My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second

Maurizio Cattelan: All: A Multi-Media Post-Mortem

2012-01-27T11:45:00.001-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—If nothing else, the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan—whose work was recently the subject of a near-complete retrospective, titled Maurizio Cattelan: All, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, one which ended Sunday (yes, as with the Museum of Modern Art's Willem de Kooning retrospective, I waited until the last minute to see this)—more often than not provokes us into an internal conversation as to how serious this guy actually is.

The "layout" of the exhibit itself clues you in as to Cattelan's sensibility:

Instead of the usual stately art-hanging-on-walls approach, Cattelan decided to "hang" all of his art from the Guggenheim's ceiling. A mere gesture of "look-at-me" irreverence, or something more deeply subversive? Considering that much of Cattelan's art has been site-specific in nature, his approach to All suggests an attempt to radically decontextualize his work and allow the viewer to determine how his work stands up by itself.

Perhaps this accounts for the extreme unevenness of the art on display. Works of bracing surreal creepiness—much of his taxidermy, for instance (are there other modern artists who have worked so extensively with taxidermy? I ask as an art novice, mostly)—and even occasional beauty alternate between other, thinner visual conceits that smack of an artist having a private joke of our expense. But perhaps some of the latter works resonated more within their original surroundings?

Still, there is something to be said for the kind of exuberant bomb-throwing spirit that was on display at the Guggenheim in this exhibit. At the very least, give me this kind of provocation over yet another boring still life any day!

I'll let these photos speak for themselves, from here on in (hardly an exhaustive selection, but some of the most memorable pieces, to my mind:

Untitled (2009)

La Nona Ora (1999)

Ave Maria (2007)

L.O.V.E. (2010)

Untitled (1995)/Not Afraid of Love (2000)

Stephanie (2003)

Mother (1999) [left]/Charlie Don't Surf (1997) [center]/Frau C. [right]

Him (2001)

And finally, some video of the experience! Two shots: one of Untitled (2001), which is not much more than a miniature elevator; the other taken at the top of the Guggenheim looking down into the morass of Cattelan art.

Artistic Consumption Log, Jan. 16, 2012 - Jan. 22, 2012

2012-01-23T09:00:00.001-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—I don't have much to say about this past week beyond what I consumed artistically, so I might as well just get right into it.

Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971)

Films

"Bresson," all films directed by Robert Bresson and seen at Film Forum in New York
Une Femme Douce (1969)
★ L'Argent (1983)
★ Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971)
★ A Man Escaped (1956)
Holy shit, Four Nights of a Dreamer! It's as if Robert Bresson had seen into my soul and made a film out of what he saw. A Man Escaped, Pickpocket and Au Hasard Balthazar might be "better" films, but Bresson's take on the same Dostoyevsky story that Visconti turned into Le Notti Bianche (and that James Gray unofficially adapted into Two Lovers) shows the French filmmaker at least partially surrendering to his romantic impulses, and the result is, to my mind, as sublime as I was hoping it would be, especially in the lovely new 35mm print I saw Thursday night. Folks, I am that "dreamer"; I really don't think I can be even a little bit objective about this film, so thoroughly did I identify with its main character, for better and for worse.

★ Camera (2000, David Cronenberg), seen at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.
★ At the Suicide of the Last Jew of the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007, David Cronenberg), seen at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.
These two short films—the latter a contribution to a larger anthology series called To Each His Own Cinema—were screened as part of a live conversation with the great Canadian filmmaker on Saturday. I hadn't seen Camera—which he made for the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000—before then, but it's actually a rich and wistful little meditation on cinema and aging. The second short is less rich—more a brief lark in which Cronenberg imagines himself standing at the precipice of the declining movie-going experience, waving a gun around and putting it in his mouth as television announcers do play-by-play of this momentous event—but it's amusing in its own black-comic way. Both are available to watch online, the former here, the latter here. More about the event itself below.

Music

★ Introspective (1988, Pet Shop Boys)
★ Behaviour (1990, Pet Shop Boys)
★ Very (1993, Pet Shop Boys)
I mostly have Cantopop singer Prudence Liew to thank for inspiring me to get into The Pet Shop Boys; she did a cover of the British electropop duo's 1987 hit "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" (a cover that substituted some of the synthesizer lines with actual horns—for those who care). I'm generally enjoying their music; there are always genuine emotional undercurrents coursing through the ostensibly upbeat, glitzy arrangements and through Neil Tennant's fey singing voice. The one that I found myself responding to most positively—ecstatically, in fact—however, is Behaviour, which has a mournful, dreamy quality to it that I viscerally respond to in something like...Four Nights of a Dreamer, actually. It also has "My October Symphony," which apparently was inspired by Dmitri Shostakovich's Second Symphony, entitled "To October." When's the last time you heard a pop song inspired by Shostakovich?

Very is also quite good, though I don't feel quite the same affection for it as I do Behaviour; still, their Village People's "Go West" is oddly affecting.

Literature

★ Catch-22 (1961, Joseph Heller)
I wrote a bit about this literary classic here; I finally finished it—after having to endure a week without it after having accidentally left my copy of it in a friend's purse—and its conclusion brings it all home in a rather beautiful, lightly existential and exhilaratingly irreverent way. Catch-22 fully deserves its reputation.

Art

"Maurizio Cattelan: All," seen at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York
As a result of the ton of photos I took at this exhibition, I think this warrants a whole separate post; perhaps then, I'll pool my rough impressions of this alternately invigorating and frustrating show. Stay tuned...

Other

"A Conversation with David Cronenberg," seen at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.
I don't have much to say about this event, really; it wasn't exactly heavy on revelatory insights into his fascinating body of work or his working methods. (Honestly, I'm already forgetting about a lot of it, a mere day or two after the fact.) Still, it was nice to be in the presence of a filmmaker as articulate about his own work, and as formidably intelligent, as Cronenberg is. His demeanor is fully in tune with the films he's made: clinical in its fascinated gaze toward ideas and images that most of us normally wouldn't want to contemplate.

Artistic Consumption Log, Jan. 9, 2012 - Jan. 15, 2012: "Robert Bresson Immersion" Edition

2012-01-16T18:00:00.025-05:00

NEW YORK—As you could probably glean from the log below, this past week in artistic consumption was dominated mostly by Robert Bresson, as a complete retrospective of the legendary French director's work rolls along at Film Forum. A fuller consideration of Bresson's singular art perhaps awaits here on this blog; for now, I'll just offer these two observations/thoughts:

Apparently Bresson pretty much had, if not his style, then his thematic concerns figured out right from the get-go with his first "official" feature, Les Anges du Péché, with its nunnery setting, its anti-psychological approach and its preoccupation with themes of spirituality and religious transcendence. But the difference stylistically speaking between that film and The Devil, Probably—the latest Bresson feature I've seen thus far—is vast indeed.
So far, my favorite Bressons of the ones I've seen are two consensus faves, Au Hasard Balthazar and Pickpocket. To my surprise, though, the aforementioned The Devil, Probably is, as of now, not running too far behind. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of its take on one youth's societal disconnection, but at the very least, I found it more consistently engaging and fascinating to ponder than Lancelot of the Lake (great in its own way, though I admit to finding some stretches rather tedious). Plus, it has this brilliant piece of montage in the middle (though its brilliance might make more sense in context and with more than a passing familiarity with Bresson's late style).

The other major highlight of my week? Seeing the Brooklyn Art Song Society perform all 114 of Charles Ives's 114 Songs in one four-and-a-half hour marathon. It's quite a rich collection of tunes, ranging from Americana to settings of French/German poetry, playful little ditties to reflective religious meditations, and from tonal melodies to dissonant impressionistic evocations. Thankfully, there's enough variety in these songs to make those four-and-a-half hours pass by fairly quickly. I had never heard of the Brooklyn Art Song Society before hearing about this event through New Yorker classical-music critic Alex Ross's Twitter feed; I will have to investigate their music-making some more, after this well-wrought feat.

Oh...and the Golden Globe Awards were mostly a snooze. I didn't watch Ricky Gervais's controversial hosting job last year, but I guess I missed out on an edgier performance than what he offered last night. Plus, there weren't a great many surprises in any of the film categories. And that's all I have to say about that.

The log, please...

