![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Music of Chance
Feb. 20th, 2012 02:00 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -6. High today: -1. Third day this month the temperature hasn't broken freezing.
The trouble with that star-chart thing is, it makes me want to replace my roof with glass.
Watched Music of Chance on youtube tonight. The first and only other time I saw it was probably about 1995. (I rented it--dunno how it came out on VHS but never on North American DVD, and for that matter how it managed to gross (according to IMDB) $313,967 (what the hell happened to this film?)--with one of my highschool friends, which led to our adopting "the Music of Chance game" in our poker games: seven-card stud, two up, four down, one up (which for years now we've just been calling "2-4-1"; I had actually forgotten that that's what "the Music of Chance game" was before seeing the film again tonight.) Funny thing about the film in relation to what I said about the book yesterday: almost all of the dialogue in the film is taken pretty much straight out of the book (although the setting in which it's delivered is sometimes changed around), but I don't get the same irritated feeling about the wisecracking as I did with the book. (There probably is less of it, though, as there is generally less in the film than in the book, and of course there isn't a narrator saying how they wolfed down their steaks.) I'm not sure, but I think that may have a lot to do with the contrast between Mandy Patinkin and James Spader as Nashe and Pozzi in the film. Patinkin makes Nashe's line about how he was a real fireman, "the whole hook-and-ladder routine", come across a lot drier than it does in the book. Spader suffers a bit in the film for seeming to be dressed up as Steve Buscemi, but I feel like no one could play Nashe like Patinkin does. I think the film would probably be lousy without him.
Another funny thing about the film in relation to the book: I was annoyed by the ending of the book, but as the film appeared to be headed toward the same ending, I felt like it worked better in the film (maybe this was Patinkin's doing again, I dunno), but then it veered off. The really funny thing about that is that after it veers off into its own ending (which maybe would've felt better in the book, although it seems to be in the film to provide a kind of symmetry that's much more effective visually than it would be on the page), Paul Auster shows up in a cameo.
I'd like to reproduce the aphorism from The Gay Science (#277) that Auster took his title from, but it's too long. Here's the last sentence of it: "Now and then someone plays with us--good old chance; now and then chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not think up a more beautiful music than that which our foolish hand produces then." Eh, well, one more sentence from the middle of it, because Auster seems to actually work some of it in (or maybe it's only coincidence): "Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, sickness, slander, the failure of some letter to arrive, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a fraud--either immediately or very soon after it proves to be something that 'must not be missing'; it has a profound significance and use precisely for us."
The trouble with that star-chart thing is, it makes me want to replace my roof with glass.
Watched Music of Chance on youtube tonight. The first and only other time I saw it was probably about 1995. (I rented it--dunno how it came out on VHS but never on North American DVD, and for that matter how it managed to gross (according to IMDB) $313,967 (what the hell happened to this film?)--with one of my highschool friends, which led to our adopting "the Music of Chance game" in our poker games: seven-card stud, two up, four down, one up (which for years now we've just been calling "2-4-1"; I had actually forgotten that that's what "the Music of Chance game" was before seeing the film again tonight.) Funny thing about the film in relation to what I said about the book yesterday: almost all of the dialogue in the film is taken pretty much straight out of the book (although the setting in which it's delivered is sometimes changed around), but I don't get the same irritated feeling about the wisecracking as I did with the book. (There probably is less of it, though, as there is generally less in the film than in the book, and of course there isn't a narrator saying how they wolfed down their steaks.) I'm not sure, but I think that may have a lot to do with the contrast between Mandy Patinkin and James Spader as Nashe and Pozzi in the film. Patinkin makes Nashe's line about how he was a real fireman, "the whole hook-and-ladder routine", come across a lot drier than it does in the book. Spader suffers a bit in the film for seeming to be dressed up as Steve Buscemi, but I feel like no one could play Nashe like Patinkin does. I think the film would probably be lousy without him.
Another funny thing about the film in relation to the book: I was annoyed by the ending of the book, but as the film appeared to be headed toward the same ending, I felt like it worked better in the film (maybe this was Patinkin's doing again, I dunno), but then it veered off. The really funny thing about that is that after it veers off into its own ending (which maybe would've felt better in the book, although it seems to be in the film to provide a kind of symmetry that's much more effective visually than it would be on the page), Paul Auster shows up in a cameo.
I'd like to reproduce the aphorism from The Gay Science (#277) that Auster took his title from, but it's too long. Here's the last sentence of it: "Now and then someone plays with us--good old chance; now and then chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not think up a more beautiful music than that which our foolish hand produces then." Eh, well, one more sentence from the middle of it, because Auster seems to actually work some of it in (or maybe it's only coincidence): "Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, sickness, slander, the failure of some letter to arrive, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a fraud--either immediately or very soon after it proves to be something that 'must not be missing'; it has a profound significance and use precisely for us."
