Arriving in one of the great cities of the world and seeing a sight like this was extraordinary. The feeling was, however, surpassed the next morning when I watched the movie itself in a proper cinema.

Il Capitale Umano opens in Italy on January 9, 2014 on an impressive 400 screens. 

More to follow...

Tonight, I leave  America's wintry east coast for Rome, where I will attend a press screening of Il Capitale Umano.  From this side of the Atlantic, I sense a growing excitement in advance of the film's general release on  January 9th.   I am not the best judge, but I think people are right to be getting excited.  Paolo Virzì and the talent he has assembled to take this story from the page to the screen have done a truly magnificent job.  

Take a look at the trailer ...

Here, complete with intriguing photograph, is a little mention of Paolo Virzì's Human Capital from Greece.   I am awestruck by the idea of my characters making it to the country of my maternal grandparents' birth.  I wonder what my grandfather Sam Nikitopolous, proprietor of Mary's Barbeque in Detroit, whom I never met, would make of it all.

Happy Birthday to Herbert Marcuse, who would have been 115 today.  

I first read his 1964 masterpiece, One-Dimensional Man, when I was in my teens.  I found it eerily prescient.   In 2000, I wrote about the book's continuing relevance in The New Statesman, and today, almost five decades after its original publication, I believe Marcuse's vision of a world dominated by a "comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom" to be truer than ever.  

For Marcuse, the threat to freedom was not the violent totalitarianism he escaped in his native Germany, but a subtle kind of corporate fascism in which cultural, financial and political forces inexorably mold the individual into a one-dimensional creature who "cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action" than the one he inhabits.  As we service our credit card debts, consume news as information and compulsively scan our digital devices for stimulation, can anyone doubt Marcuse’s fears were justified?