These are good times for ridiculing cinema. But cinema also involves a lot of history and old bones that need to be uncovered to accommodate whatever is left of it. Brad Pitt has been building a reputation of taking projects on face value but not really signing on the dotted line. Now the soft and small featured Natalie Portman is also interested in a union of their talents. It will translate into unbelievable chemistry and a love that tear our hearts apart.
Now the conjurer of this reunion will be Greg Mottola who really brought in a breath of fresh air to Kristen Stewart in Adventureland. The film he plans to work on is called Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelery. Here is a synopsis from the book.
Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person—their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In Leanne Shapton’s marvelously inventive and invented auction catalog, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (who aren’t real people, but might as well be). Through photographs of the couple’s personal effects—the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks)—the story of a failed love affair vividly (and cleverly) emerges. From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple’s accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind, laid out for us to appraise and appreciate. In an earlier work, Was She Pretty?, Shapton, a talented artist and illustrator, subtly explored the seemingly simple yet powerfully complicated nature of sexual jealousy. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris—a very different yet equally original book—she invites us to contemplate what is truly valuable, and to consider the art we make of our private lives.
Leanne Shapton is an illustrator, writer and publisher who is an art director of the new York Times op-ed and cofounder of J&L Books. It is really chronicle piece of images and artifacts that meant a lot to the protagonists. So this doomed love affair will be really nice to watch on the big screen if these two stars come out in full force.
