I've already told you that The Apostle is the film to see. The writing, the directing, and the acting are all excellent. A very deep, complex film. Robert Duvall is certainly one of the really great actors around. Certainly De Niro has an elemental force (``duende'' as the Spanish say) that always gets to you, no matter what he plays. But after you've seen a certain number of De Niro films, you start to notice certain things about his performances that are always the same: especially certain facial expressions, that turn of the mouth that he uses over and over. I think that Robert Duvall has a much greater range and so, in this respect, is a better actor. (It was interesting to me that the gossip columnist for Parade gave Duvall's greater range as a reason for saying that he should not be considered a star. In fact, here's the quote: ``But Duvall ... is more in the tradition of Alec Guiness and Anthony Hopkins---a versatile character actor whose personality disappears into his roles. In that sense, Duvall is not a true movie star.'')

I went back to see Wings of the Dove again to see why I'm apparently the only person in the whole world who didn't think that was a magnificent film. And I'm still not impressed with it, and I see now that the reason is the performance of Helena Bonham Carter. Allison Elliot was of course very good, and Linus Roach was good, but, to me, there was a lack of passion in Carter's performance and so, to me, there was a lack of passion in the film. I realize that the character she played is supposed to be calculating, but even a calculating person will still have her own kind of passion. To me, Helena Bonham Carter in that film was just a cold fish. Except for the quite good opening scenes in the tram and the elevator, I was never convinced of the passion between Carter and Roach.

And, contrary to what almost everybody else seems to be saying, I found that the film had almost no subtlety. By contrast, I just saw the Merchant-Ivory productions of the Henry James novels The Bostonians and The Europeans again in a retrospective at The Castro. People sometimes accuse Merchant-Ivory of making Masterpiece Theatre films, but I found a lot more passion and a lot more subtlety in these two films than in Wings.

By the way, to me the homoerotic aspect of Wings you were struck with seemed, to me, just an incidental thing. The fact that a woman at some particular moment might have some vaguely sexual feeling toward another woman is just something that naturally happens occasionally except when our inhibitions put us on our guard. It doesn't means that the relationship between the two women is necessarily on some covert level lesbian.

But if you want to see a very strong, unmistakable lesbian subtext in a film, look at The Bostonians. In that film, you just can't miss it. It's been too long since I read the book, so I can't say whether it was in the novel or not. I suspect though, that's it's probably there, but probably not as strongly as in the film.

Hm... As well as being unappreciative of Helena Bonham Carter in Wings, I didn't really see what was so remarkable about Julie Christie in Afterglow. I found Nick Nolte a real pleasure to watch in that film, but on the whole, I found it a much more minor film than I had expected.

Great Expectations is good and, in my opinion, has the true spirit of Dickens. So it's set in Florida. I was expecting to be outraged by that, but when I saw the film I thought it was perfectly reasonable.

I liked Live Flesh. Everyone says that Almadovar's films are going downhill, but I guess I came to this one with the advantage that I missed all his previous ones except for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Of course Live Flesh is nowhere near that good, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying it. And the thing that nobody mentions, for some reason, is that it's based on a book by Ruth Rendell. I know that you're not that fond of Ruth Rendell, and I'm not that fond of her Wexford novels, but she does come up with some ingenious twisted plots sometimes, and Live Flesh is a good example of that virtue.

I haven't seen Mrs. Dalloway yet, but I've seen the previews and, no matter what the reviewers say, I want to see that film. I've never read any Virginia Woolf and I suppose I should, but, from what I know about her, I think I'd much rather see the film version.

--Lee