Pickpocket (1959)

Films

"Bresson," all films directed by Robert Bresson, seen at Film Forum in New York:
★ Les Anges du Péché (1943)
★ Lancelot of the Lake (1974)
★ Pickpocket (1959)
★ The Devil, Probably (1977)

Music

★ High Time (1971, MC5)

★ Please (1986, Pet Shop Boys)
Actually (1987, Pet Shop Boys)

★ Charles Ives: 114 Songs, performed by Brooklyn Art Song Society at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Television

The 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards, seen on NBC in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Literary Interlude, "Film Critic's Statement of Purpose" Edition

2012-01-10T08:00:00.054-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Recently, I decided to finally start reading some of the criticism of the late British-Canadian film critic Robin Wood...and right on the first page of his prologue introducing Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond, I came across this passage that instilled me with utter delight with its insights and eloquence:

I am a critic. As such, I see my work as in many respects set apart from that of theorists and scholars (though it is of course frequently dependent upon them). The theorist and the scholar are unburdened of any necessity to engage intimately and on a personal basis with any specific work; they can hide behind their screens of theory and scholarship, they are not compelled to expose the personal nature of their work because they deal in facts, abstract ideas, and data. Any critic who is honest, however, is committed to self-exposure, a kind of public striptease: s/he must make clear that any authentic response to a work of art or entertainment is grounded not only in the work itself but in the critic's psychological makeup, personal history, values, prejudices, obsessions. Criticism arises out of an intense and intimate personal relationship between work and critic. If it is the critic's duty to strive for "objectivity" (in the negative sense of avoiding distortions), s/he knows that it is an objectivity that can never be fully achieved, because even when one is convinced that one "sees the work as it is," the relationship to it has still to be established. I have not the right to say, for example, "David Lynch makes bad movies": many people for whom I have great respect admire them, and they can certainly be defended on grounds of imagination, accomplishment, originality, strong personal commitment. I do, however, have the right to say, "I find Lynch's films extremely distasteful; my sense of value repudiates them."

The critic, it follows, must never set him- or herself up as some kind of infallible oracle. The relationship between critic and reader must always be one of debate. One might invoke here F. R. Leavis's famous definition of the ideal critical exchange: "This is so, isn't it?" / "Yes, but..." All interesting criticism is founded in the critic's beliefs and values, political position, background, influences, and these should be made explicit or so clearly implied as to leave no room for ambiguity. The theorist and scholar can (up to a point) conceal any personal commitment behind a cloak of objectivity. The personal element will always be there (in such matters as choice of material to be pursued and analyzed, choice of premise from which to work), but it can only be exposed with precisely that "reading between the lines" that the apparent perfect objectivity is there to deflect.

—Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond (2003)

As someone who, even now, still considers himself a student of cinema (and film criticism) rather than an authority on the art form by any means, Wood's explication of the role of a film critic especially resonates with me. I am only one voice, and I can only bring my own personal experiences and emotional makeup to bear on assessing the value of a work of art. Whether my voice is of any value to anyone is, I guess, up to the individual.

Naturally, I hope that my critical voice is of interest to someone out there...which is partly why I'm finding Wood's politically minded brand of criticism to be so refreshing and even important—possibly a model to aspire to. I want my criticism to matter, dammit!

Sorry. After the firing of veteran film critic J. Hoberman from the Village Voice last year, I can't help but reflect once again on how best to forge ahead in this film-criticism path I'm trying to navigate. Maybe I really need to just drop out of the daily grind altogether and just return to academia or something. I don't know. I suppose 2012 will be the year I figure all that out.

Until then, perhaps I should frame Robin Wood's words above and absorb it as a mantra. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the more specific insights he has in store for me in the rest of this and other books of his.

Artistic Consumption Log, Jan. 2, 2012 - Jan. 8, 2012

2012-01-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—What at first looked to be a fairly quiet weekend in artistic consumption became a much more active one when, on Thursday, I received an email from the Museum of Modern Art reminding me that its blockbuster retrospective of Dutch-born Abstract Expressionist artist Willem de Kooning was ending Monday (today). That's all I needed to hear: I had to carve out time this weekend to go check it out.

Thus it came to be that I found myself wandering around MoMA's sixth floor on Saturday. I'm glad I went, finding the experience of touring through the various stages of de Kooning's artistic life positively head-spinning; the effect of seeing so many challenging works of art in one space is enough to give an attentive viewer a headache—a "good" kind of headache, I'd say. Boy, that de Kooning sure didn't stop experimenting, did he? Even his later, sparer works from the 1980s—at least in the context of this eye-opening exhibit—bear the signature of a man who, even in ailing health, remained restless in his creativity and expansive in his vision.

You know who else had as expansive a vision as de Kooning? Gustav Mahler—whose valedictory Ninth Symphony I got to see performed live that same day by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of music director Alan Gilbert. It was a less illuminating affair (Gilbert doesn't challenge Leonard Bernstein in the dynamism department when it comes to Mahler), but it was nevertheless a satisfying performance, with Gilbert showing moments of liberating interpretive freedom in some of this work's wilder passages (especially in its inner movements).

The other noteworthy highlight of this past week in artistic consumption: being so stunned into submission by my first-ever viewing of Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar—the opening film in a near-complete Bresson retrospective unfurling right now at Film Forum—that I felt unable to speak to anyone else after the screening. And yet how is it possible that a film with such depressing content can have the power to inspire its viewers to maybe be nicer to one's fellow man? I am already looking forward to seeing what other revelations Bresson has in store for me in this series.

Here's this week's log:

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

Films

★ Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim), seen at Film Forum in New York [second viewing]

★ Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, Robert Bresson), seen at Film Forum in New York
★ Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945, Robert Bresson), seen at Film Forum in New York

★ Almayer's Folly (2011, Chantal Akerman), seen at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.

Music

★ Kick Out the Jams (1969, MC5)

★ Back in the USA (1970, MC5)

★ Mahler: Symphony No. 9 (1984, Herbert von Karajan & Berlin Philharmonic) [umpteenth listen]
★ "Mahler's Ninth Symphony," performed by Alan Gilbert & New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in New York

★ "Heroes" (1977, David Bowie) [second listen]
Just because it was Bowie's birthday yesterday. And because I wanted to make sure I didn't underrate this one in light of its predecessor, Low (I concluded that I didn't). Plus, the title cut is still pretty awesome.

Art

★ "de Kooning: A Retrospective," seen at Museum of Modern Art in New York

Literary (and Photographic) Interlude, New York at Night Edition

2012-01-04T08:00:00.028-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligble gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

I had completely forgotten about this evocative description of New York at night until I heard it recently in the context of Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service's brilliant word-for-word stage dramatization of Fitzgerald's great American novel. In this one passage, Fitzgerald vividly describes the nocturnal New York of not only my own perceptions, but also of my dreams. (What that suggests about my dreams...well, I'll leave that to you all to consider.)

What Wong Kar-Wai did with images for Hong Kong in Chungking Express and (especially) Fallen Angels, Fitzgerald apparently accomplished about seven decades earlier with words for New York in The Great Gatsby. "Oh the night is my world..."

[Yes, I did just quote a line from that Laura Branigan song, "Self Control." What of it?]

Speaking of the night, here's a photo I snapped on Sunday of the night sky overlooking Union Square (taken while I was alone, naturally):

Artistic Consumption Log, Dec. 26, 2011 - Jan. 1, 2012

2012-01-02T15:00:00.003-05:00

NEW YORK—Happy New Year, friends!

As I anticipated in last week I ended up not being able to find much time to annotate this latest artistic consumption log, what with my year-end review over the weekend plus other New Year-centered events (including a failed attempt to wade into the Atlantic Ocean in Coney Island on New Year's Day yesterday with the rest of the Polar Bear Club-ers).

So here's a barebones log for what was a relatively light week for me in artistic consumption.

The Cameraman (1928)

Films

★ The Cameraman (1928, Edward Sedgwick), seen at Film Forum in New York

★ A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi), seen at Film Forum in New York [second viewing]

War Horse (2011, Steven Spielberg), seen at UA Court Street Stadium 12 in Brooklyn, N.Y.

★ Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan), seen at Cinema Village in New York [second viewing]

Music

★ Ravel: Complete Music for Solo Piano (1992, Abbey Simon)

2011 in Review: My Favorite Films, New and Old, of the Year

2012-01-01T10:00:00.007-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—2011 was indeed a great year for cinema—at least, if you knew where to look and were willing to explore beyond the increasingly paltry Hollywood offerings of the megaplexes.

It wasn't as good a year for me as far as my rigor in catching up with 2011 releases go. As I'm sure I've mentioned on this blog before, now that I'm living in New York—2011 was my first full year as a New Yorker—I'm even more spoiled for choice than ever. For me, that meant that, when presented with the choice of taking a chance on a new release versus catching up with cinema history by seeing an older film, I often found myself going with the latter option...at least until I came back from my San Francisco vacation in late October, when it seemed like I suddenly felt less of a desire to keep up the same torrid theater-going pace as I managed before. (That may be about to change with Film Forum's upcoming Robert Bresson retrospective in January—Bresson being a major filmmaker whose work I have barely seen, outside of maybe five minutes of A Man Escaped.)

All of that is my roundabout way of saying that the following list of my 10 favorite films of 2011 is by no means complete, and is subject to change once I actually do catch up with some of my major blind spots this year—Of Gods and Men, To Die Like a Man and The Arbor are three that immediately come to mind. Maybe, when I catch up to those, one or all of them will end up bumping a title out of my current Top 10.

For now, though...here is my list (based on a large pool of films that received a release of a week or longer here in New York):

10. Heartbeats. Xavier Dolan's glamorous love triangle certainly had style to burn, but behind the swoon-worthy Wong Kar-Wai-ish aesthetic was an intelligent examination of the way we all tend to deceive ourselves in the game of love.

