got two stars in the Times. Why not go for it? If you like four-day-old fish, be my guest. Here’s how things usually work. The chef orders his seafood for the weekend on Thursday night. It arrives on Friday morning. He’s hoping to sell the bulk of it on Friday and Saturday nights, when he knows that the restaurant will be busy, and he’d like to run out of the last few orders by Sunday evening. Many fish purveyors don’t deliver on Saturday, so the chances are that the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what conditions. When a kitchen is in full swing, proper refrigeration is almost nonexistent, what with the many openings of the refrigerator door as the cooks rummage frantically during the rush, mingling your tuna with the chicken, the lamb, or the beef. Even if the chef has ordered just the right amount of tuna for the weekend, and has had to reorder it for a Monday delivery, the only safeguard against the seafood supplier’s off-loading junk is the presence of a vigilant chef who can make sure that the delivery is fresh from Sunday night’s market.
Generally speaking, the good stuff comes in on Tuesday: the seafood is fresh, the supply of prepared food is new, and the chef, presumably, is relaxed after his day off. (Most chefs don’t work on Monday.) Chefs prefer to cook for weekday customers rather than for weekenders, and they like to start the new week with their most creative dishes. In New York, locals dine during the week. Weekends are considered amateur nights—for tourists, rubes, and the well-done-ordering pretheatre hordes. The fish may be just as fresh on Friday, but it’s on Tuesday that you’ve got the good will of the kitchen on your side.