Kory Stamper picks 4 movies to pair with ‘True Color’
In Pairings, artists and creators pick the movies that complement their latest work.
Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and former associate editor for Merriam-Webster dictionaries. She’s the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries and the new book True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink, which is out now wherever you get your books!
We asked Kory to pick a few movies that pair well with True Color. Here’s what she wrote about them.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)
Maybe it’s odd to pair a black and white movie with a book entirely about color. But you can’t get better than Myrna Loy as Muriel Blandings waxing rhapsodic to her painters about the exact, right colors for her dream house in the country—“not as blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds,” “an apple red, somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Jonathan.” Her attempt to explain what the right color is to her long-suffering contractors is so perfect, so full of joy in the order and nature of color, that it serves as the epigraph to my book.
Playtime (1967)
This Jacques Tati comedy about the sleek modern life captivated me with its weirdness the very first time I saw it, and it’s a great contemporary foil for all the innovations in technology and color that dominate the main story of my book. If it looks almost too polished and architected for real life, that’s because it is: everything in the movie, apart from a few mattes of major landmarks and some extras, were sets constructed by Tati. That accounts for the better-than-life cohesive color palette of the whole thing. Stay for the carousel at the end.
The Great Passage (2013)
True Color is about colors, but it is also, as one reader put it, about nerd fights at the dictionary factory, and what better movie than The Great Passage to talk about the dictionary factory. Set at a dictionary publisher in Japan, it’s a slow-burn story about the quest to set down an entire language’s lexicon, complete with index cards, too many books jumbled on shelves, the double-barrelled threats of pulled funding and a too-soon deadline, and awkward lexicographers falling in love (mostly with words, occasionally with people).
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
You want color? You want whimsy? You want to, every time you see a pink box, turn to your companion and holler “Keep your hands off my lobby boy!” Then you want Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. The movie has nothing to do with color as the subject, but color plays a supporting role. It’s eye candy. You deserve some eye candy.