9. Melancholia. With his last film, Antichrist, Lars von Trier kept telling the world about how his film was meant to be an expression of the deep depression he experienced while making it. Maybe the after-the-fact clarity of that experience helps explain why Melancholia seems so much more powerful in that regard. It's not only a visually stunning end-of-the-world saga, but also one of the most vivid dramatizations I know not only of one person's depressive state of mind, but of the effect of her state on those surrounding her.

8. Beginners. Perhaps someday I'll work on that piece I've been meaning to write about the similarities between this film and my No. 1 pick for this year (what, you think I'm going to spoil that for all of you now?). For now, all I'll say is: "insufferably quirky"—a common charge lobbied against Mike Mills's second feature—is the last thing that came to my mind (other than the dog subtitles, I suppose); instead, its melancholy, reflective, almost fragile vibe is what came across most movingly for me in this essayistic exploration of people who still seem to be discovering things about themselves and the ones around them even in adulthood.

7. A Separation. Asghar Farhadi's devastating film is a richly drawn humanist drama that obliquely suggests the complexities of life in Iran in its gripping, evenhanded exploration of one couple's titular separation and the effects it has on many other characters.

6. Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Even more so than in his previous documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog—working for the first time in 3D, no less—finds the awe in nature, in history and in humanity as his camera probes around the oldest-known cave paintings in the Chauvet caves in Southern France.

5. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest meditation on the intersection of history and memory is as warm and formally mesmerizing as it is quietly profound—in short, the Thai director working once again at the height of his powers.

4. Certified Copy. Abbas Kiarostami goes international for his latest film, but he is still as concerned as ever with the bridge between reality and art. Thankfully, as was the case with his 1990 masterpiece Close-Up, his intellectual concerns never get in the way of the human drama at the heart of this increasingly surreal chronicle of a couple falling apart and reconnecting. But wait—is what we're watching "real" or not? What is real in the film and what isn't? Most importantly: In the search for greater emotional truths, how much does "reality" matter, in the end?

3. Love Exposure. Love, sex, family, religion—Shion Sono's grand, mad epic has it all, and somehow manages to sustain both narrative interest and thematic richness over a four-hour span. Ever since it played to great acclaim here in New York two years ago at the New York Asian Film Festival, I've been dying to finally see this film; it was completely worth the wait.

2. Margaret. Kenneth Lonergan's passion project finally made it to theaters after years of legal struggles, and even in less than its creator's ideal form, this is still a dazzling, insightful and profoundly moving film that seems to contain years of life experience in its chronicle of a young woman's guilt and maturation after her involvement in a tragic traffic accident.

And finally.............

1. The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick attempted to encompass no less than the entirety of existence in this head-spinning folly, but the most surprising thing about The Tree of Life is how its grand, humbling ambitions don't dwarf the wrenching familial drama at the center of it all. The Artist? Bah! It's cute and all, but it's got nothing on this awe-inspiring piece of cinema, folks.

Other 2011 film releases I especially liked (in alphabetical order):

13 Assassins, Takashi Miike
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Andrei Ujicâ
Bellflower, Evan Glodell
Contagion, Steven Soderbergh
A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg
Film Socialisme, Jean-Luc Godard
House of Pleasures, Bertrand Bonello
The Interrupters, Steve James
Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog
Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin
Mysteries of Lisbon, Raúl Ruíz
Petition, Zhao Liang
Poetry, Lee Chang-dong
The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodóvar
Tabloid, Errol Morris
Tuesday, After Christmas, Radu Muntean

Special honorable mention: the belated theatrical release of Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1991) in a new restoration courtesy of the World Cinema Foundation.

Finally, here are 10 older films—plus one special honorable mention—that I discovered this year that hit me the hardest (again, in alphabetical order):

A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan)

A Woman Under the Influence (1974, John Cassavetes)

All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse)

Deep End (1970, Jerzy Skolimowski)

Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

Handsworth Songs (1987, John Akomfrah)

I Only Want You to Love Me (1976, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Le Rayon Vert (1986, Eric Rohmer)

Re-Animator (1985, Stuart Gordon)

Seven Chances (1925, Buster Keaton)

Honorable mention:

Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983, Tsui Hark)—mostly because it was probably the most exhilarating action picture I saw all year (and yes, that includes The Adventures of Tintin and Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol)

Here's to another year of cinematic discoveries and explorations!

2011 in Review: My Most Memorable (Non-Film) Artistic Discoveries

2011-12-31T09:00:00.004-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—It's that time of year again: time for all of us to think back on the year that was and look ahead to the year to come.

For me, at least here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second, that means taking stock of all that I consumed artistically—because you all know me: always on the prowl for enjoyment and illumination, culturally or otherwise!

As usual, though I put a special emphasis on film when it comes to these year-end retrospectives, I'd be remiss if I didn't devote some time to looking back on some of the most memorable things I experienced in other artistic disciplines. So that is what I will do with this post.

Without further ado: my favorite (non-film) artistic discoveries of the year!

Art

Photo credit: Solve Sundsbo

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

I don't go to as many art exhibitions as I should, so this was an easy choice, considering that I didn't really have much to choose from as far as art discoveries go. But...let me put it this way: Going into this blockbuster exhibition of the late fashion designer's work, I didn't really think all that much of fashion as a vehicle for personal artistic expression. As I weaved through McQueen's gloriously dark and impassioned designs, I could feel my own conception of the possibilities of fashion infinitely expanding. None of the other handful of exhibitions could quite match the boundary-pushing power of this exhibition.

Other memorable artistic discoveries:

the transfinite: Ryoji Ikeda's multimedia installation at the Park Avenue Armory was deceptively simple—a big monolith along with a few smaller monitors—but powerfully evocative of our digital age. (I wrote about it here and even took some video of the experience.)
Primitive: Those who thrilled to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's environmental evocation of history and memory in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives earlier this year found an extension and deepening of those themes in this multimedia installation at the New Museum, combining artwork and videos to paint a complex, vivid portrait of Thai life as he perceived it in the 1960s and '70s.

Dance

Photo credit: Stephanie Berger

Shen Wei Dance Arts, seen at Park Avenue Armory

This is an even easier call, my knowledge of dance being even more rudimentary than my knowledge of visual art. I wonder if I ever will be able to appreciate dance as an art form. I went to three American Ballet Theater productions over the summer, and frankly found myself having trouble working up much emotional engagement with what I was seeing. If seeing Shen Wei's fascinatingly abstract choreography recently at the Park Avenue Armory tells me anything, it's that maybe modern dance is more my speed than traditional "story" ballets. I shall persevere next year. Until then, I will fondly remember the thrill of experiencing the Chinese choreographer's new work, Undivided Divided—a work that divided Park Avenue Armory's Thompson Drill Hall into squares and literally invited us spectators to wander around the dancers.

Literature

When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade (2011), Dave Kehr

This is the kind of volume that has the power to inspire an aspiring film critic like myself to step up one's game. Dave Kehr offers up insight after insight in this anthology of his work for the Chicago Reader during the '70s and '80s—but the most admirable thing about Kehr's approach is how humble and subservient he is to the films he reviews and the artists he champions. Those who think they know Kehr only through his Chicago Reader capsules and weekly New York Times DVD column owe it to themselves to pick up this book and see new sides not only of him as a writer and critic, but of the films he writes so accessibly about.

Other memorable literary discoveries:

Howl and Other Poems (1956, Allen Ginsberg): On a whim, I picked up a copy of this while visiting the landmark City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in October (fitting, since it was through the obscenity trial that resulted from its publication of this slim volume that the bookstore itself became famous). Having never read it before, I proceeded to be wholly blown away by the urgency and passion in Ginsberg's language, beautiful in its own angry way.
Jane Eyre (1847, Charlotte Brontë): Here's another one I somehow avoided reading in high school/college until this year. Jane Eyre's journey to independence and maturity is still as inspiring as it ever was. (I still haven't seen Cary Fukunaga's recent film adaptation, released this year.)
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933, Nathanael West): a fascinating irony-drenched black comedy about a man who seemingly bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, whether he really ought to or not
The Sun Also Rises (1926, Ernest Hemingway): Gorgeous and heartbreaking, this Hemingway classic offers a corrective to the half-hearted critique of fantasy nostalgia Woody Allen offered up in Midnight in Paris (I tried to explain my thinking on that point here).
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956, Yukio Mishima): one of the most vivid and unsettling portraits of neurotic madness I've ever read

Theater

Follies (1971, Stephen Sondheim), seen at Marquis Theater in New York

There were more adventurous works of theater I saw this year, but none of them delivered the kind of emotional insight Eric Schaeffer's revival of Stephen Sondheim's 1971 musical offered up in spades. It's the kind of brilliant revival that may well have you saying "They don't make them like they used to"—rather fitting for a musical about aging and the compromises in life.

