I'm fond of Turner...been lucky to see several of hispaintings in the flesh (or in the paint, as it were) in galleries. Just very evocative and romantic stuff. They stir me like a great piece of music. Looking at a Turner painting while listening to Miklos Rozsa could probably kill me with beauty.
Most of my other favourite painters are illustrators...like Maxfield Parrish; N.C. Wyeth; Frank Frazetta.
As promised my detailed explanation of why the end of Being Julia doesn't really work. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
I don't think Julia's revenge on those who done her wrong comes off...for several reasons. First off, she doesn't have to hire the girl. To hire her, just to humiliate her is a bit calculatingly cruel on Julia's part.
Secondly, everyone keeps talking about what a great looker this girl is when, in fact, she is not particularly good-looking and certainly not a patch on Annette Bening.
Thirdly, despite what they all say and seem to think, she isn't a very good actress, given what we see of her in auditions and rehearsals...even given that they are trying to emulate a certain style of the day, it still isn't particularly good.
Fourthly, the scene in which they all think the girl is so funny isn't that funny and neither is her performance...and just because they are all laughing doesn't make it funny to us in the audience.
Fifthly, we do not see enough of the play to know that what Julia is doing is amazing!
We know she is changing the play and some of it we've seen, but we need to see and know more. When she's relating it to her own life and giving her ad-libs and revisions double-meanings, we have no idea how she can depart from the scene and the play and still make it fit the context of the whole. So when Jeremy Irons tells her to keep all her alterations in, we don't know how it works. If we had seen the whole scene played out or seen other scenes that made us understand exactly what she was doing and where she was departing, then it would look like the amazing feat it was supposed to be.
As it standsI think it is a lazily written scene (and Ronald Harwood is a good enough writer not to be that lazy)...because he takes the easy road by not showing us the original context so that we're able to contrast it to what Julia is actually doing. That would have been amazing and dangerous. To know the original, see the departure, she how she gave it double meaning, and could still make it work within the play she is performing. But all that stuff about the girl's lovers makes no sense because there's been no reference to it before.
I think a little study of Ferenc Molnar, who has done this sort of thing in plays like THE PLAY'S THE THING, might have helped.
Sixthly, even the revised revenge version of the scene isn't all that funny. Just because the audience in the film's theatre is laughing, doesn't mean the real audience in the theatre. It's all a little too forced, obvious, and precious.
And finally, Julia needs more real motive to exact this sort of revenge. Now it only seems beneath and unworthy of her. She hasn't really been all that wronged. After all, she is the first to cheat and to pursue an affair which with a drip who her closest friend warned her in no uncertain terms would end badly. And her greatest victim...the actress...hadn't really done anything to her before she starting plotting her revenge on her. Also she was simply no real threat to Julia. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Julia's behaviour is the worst of anyone in the film.
