two pieces of reader mail

Here are a couple of reader responses to the earlier discussion of “real and fake”:

“I think the film ‘Hostel’ is an authentic fake as the young filmgoers attempt to film horror by recreating what they think it is. So far from Hitchcock et al it is embarrassing.”

Haven’t seen it, I’m afraid, and am just posting this for the consideration of those who have.

“One example from literature–in my opinion, of course–is Thomas Mann’s ‘Tonio Kroger’, which reads like distanced self-pity and so as a kind of indirect realization of Aschenbach’s delusion in ‘Death in Venice’. I am relying on my memory, however, and it’s been years since I read either work.

Shakespeare’s worst stumble? Maybe Titus Andronicus, which T.S. Eliot famously described as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’.

Probably the most contentious choices, because in a way much ‘closer’, would be to identify the film by a great director that lapses into a lifeless pastiche of earlier work. Hitchcock’s decline, for example, is not something that many would dispute; however, does it occur with Marnie or only after? (I’m in the ‘only after’ camp, having always liked that film.)”

I like Marnie too, but maybe that’s just because Tippie Hedren is hilarious in it, as is the brief appearance by Bruce Dern.