Other memorable theatrical discoveries:

Gatz (2005, Elevator Repair Service), seen at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.: This word-for-word, six-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is as much a meditation on the act of adaptation as it is a singular experimental theater piece by its own right. (Not too far behind this: The Select (The Sun Also Rises), Elevator Repair Service's adaptation of the aforementioned Hemingway novel—less daring, perhaps, but just as inventive and perhaps even more affecting. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to another accomplished feat of book-to-stage adaptation, Amon Miyamoto's Japanese-language stage version of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.)
Krapp's Last Tape (1958, Samuel Beckett), seen at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.: In a mere 55 minutes, John Hurt managed to suggest a whole lifetime of bitter experience in Samuel Beckett's typically stripped-down, one-act, one-man drama.
The Normal Heart (1985, Larry Kramer), seen at the Golden Theatre in New York: This revival of Larry Kramer's chronicle of the stirrings of AIDS awareness in the early '80s unexpectedly hit the zeitgeist when New York officially legalized gay marriage earlier this year. Thankfully, The Normal Heart—at least in this deeply moving production—plays surprisingly well as character drama, not just as polemic.
Satyagraha (1979, Philip Glass), seen at Metropolitan Opera House in New York: Less a conventional opera than a philosophical meditation on the intersection of the political and the personal, Philip Glass's opera—given a fascinating and moving production by the Metropolitan Opera—still packs a mighty punch today, especially in the shadow of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Sleep No More (2011, Punchdrunk), seen at the McKittrick Hotel in New York: To wander around the various floors and hallways of this "immersive" adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet is to not only find yourself ensconced in a whole new world, but to feel the possibilities of theater expand right before your very eyes. Love it or hate it, there was certainly nothing else quite like it.

Music

Inuksuit (2011, John Luther Adams), seen at Park Avenue Armory in New York

No album I listened to, or concert that I went to, was quite as mind-blowing as John Luther Adams's astonishing feat of musical daring: a work that literally created a whole environment of sounds from the bottom up and asked us listeners to wander around and create our own musical experience from it. It is, I daresay, the closest to a musical equivalent of Playtime as I've ever come across. (I wrote more about it here.)

Other memorable musical discoveries:

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998, Lucinda Williams): still the alt-country rocker's finest collection of songs. That tender grit in her voice never fails to slay me.
Egypt (2004, Youssou N'Dour): an act of cross-cultural empathy on a par with Paul Simon's classic Graceland, courtesy of an amazing Senegalese singer
How I Got Over (2010, The Roots): This may be my favorite Roots album, brimming with a lyricism and thematic ambition that makes it stand out among the rest of this hip-hop group's post-Things Fall Apart outlook. It's too bad it took me 'til this year's release of their latest (and very fine) album, Undun, to finally get around to listening to Black Thought, ?uestlove & co.
Nine Types of Light (2011, TV on the Radio): Their 2008 album Dear Science was my breakthrough with this much-acclaimed Brooklyn-based band, and their latest album continues the gorgeous melodies and joyous experimentation of that one.
Station to Station (1976, David Bowie): I had never listened to much of Bowie's music before seeing the Bowie-led Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth for the first time this year. Eventually, I got around to delving into this famous glam rocker's catalog...and of all the records he cut during his prime (late '60s/'70s/early '80s, roughly), this is the one I return to the most, the one with arguably his most daring cuts (the 10-minute title track, for one) and his most soulful (for him) vocals. (His follow-up, Low, runs a close second.)
Vespertine (2001, Björk): my favorite album from the Icelandic pop songstress, lush, whimsical and beautiful. (Her most recent album, Biophilia, is...okay, I guess.)
W H O K I L L (2011, tUnE-yArDs): Actually, I think I like both this and BiRd-BrAiNs about the same, but W H O K I L L announces its greater ambition straight away with its first cut, "My Country." Either way, though, Merrill Garbus's bracingly low-fi music scintillates and engages.
劉美君 (1986, 劉美君): I wasn't as vigilant with Chinese-pop explorations as I have been in previous years, so my usual C-pop discovery of the year automatically goes to this one, the debut album of Prudence Liew, a singer who somehow makes her lack of vocal grace an asset rather than a drawback.

Tomorrow, on New Year's Day: the film-related lists you've surely all been waiting for. Stay tuned!

Literary Interlude, Agnostic Edition

2011-12-28T08:00:00.004-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Colonel Cathcart went away from General Dreedle with a gulp and kicked...[C]haplain [Tappmann] out of the officers' club, and it was exactly the way it almost was two months later after the chaplain had tried to persuade Colonel Cathcart to rescind his order increasing the number of missions to sixty and had failed abysmally in that endeavor too, and the chaplain was ready now to capitulate to despair entirely but was restrained by the memory of his wife, whom he loved and missed so pathetically with such sensual and exalted ardor, and by the lifelong trust he had placed in the wisdom and justice of an immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, humane, universal, anthropomorphic, English-speaking, Anglo-saxon, pro-American God, which had begun to waver. So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it indeed seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune trampled with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt; and the chaplain, who had conscience and character, would have yielded to reason and relinquished his belief in the God of his fathers—would truly have resigned both his calling and his commission and taken his chances as a private in the infantry or field artillery, or even, perhaps, as a corporal in the paratroopers—had it not been for such successive mystic phenomena as the naked man in the tree at that poor sergeant's funeral weeks before and the cryptic, haunting, encouraging promise of the prophet Flume in the forest only that afternoon: Tell them I'll be back when winter comes.

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

Even amidst all the bits of scalding satire contained in Heller's classic American novel, there are moments that cut through pitch-black-comic surface and get at something emotionally and even philosophically real. Above is one particular passage that really got to me; it's as dead-on an encapsulation of the reasons behind my own agnosticism as any I've come across in a work of literature. Granted, this comes in the context of a character—a naive army chaplain—who, rather than being an agnostic/atheist from the start, is a deeply religious man who experiences a crisis of faith as this particular war drags on. Still, the confusion Heller articulates, with near-unnerving directness, more or less aligns with the kind of confusion I feel whenever I get around to contemplating matters of religion and spirituality.

I'm still reading Catch-22, by the way (I'm almost finished with it), but so far I'm finding it about as brilliant as its reputation—a thorough savaging of the absurdities of life during wartime, by turns hilarious and infuriating. It's snarky and sometimes just plain insane, but at heart Heller's vision is deeply, bleakly humane—as passages like the one above attest.

Artistic Consumption Log, Dec. 19, 2011 - Dec. 25, 2011: Christmas Weekend Edition

2011-12-26T09:00:00.081-05:00

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Yesterday was Christmas.

Yeah, that's pretty much the only excuse I have for not annotating this week's artistic consumption log below. I was all set to sit down and take some time to annotate it yesterday, but my will failed me. Call it "the Christmas spirit" or just plain "laziness" if you will, but I felt more like hanging out with friends/folks yesterday rather than sitting down in front of my computer and coming up with substantive things to say about everything I consumed artistically this past week (which ended up being quite a lot, actually).

So this week's log is a barebones one. Next week's will most likely be barebones as well, but we'll see about that.

In the meantime...well, it's a day late (but hopefully not a dollar short), but here, for your viewing pleasure, is that immortal holiday chestnut "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" as sung by Judy Garland in one of the films I saw this past week, the classic 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis (yes, for the first time—and it is glorious indeed). That film, by the way, is the one that introduced that song to the world—which partially explains why the lyrics are a little different than what you might be used to hearing.

Plus, sprinkled in this week's log are some personal Christmas traditions: viewings of the first two Die Hard films as well as a Christmas-set episode of The X-Files! (I've already thought of a different choice for next year's Christmas movie entertainment, though: Wong Kar-Wai's 2046. Hey, it's got scenes set on Christmas Eve! It works!)

Happy holidays!

Films

★ The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey), seen at IFC Center in New York

★ The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin), seen at Film Forum in New York

★ Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli), seen on Turner Classic Movies in East Brunswick, N.J.

★ Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan), seen on Netflix Instant in Hillsborough, N.J. [fifth viewing]
★ Die Hard 2 (1990, Renny Harlin), seen on Blu-ray in East Brunswick, N.J. [fourth viewing]

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011, David Fincher), seen at AMC Bridgewater Commons in Bridgewater, N.J.

Television

★ The X-Files: "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" (Season 6, episode 6) (1998, Chris Carter), seen on DVD in East Brunswick, N.J. [fourth viewing]

Music

★ Game Theory (2006, The Roots)
★ Rising Down (2008, The Roots)
★ How I Got Over (2010, The Roots)
★ Undun (2011, The Roots)

The Embracers, seen at The Bitter End in New York

Are You There, Moviegoers? It's Me, Margaret.

2011-12-22T14:30:00.005-05:00

NEW YORK—

My latest film review published somewhere other than this blog was posted on Tuesday at In Review Online. Under consideration: Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan's film maudit that, even in something less than its creator's ideal form, is one of the best films of 2011. The film is so filled-to-bursting with ambition, beauty and humanity that I could hardly articulate everything I love and admire about this film in one single review...so at the very least, I hope this piece will serve as a starting point for discussion—especially now that it's getting a re-release at Cinema Village here in New York starting tomorrow! Go see it; it's amazing.

