By Rex Reed 11/22/11 11:28am

movies

24

Freud and Jung’s Hunky Hollywood Iterations are Gluttons for Keira Knightly’s Punishment

An antiseptic departure for shock jock David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method is a psychological tug of war between the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and his disciple Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) over the mind and sex of an overwrought mental patient named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a mad Russian with a craving for spanking. Whacking her on her naked bottom must have worked. She ended up, years later, analyzing patients of her own. Too bad she didn’t also analyze this movie. It would have saved so much wasted time.

A grim 1912 period piece set in a mental clinic in Vienna at the dawn of 20th century enlightenment, the movie flirts with the peculiar relationship between novice Jung and mentor Freud while they both flirt with the same patient, but aside from Ms. Knightley’s lurid whupping without her panties on, nothing ever happens. The “dangerous method” in the title refers to the experiment by both analysts to radically treat the same female patient by taking her to bed. Not very scientific, but very, very talky. Read More

By Marilyn Berger 1/15/07 12:00am

Remembering Teddy, Heart And Soul of Jerusalem

A founding father and jet-setter, a kibbutznik and a bon vivant, a secular man in an Orthodox city, a Labor Party loyalist in a Likud stronghold, a dove among hawks, a cosmopolitan in the land of the shtetl, and a Zionist who tried to nudge Arab and Jew into peaceful co-existence—the Teddy Kollek I knew Read More

By Mario Naves 8/07/06 12:00am

Swiss Masquerading as Turk, Victim of His Own Expertise

Among the many masterpieces regularly on the walls at the Frick Collection, there’s an inconspicuous gem by the Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard. Trompe l’Oeil (1771) doesn’t offer a transformative glimpse into the human psyche or herald a profound alternative to the way we look at the world. It’s a wonder anyone notices it at all. Read More

By Mario Naves 8/07/06 12:00am

Swiss Masquerading as Turk, Victim of His Own Expertise

Among the many masterpieces regularly on the walls at the Frick Collection, there’s an inconspicuous gem by the Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard. Trompe l’Oeil (1771) doesn’t offer a transformative glimpse into the human psyche or herald a profound alternative to the way we look at the world. It’s a wonder anyone notices it at all. Read More

By David Thomson 10/03/05 12:00am

A Book To Carry You Away— Berendt Does Venice, Loosely

“Everyone in Venice is acting” are the first words of this book, and the opening has the feel or reach of fiction working in what the author insists is nonfiction. “I had been walking along Calle della Mandola,” says the author, “when I ran into Count Marcello.” And just like a wise, sardonic and not Read More

By David Thomson 10/03/05 12:00am

A Book To Carry You Away- Berendt Does Venice, Loosely

“Everyone in Venice is acting” are the first words of this book, and the opening has the feel or reach of fiction working in what the author insists is nonfiction. “I had been walking along Calle della Mandola,” says the author, “when I ran into Count Marcello.” And just like a wise, sardonic and Read More

By NYO Staff 4/04/05 12:00am

Bungalow Gate

“Reservations only, reservations only. I can’t, sorry man, we’re packed inside. Guys, we are packed. We have no more tables. We’re done. Two of you guys I can take care of, but not the whole group. Sir, good to see you!”

It was late Friday night outside Bungalow 8, the super-exclusive nightclub where New York’s Read More

By Daniel Asa Rose 3/15/04 12:00am

He Saw Everything Twice! A Memoir of Then and Now

Double Vision: A Self-Portrait , by Walter Abish. Alfred A. Knopf, 220 pages, $24.

We’re all impatient for the memoir to evolve-who needs more cross-eyed mirror-gazing?-but don’t expect the first stabs at a less narrowly focused generation of autobiographical writing to be 20-20, or even particularly legible. Case in point is Walter Abish’s Double Read More