Artistic Consumption Log: Dec. 12, 2011 - Dec. 18, 2011: "I'm Late, I'm Late" Edition

2011-12-21T19:00:00.002-05:00

NEW YORK—I'm already super-late with this latest artistic consumption log, so let's get right to it, shall we?

Elevator Repair Service's Gatz at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.

Films

★ Moneyball (2011, Bennett Miller), seen at AMC Empire 25 in New York
Screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin locate the beating human heart in Michael Lewis's nonfiction book about Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane and the near-miraculous 2002 season his team had, and fashions a solid screenplay that receives sturdy direction from Bennett Miller and fine central performances by Brad Pitt as Beane and Jonah Hill as statistics-minded assistant GM Peter Brand (a character that is actually a fictionalized amalgamation of a few real-life characters).

For the most part, though, I enjoyed Moneyball out of personal nostalgia. Back in 2002, I followed professional baseball a lot more closely than I do now (that dissipation of interest is a hazard of following a team as perpetually disappointing as the New York Mets), and so I found myself smiling and nodding in recognition throughout this film, remembering a lot of details about the season this film depicts. If anything, Moneyball left me feeling the same way Beane felt towards the end as he was deciding whether to leave the A's and take a high-paying new position in Boston. "It's so easy to be a romantic about baseball," he says. The moment he said that, I started feeling a bit romantic about the sport myself, missing the days when I was a more intense baseball fan.

Rest assured, though, that Moneyball has more to it than nostalgia value. Once again, an all-American sport is made the backdrop of larger themes and dichotomies: haves vs. have-nots; the coldness of numbers vs. the warmth of human interaction; romantic idealism vs. harsh reality. (In those ways, it wouldn't be too far off to think of this film as a fitting follow-up to last year's Sorkin-scripted The Social Network, with baseball substituting for Facebook.) Thankfully, Miller mostly stays out of the way of the script and the actors, allowing the themes to come through sufficiently. It also has one standout scene: a real-time negotiation-by-phone in which Beane, with Brand in tow, tries to land a certain pitcher he desperately wants on his team. The highest compliment one could pay to Moneyball is that it manages to fashion a gripping human drama out of the potentially dry subject of baseball's behind-the-scenes business machinations.

★ Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011, Brad Bird), seen at AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 in New York
If anything, I found this an even more consistently enthralling an action picture than Steven Spielberg's still quite enjoyable The Adventures of Tintin—which means this fourth installment in the Mission: Impossible series at least comes within striking distance of securing a spot in my personal pantheon of great Bruised Forearm entertainments (I wrote about previous inclusions into that canon here, here and here). Perhaps Brad Bird showed more "heart" in his animated features (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille)...but the action sequences here are so deliriously conceived and superbly wrought that that I can't find myself be bothered by the two or three moments of attempted character drama that don't fully come off (though that's one or two more than Spielberg really tried for in Tintin). And yes, this is absolutely worth seeing in IMAX, which is how I saw it; in fact, it was the first time since I was a kid (read: younger than 10) I had seen anything in a legitimate IMAX format (no, my second go at The Dark Knight at one of AMC's fake IMAX theaters in New Jersey doesn't count).

★ Nashville (1975, Robert Altman), seen at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y. [second viewing]
I'm not sure if anyone has invoked Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) in talking about Altman's 1975 masterpiece, but, watching this film for a second time—my first time on a big screen—I couldn't help but think of Tati's film in Altman's less overtly formal and more "humane" approach: Nashville's de-emphasis on central characters; its generosity in depicting various points of view; its spirit of inclusiveness with even the most selfish and/or self-delusional of characters. It's a human mosaic, not a message movie or political screed (this is why a film like Paul Haggis's openly schematic Crash—with its thin, position-paper characterizations—dishonors the "network narrative" form Altman pioneered); Altman might have his own personal vision of America in mind, but that doesn't mean he doesn't try to air out different points of view to complicate that vision. And once one gets attuned to Altman's deliberate looseness with narrative, Nashville becomes, well, pleasurable. Many have tried to match it (even Altman himself, with later mosaics like A Wedding, Short Cuts and Gosford Park) , but even now, there has still never been a film quite like it.

Music

★ Phrenology (2002, The Roots)
★ The Tipping Point (2004, The Roots)
Phrenology pushes The Roots' hip-hop sound and lyrical substance even further than Things Fall Apart did; by contrast, the relatively more conventional The Tipping Point comes off as something of a creative breather for the group, though still an enjoyable one. That's pretty much all I have to say about these two albums (really, I try, but I'm no music critic, folks).

★ 塵緣 (1985, 蘇芮) [third listen]
Finally—a chance to offer up a few words about one of my favorite Mandarin pop albums! I've mentioned 蘇芮—who also went by the Western name "Julie Su"—before; Jia Zhang-ke fans surely know who she is (she sings the song on the radio Zhao Tao dances to by herself in his 2001 film Platform). This 1985 album—her greatest album of the '80s, in my opinion—doesn't feature that song, though. Instead, it features the title track, a glorious nine-minute epic about the overcoming of heartbreak that is quite possibly one of the greatest cuts you've never heard.

Don't believe me? Check it out here (and to my mind, you don't need to understand what she's singing to get the gist; the music and her impassioned voice, signify everything that needs to be, uh, signified):

The rest of the album is pretty great, too—some of the most adventurous pop music Julie Su ever recorded, by turns rocking, spacey, surreal, romantic, regretful, and ultimately heroic. (If I've piqued your interest in it at all, you can pick up a copy here at YesAsia.com.)

Theater

★ Gatz (2010, Elevator Repair Service), performed at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.
Yes, I traveled all the way down to Princeton, N.J., to see this highly acclaimed six-hour theatrical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby live—and I paid quite a lot for the privilege ($150, more or less). It was worth every penny.

If you've heard anything about Elevator Repair Service's Gatz, you'll perhaps know of it as "that word-for-word stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby." There's more to it than that, though. Here's the set-up: A lowly office worker runs into computer problems during a normal day at the office, opens up his Rolodex and, lo and behold, finds a copy of The Great Gatsby sitting in it. He opens up the book, starts reading...and then gradually, within that one office set, the novel starts to come to life around him, even as "Nick Carraway"—because, of course, Fitzgerald's story is told from Nick's point-of-view—keeps reading from the book, which he holds in his hand (most of the time, at least) as he reads aloud every single word. This guy doesn't just read The Great Gatsby; he gets lost in it, the way anyone would get lost in any engrossing novel or work of art.

But wait, you might be asking at this point: Doesn't that set-up suggest that Gatz essentially adds up to little more than a staged recitation of this American literary classic? No. Judging by The Select—the Elevator Repair Service's stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises that I saw earlier this year here in New York (I offered up some commentary on it here)—this company thrives on finding inventive ways to illustrate great literary texts on stage, and a lot of the playful frisson of Gatz comes from the way they experiment with lighting, staging and acting to not only bring The Great Gatsby to life within its deliberately limited means, but to turn the whole production into an indirect meditation on the sheer act of book-to-stage adaptation. Simplification and/or compression is often the name of the game when it comes adapting a work from one medium to another; here, though, director John Collins and company apparently decided to try the opposite approach, presenting the whole work in toto. And yet...for one thing, listen to the way Scott Shepherd, who plays Nick/the narrator, subtly conveys different modes of engagement with the material he's reading aloud. Sometimes he gets fully into it, most notably in early party scenes and during Daisy's first reacquaintance with Gatsby; other times he just reads perfunctorily, as if figuring the language would take care of itself. Shepherd, in other words, gives a real performance even as just a "reader"; his feat of acting, among other details, is enough to get one to reflect on one's own preconceived notions about what's "theatrical" or not. Surely it's telling, then, that when Shepherd finally puts away the book and recites its final chapter from memory, his performance, freed from the shackles of the text, suddenly achieves a sense of creative freedom that was not consistently apparent throughout the rest of the production.

Of course, Gatz still works quite grippingly as a straight-up stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby—as long as you don't go in expecting fresh revelations about this much-discussed work of 20th-century art. As an adaptation, it's more about imaginative illustration than profound illumination. Its provocations lie elsewhere. The Elevator Repair Service seems to have decided that—unlike Gatsby and his attempts to remake himself into the man of his and Daisy's dreams—the only truly honest way to "adapt" The Great Gatsby to the stage would be to allow the words to speak for themselves while still trying to make it play as a work of theater. Is this maybe the only way to truly do justice to a literary work in a different medium? In being retrograde in its approach to adaptation, Gatz is also, paradoxically, more daring.

All of that basically sums up my disorganized, incoherent, complicated thoughts on this monumental work, simultaneously an act of theatrical hubris and artistic humility. It's coming back for an encore theatrical run at the Public Theater in New York in the spring (details here); if you're willing to put in the time and money for it, I think it'll be worth your while—at least if you're game for having your conception of the possibilities of theater rocked to its core.

Artistic Consumption Log, Dec. 5, 2011 - Dec. 11, 2011: Birthday Celebration Edition

2011-12-12T18:30:00.002-05:00

NEW YORK—I'm really starting to think that San Francisco bit me with some kind of "chill out" bug when I was there at the end of October—a bug that has led me to drastically slow down my culture intake. Two films? Only two? I usually manage, like, four or five in a week. What is wrong with me?

Maybe I should blame OKCupid (of which, the less said about it, the better—but if you want to ask, feel free to ask me about it). That and my 26th-birthday celebration (which went extremely well, if you wanted to know).

Anyway...here's a summary of my week in artistic consumption.

Krapp's Last Tape (photo credit: Anthony Woods)

Films

★ A Dangerous Method (2011, David Cronenberg), seen at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in New York
There are, I admit, moments in this adaptation of Christopher Hampton's stage drama about the clash between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) in which David Cronenberg's surgical precision leads the film to plod a bit too much for my taste; I guess there's only so much even a brilliant visual artist like Cronenberg can do with such inherently talky material until it starts to feel, well, talky. Even at its saggiest, though, form follows function in A Dangerous Method: a wholly intellectual battle of wits gets an appropriately clinical treatment in Cronenberg's hands, the better for its stabs of underlying human anguish—Keira Knightley's virtuoso spasms of hysteria, Jung's attempts to repress his sexual urges—to puncture through the good surface manners with an unexpected emotional force. Its final image—which, now that I think about it, is remarkably similar to the final image of Cronenberg's last film, Eastern Promises, in terms of how much it implies about a character's persisting inner demons—is especially striking in that regard.

So yeah, I liked, if not necessarily loved, A Dangerous Method. If nothing else, I'm now much more interested in reading Jung and Freud than I was going into the film.

★ The Adventures of Tintin (2011, Steven Spielberg), seen at Regal E-Walk Stadium 13 in New York
I'm afraid of breaking any sort of review embargoes that Paramount might have imposed on this film, which, thanks to a roommate of mine, I was able to see at an early screening. (I guess I have the recent David Denby/The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo brouhaha in mind in my anxiety.) So I won't say too much about it now...except to say that if you're a fan of Spielberg's classic action-adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark, you will likely enjoy this, too.

Music

★ The Roots Present: an undun performance..., seen at Highline Ballroom in New York
Illadelph Halflife (1996, The Roots)
★ Things Fall Apart (1999, The Roots)
I recently decided to dive into the music of The Roots because of a concert of theirs I agreed to go see with two of my roommates on Tuesday night. Alas, I wasn't able to listen to all of their albums before going to the concert—which was, in part, meant to promote their latest album, Undun—so I watched Black Thought, ?uestlove & co. more as a detached spectator than as a passionate longtime fan. I still enjoyed the experience, though; having only heard their first two albums, Organix and Do You Want More?!!!??! by that point, I found it interesting that their early stabs at infusing jazz elements into their hip-hop had, by all appearances, flowered into something grander, as evidenced by the group's inclusion of full-blown brass instruments (tuba, trumpets, saxophone).

Later in the week, I got around to listening to their next two albums after Do You Want More?!!!??! I didn't notice quite as much of the smooth-jazz sound in these two albums; if anything, Illadelph Halflife and Things Fall Apart seem to mark a move away from that to something approaching straight hip-hop. Perhaps I have some more experimentation to expect from The Roots as I go further into their recorded output to date. In the meantime, allow me to express my full admiration for the band's consistently intelligent and inventive rhymes, always showing an awareness of the outside world even when they rap about themselves (no Kanye West-like self-involvement here).

Theater

★ Krapp's Last Tape (1958, Samuel Beckett), performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Samuel Beckett did indeed write plays other than Waiting for Godot, and on Friday night, I saw one of them: a 55-minute one-man play in which a sick, elderly man plays an old audio recording of himself made years ago, tries to record a new one, eats some bananas, drinks a lot, and just generally feels disappointment at what he considers a wasted life. This production, directed by Michael Colgan and starring John Hurt, is equally spare in execution: The set is basically just a table on a stage, no other sets in sight, with light literally boxing Krapp in (and this boxing-in is turned into a visual joke at one point when Hurt plays peekaboo with the darkness outside of that box of light). Krapp is imprisoned not only by light, but by his own memories of missed and failed opportunities. Depressing? Sure. But, as with the best "depressing" art, the sense of invention on display as well as its range of emotion—from bleak humor to deep despair—is genuinely enlivening. Did I mention it's only 55 minutes long? And yet, one feels, within those 55 minutes, as if one has experienced a précis of a whole lifetime of experience.

Krapp's Last Tape is running until Dec. 18 at BAM's Harvey Theatre. It's well worth your time. If you aren't able to see it, though...well...look what I found on YouTube!

Apparently, way back in 2000, Atom Egoyan, as part of a British TV series entitled Beckett on Film, shot a film version of Krapp's Last Tape with...John Hurt as Krapp! Someone was nice enough to upload the whole hour-long work to YouTube. For those who aren't able to see Hurt act live onstage, I guess this offers you all a second-best option.

Artistic Consumption Log, Nov. 28, 2011 - Dec. 4, 2011: 26th Birthday Edition

2011-12-06T14:30:00.004-05:00

NEW YORK—Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011, was my 26th birthday.

Yeah, that flatly declarative statement gives you an idea of how eventful my 26th birthday actually was. But that's okay; I'm putting off my official celebrating until Friday night, with a party in the works at a place in the East Village! Details, for those of you readers of this here blog who aren't on Facebook, are forthcoming (at least, if I feel like broadcasting them far and wide)...

Until then...there's this log—which, to be perfectly frank, I felt too lazy to annotate on Sunday on account of it being my birthday and all. So, for another week, at least, I'll leave this as a barebones thing.

By the way, for those who hadn't figured this out yet: For the still photos that usually precede these logs, I usually try to pick one from the work of art that impressed me most throughout the week. This past week, though, I found myself experiencing the most sheer awe at a program at the Park Avenue Armory of modern dance works conceived by Chinese choreographer Shen Wei and performed by his Shen Wei Dance Arts company. In this case, only a video, I felt, could hope to give you a sense of what I witnessed. Here below, then, are clips from Folding, a Buddhist-inflected work full of hypnotically slow movements, spare yet dizzying costume designs and a gradually enveloping sense of stillness. These selections don't come close to conveying a sense of the whole, but for now, at least, it's close enough:

Films

★ Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987, Eric Rohmer), seen at Film Forum in New York

★ Carnage (2011, Roman Polanski), seen at Sony Pictures Screening Room in New York

★ Hugo (2011, Martin Scorsese), seen at Clearview Chelsea Cinemas in New York

Possession (1981, Andrzej Zulawski), seen at Film Forum in New York

Music

★ Organix (1993, The Roots)
Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995, The Roots)

★ 出塞曲 (1979, 蔡琴) [second listen]

Dance

★ Shen Wei Dance Arts, seen at Park Avenue Armory in New York

Artistic Consumption Log, Nov. 21, 2011 - Nov. 27, 2011: Thanksgiving/Wedding Edition

2011-11-29T09:00:00.023-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This past week was dominated not just by Thanksgiving and heavy eating, but also by the wedding of two dear friends of mine back in New Jersey (one of whom I've known since high school, and possibly earlier).

The ceremony was held on Saturday down in Long Beach Island, a scenic beach town that I raved about once before on this blog here. The weather couldn't have been better for this special occasion; the venue was surrounded by lake-side dusk views such as this...

...and this:

The wedding was on Saturday afternoon, but, because I was asked to be an usher at the ceremony, I and a bunch of friends went down to the area on Friday—so I got a chance to sit it on a brief rehearsal as a result of being there a day early. I hadn't been to many weddings before this one—the last one I was at was maybe two years ago, and I wasn't involved in the actual ceremony—so I think this was the first time I realized just how much planning goes into an event. The couple had hired a wedding planner to help organize the whole thing, and as I witnessed the rehearsal, I realized that wedding planners are, in essence, a ceremony's equivalent to an orchestra conductor and, to an arguably lesser extent, film/theater directors: vessels in which to help realize a personal vision. Because what are weddings like these other than grand staged productions for the benefit of friends and family, with many different avenues for creativity within a certain traditional structure?

By that logic, then, the wedding ought to be included in the artistic consumption log...and so that's what I've done, as you will see all the way at the end of this post. It really was a wonderful ceremony, a heartening celebration of the official union of a cute couple that deserve all the happiness in the world. It certainly brought out the sentimental romantic in me—and I tend to treasure experiences that have that kind of effect on me, artistic or not.

Plus, the ceremony offered many photogenic opportunities such as this shot of the chapel, which I consider a tribute of sorts to John Alcott, the cinematographer who famously shot Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon with the kind of candlelit natural light you see here:

All I was missing was a Carl Zeiss lens!

***

Before I get to my log proper—which, because of a lack of time during a whirlwind weekend, I present without annotations—I will, for the sake of completeness, mention a few titles I watched but left off the log, for various reasons:

The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges). When I came back to home to East Brunswick, N.J., on Thursday night (yes, I worked on Thanksgiving, as I've done for the past four years now at The Wall Street Journal), I tuned into Turner Classic Movies and discovered, to my delight, that they were screening this screwball classic. Later on, though, I became distracted by certain wedding obligations that popped up, so my attention wasn't as riveted to the film during its last half-hour as it was during its first hour. So I'm not counting it. (Hey, it's my log; I have my own rules here!) This, by the way, was my second time seeing it—but this scene I've seen, oh, about five more times since the first time.
Hall Pass (2011, Peter & Bobby Farrelly). This was one of three pay-per-view films I watched on Friday night with my friends in the hotel room we all shared. Again, my attention wavered throughout, so I'm not including it in the log; plus, I'm pretty sure we were watching it in the wrong aspect ratio, anyway (stretched-out 1.33:1). For what it's worth, based on what I saw, I found this actually pretty passable, sometimes inspired and occasionally painfully truthful about relationships and male behavior—in other words, not quite as bad as its initial reviews made it out to be. I'll have to revisit to confirm, though.
Debbie Does Dallas (1978, Jim Clark) and Debbie Does Dallas...Again (2007, Paul Thomas). These are the other two films I saw on Friday night—yes, pornography. (Too much information?) But hey, one of them is considered a classic of the genre, after all—one I had never seen. So naturally, I was curious about it simply on the basis of its reputation. Once again, I'm pretty sure we watched both of these in the wrong aspect ratio, and I spent as much time joking about what were watching as I spent watching it, so I'm relegating them to this preface rather than listing them in the log proper. Not that making an effort to actually watch either of these would make them any better. If anything, the "sequel"-in-name-only Debbie Does Dallas...Again has more extravagantly outrageous (read: hotter) sex scenes than anything in the cheesy and slightly monotonous 1978 original. (The only thing that elevates Debbie Does Dallas compared to Debbie Does Dallas...Again, really, is that all of the breasts in it are, as far as I know, real. That's a big deal, in my book.) I say that as no expert in adult entertainment, however...

***

A Confucian Confusion (1994)

All right...here's what I officially took in artistically this past week (the best of the bunch being Edward Yang's rich, underseen modern tapestry A Confucian Confusion):

Films

★ Pariah (2011, Dee Rees), seen at Universal Studios Screening Room in New York

★ A Confucian Confusion (1994, Edward Yang), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York
★ Mahjong (1996, Edward Yang), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York

Music

Biophilia (2011, Björk)

★ Caterwaul of Sound Does The Cramps' Bad Music for Bad People, seen at Arlene's Grocery in New York

Other

★ Traci and Adam's Big Day, seen at Bonnet Island Estate in Long Beach, N.J.

Artistic Consumption Log, Nov. 14, 2011 - Nov. 20, 2011

2011-11-22T08:00:00.002-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Late again, I know...but at least I'm producing content, right?

The Crowd (1928)

Films

★ The Crowd (1928, King Vidor), seen at Film Forum in New York [third viewing]
With this third viewing of The Crowd—and my first time seeing it in a (brand new) 35mm print with live piano accompaniment—I finally confirmed that King Vidor's masterwork does indeed have a place in my personal cinematic pantheon (I previously pooled some brief thoughts on it at my blog here). The only revelation I experienced this third time around, really, is a more acute realization of just how bitterly ironic this film actually is about its main character John's self-delusions and the American dream in general. The Crowd is a genuinely wounding film in that regard...which is not to say that it doesn't exude a deep empathy for these characters. The brilliance of its final shot—the camera dollying away from John, Mary and their son laughing in a theater to reveal their insignificance within the larger crowd of doubled-over spectators—is that it's a happy ending with a deeply pessimistic undertone. John hasn't become the great man his parents raised him to think he would become—but at least he now understands his place in society and can go on living with a sense of hope going forward. It's better than nothing, one could rationalize. Where is this film on DVD, seriously??? It's one of the great American films!

★ Sons of Shiva (1985, Robert Gardner), seen at Film Forum in New York
★ Forest of Bliss (1986, Robert Gardner), seen at Film Forum in New York
Sons of Shiva is a reasonably engrossing half-hour look at a four-day ceremony held in India celebrating the titular Hindu god, but it's utterly conventional compared to the evocative and haunting Forest of Bliss, in which Gardner drops voiceover narration altogether and takes a more mosaic-like approach to depicting life in Benares, India, a harbor town that seems to exude death at just about every corner. There's not much else to say except: watch it and bask in it.

★ House of Pleasures (2011, Bertrand Bonello), seen at IFC Center in New York
This hasn't been released yet; I saw this at a press screening on Friday. But when it begins a theatrical run here in New York at IFC Center this Friday, I urge you all to check this out. This is one of the most gorgeous-looking films released this year (Josée Deshaies's cinematography has a silken, velvet-y beauty to it with its brown-ish interiors), but its surface beauty belies a fascinating and evocative look at not only the titular brothel that is close to the end of its existence at the turn of the 20th century, but at the sometimes porous intersections between memory and history.

★ Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, Tomas Alfredson), seen at Park Avenue Screening Room in New York
This hasn't been released yet, either, and thanks to an embargo imposed by Focus Features, I can't say too much about it until its official theatrical release on Dec. 9. For now, I'll just say that it's pretty good—superbly acted and astonishingly well-directed, if hardly the most electrifying of its genre around.

★ Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1989/2011, Guy Maddin), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York
This, Guy Maddin's first feature—and my first Guy Maddin feature—was screened in a revised version and a brand new live score commissioned by Performa 11, a performing-arts biennial that has been running here in New York since Nov. 1. After sitting through its 65 bizarre minutes, I'm certainly interested in seeing how this differs from the version that is currently available on Kino Video DVD. The film itself is enjoyably unhinged, even if resonance remains rather thin at the end. Basically, it's a nonstop parade of increasingly wild dream imagery, a film that often recalls the straight-from-the-id quality that characterizes David Lynch at his feverish best. Maddin's main distinguishing feature is a certain affection for old-movie tropes: flickering black-and-white cinematography with moments of color tinting, a post-synch soundtrack that is nevertheless mostly dominated by live-orchestra accompaniment, etc. But Tales from the Gimli Hospital isn't a wallow in silent-era nostalgia like Michel Hazanavicius's recent The Artist; Maddin's sensibility somehow manages to feel distinctly personal and modern even with the silent-film hallmarks. I look forward to catching up with the rest of his oeuvre eventually.

Music

★ Volta (2007, Björk)
Here, Björk expands her musical gaze internationally, with cuts that feature African drums, a Chinese pipa and various other worldly instruments in addition to a prominent horn section. Internationalism even seems to be one of its major themes, made especially explicit with its second track, "Wanderlust." Even when her experiments don't always come off—"The Dull Flame of Desire," for instance, drones relentlessly on for seven frankly dull minutes (form following function?)—I continue to find Björk's restlessness refreshing; the hit-or-miss Volta is no exception, even if it is no Vespertine.

Theater

The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer (2009, Michael Sturminger), seen at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.
This past weekend, John Malkovich came to town and performed on the stage of BAM's Howard Gilman Opera House in this theatrical work as Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer who became a cause célèbre among many intellectuals and politicians who campaigned for his early release during his first prison term when it seemed like he was a successful example of a rehabilitated prisoner. Not so, as it turned out when he moved to Los Angeles, became a journalist and killed some more women (he was later caught again, and soon afterward committed suicide in prison).

How were so many people duped into believing his rehabilitated act? Was he really that magnetic a personality? Michael Sturminger's theater piece—a strange mix of stage play and opera—refuses to say. The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer, it turns out, is less interested in Unterweger himself than in using his story as a springboard for a kind of Brechtian meditation on celebrity, with Unterweger resurrected for an apocryphal book signing in which he divulges some details about his personal life and corrects some misconceptions, but otherwise mostly seems to just dick around while he has a great big joke at our expense onstage ("ha ha, you folks don't really know me after all!"). While Unterweger fools around with us in the audience, two female opera singers frequently interject with Baroque and Classical opera arias (by Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven and the like) that contradict his self-proclaimed "expertise with women"; through these opera selections, these women could be said to collectively express, through old melodramatic forms, the pain of his victims.

All of this sounds conceptually intriguing on paper...but the experience of watching this stretched-thin joke becomes dull and wearying, with no illumination to greet us at the end of its seemingly endless one hour and 45 minutes. The opera scenes go on and on, and there's only so much self-reflexive ribbing I could take before I was tempted to yell at these people to put the damn fourth wall back on. And sad to say, Malkovich only makes things worse. Where's the magnetism that supposedly lured both his victims and an unsuspecting public to side with him? This is just Malkovich being his usual oddball self, sporting a pretty terrible-sounding Austrian accent this time around. (Maybe his casting is basically the performance?) Did Sturminger intend for Unterweger to be so unappetizing from the start that there would be no other conclusion to draw from his life other than that the public at large—and perhaps, by extension, we in the audience—were all dunces for being taken in by this con man? Such bloodlessly intellectualized smugness might be easier to accept as revelatory if the deck didn't feel so stacked from the start.

The Infernal Comedy might be a failure, but I will grant that it at least is an interesting, ambitious failure. But if you're looking for a fourth-wall-breaking take on shallow celebrity...well, might I suggest Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson, which is, at the very least, far more enjoyable to watch?

One More San Francisco Vacation Video...With a Vertigo Twist

2011-11-17T09:00:00.049-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

In this blog entry that I posted while I was in San Francisco, I mentioned that I had visited the Mission Dolores, a historic religious settlement that was not only the city's oldest surviving structure, but was also one of many sites in the city featured in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Well, I couldn't resist shooting some video while I was wandering around the Mission Dolores graveyard...and then later overlaying a bit of the Vertigo soundtrack onto it: the strangely ethereal music Bernard Herrmann wrote for the moment Scottie spies on the woman he knows as Madeleine Elster visiting the Mission Dolores graveyard and laying a flower on the grave of a Carlotta Valdés. You can hear those gorgeous strings steal into the video about a minute and 25 seconds into it.

Oh...and I realize I never did get around to posting more pictures from my San Francisco trip after my third full day there...so those of you who don't follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook haven't seen photos of my bike trek across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, or of my visit to the famous Castro Theatre (well, other than the photo I included of its exterior in this artistic consumption log), or even of my day at the races in Berkeley! Perhaps I'll get around to posting some of those eventually here at this blog...once I find the time for it.

Just know that I had a grand time there, and would love to go back one day to explore some more!

Artistic Consumption Log, Nov. 7, 2011 - Nov. 13, 2011

2011-11-15T18:45:00.001-05:00

NEW YORK—Forgive my lateness with this, readers.

That's all I'll give you all by way of introduction. Onwards and upwards!

Last Life in the Universe (2003)

Films

DOC NYC 2011, all films seen at IFC Center in New York:

★ Minka (2011, Davina Pardo)
★ The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (2011, Lucy Walker)
★ The Interrupters (2011, Steve James)
I wrote about the first two short films for The House Next Door; here's the link. As for The Interrupters...well, believe the hype: This is as inspiring as true-life stories get, without sugarcoating. Steve James—inspired by an article written by Alex Kotlowitz (who gets a co-directing credit) that was published in The New York Times Magazine—stays enough out of the way of the four main "interrupters" he documents to allow us to draw our own conclusions as to how much they are succeeding in their attempts to prevent violence in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood; still, it's hard to deny the heroic nature of their efforts, and this film is a worthy tribute to them.

★ Dead Birds (1965, Robert Gardner), seen at Film Forum in New York
I had never heard of Robert Gardner before hearing about Film Forum's ongoing week-long retrospective of his work, but since I had been on something of a documentary kick before then, I decided to take a chance on this one film of his, at least.

Based on what I've read about him in addition to this one feature documentary of his, Gardner is a documentary filmmaker with a strong ethnographic bent; to wit, Dead Birds is an engrossing, unsparing look at a tribe in New Guinea that seems to exist out of time: a Stone Age group of people with their own customs and traditions, especially regarding war. By itself, that sounds like a reasonably interesting subject for a documentary feature; Dead Birds, however, is enhanced by a voiceover narration that occasionally verges on the poetic (or at least, poetic enough to get me to wonder whether Gardner actually spoke to these tribespeople—there are no talking-heads interview scenes in this—or whether all of his psychologizing is merely speculative). I wouldn't necessarily call this a "humanist" film in the usual sense; it's too anthropological in its approach. But, whether Gardner intended this or not, one could see Dead Birds as a disturbing reminder of how far humanity has come as a species, and perhaps even how much of the Stone Age we may still have in all of us, deep down. (I mean, we still engage in warfare after all, do we not?)

On a tangentially related note, Dead Birds seems like the kind of documentary that Ruggero Deodato tried to evoke in Cannibal Holocaust. Also, like Cannibal Holocaust, it shows graphic, un-simulated animal slaughter onscreen. No turtles get killed and mutilated, but pigs do get slaughtered, gutted and cooked. Warning: Animals were definitely harmed during the making of this film.

★ J. Edgar (2011, Clint Eastwood), seen at Regal Union Square Stadium 14 in New York
This film isn't as bad as some of its advance press might have led you to believe. Yes, some of the acting is uneven (some of the real-life supporting characters—like Jeffrey Donovan's Robert Kennedy and Dermot Mulroney's Richard Nixon—are played like risible caricatures for no reason I could determine), and some of the aging make-up effects are dreadful (the old Clyde Tolson especially looks ghoulishly wooden Indian-like in his make-up). But Eastwood is working with a worthy screenplay from Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black that is as multifaceted in its far-from-reverent take on Hoover as it is structurally ambitious in the way it weaves its way between past and present, truths and half-truths. Leonardo DiCaprio at first seems like he's giving a bad performance, especially with that blatantly fake-sounding accent...but then, look at the way he plays off so effortlessly against Armie Hammer's Clyde Tolson, and one starts to wonder if DiCaprio isn't being bad elsewhere on purpose—mirroring a character who lived much of his life giving a performance for the public eye in the service of the federal organization he created and continued to hold dear until his last days. I'm not sure this film will necessary bring Eastwood skeptics back into his good graces (all of his trademarks as a director are here, for better and for worse, especially his damned penchant for washed-out colors, courtesy of cinematographer Tom Stern), but it's an interesting film in unexpected ways.

★ Last Life in the Universe (2003, Pen-ek Ratanaruang), seen at Museum of Modern Art in New York [third viewing]
Apparently the Region 1 DVD of this film I've been watching all these years has featured a sped-up PAL transfer and I didn't know it!

PAL, for those of you who aren't, like, home-video nerds, refers to one of three different analogue television systems that exist in the world, the others being NTSC and SECAM. One of the major differences between all three systems has to do with video frame rates; PAL televisions operate at 25 frames per second, while NTSC TVs play 30 frames/second video. (Most U.S. televisions are NTSC, for instance; most European televisions are PAL.) Since most films are shot at 24 frames per second, for their eventual home-video releases they have to be converted to run at the appropriate frame rate—and for the DVD format, at least, there is no way to make video transfers compatible for both NTSC and PAL formats at the same time. In the case of transfers for the PAL system, though—well, unlike with NTSC, where there is a way to transfer a 24-frames-per-second film to 30 without having to speed up the film's frame rate, there is apparently no way to transfers a 24fps film to 25 without speeding up the whole film, not only making the film play with a shorter running time, but also speeding up the soundtrack so that its pitch throughout is a semitone sharp. Most people, I suspect, won't notice that sharp pitch...but I have perfect pitch, so I do notice such things, and it can potentially distract me from the film itself if I'm aware that I'm not watching it at its correct pitch.

Or, at least, I though I had perfect pitch...but maybe not? I usually pride myself at being able to pick up, just by looking at a DVD image or listening to a soundtrack, whether it has undergone that "PAL speed-up." So consider me surprised when I sat down to watch Last Life in the Universe at Museum of Modern Art and began to realize that everything sounded slightly flat pitch-wise compared with what I was used to watching on the Palm Pictures DVD I own. This realization only made me treasure the experience of seeing Pen-ek Ratanaruang's film in a theater even more—because I was finally seeing it pure, without any digital-transfer tinkering.

I don't expect most of you to care about anything I just said; I'm just explaining to you all why I enjoyed seeing Last Life in the Universe for the first time theatrically as much as I did. It doesn't hurt that I love this film—a gloriously dreamy meditation on embracing the messiness of life—so much that, on most days, yes, I probably would consider it among my top five favorites of all time. (I elaborate briefly on why I adore this film so much in this old, old House Next Door post.)

Music

★ Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10 (1982, Herbert von Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic) [second listen]
Two Saturdays ago, while wandering aimlessly in Greenwich Village, I encountered a street fair that included a lot of vendors selling different goods. A handful of them were record vendors selling LPs, CDs and DVDs. At one of them, I encountered a copy of the original CD release of this 1982 recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony featuring the Berlin Philharmonic led by the legendary Austrian maestro Herbert von Karajan. It was only $5, so I decided to buy it.

I hadn't heard this performance in years, and barely remembered it save for the orchestra's awesome virtuosity in dispatching its demonic second movement, a whirlwind scherzo that, according to the composer in his memoir Testimony, was meant to be a portrait of Stalin. So it was good to reacquaint myself with this recording, which turns out to have other pleasures and insights to offer in this, his first symphony after he was denounced for a second time by the Soviet government in 1948.

Shostakovich (1906-75) spent much of his career struggling to find a balance between expressing his private pains and publicly toeing the party line, so to speak; this led him to compose just as many works of empty Communist rhetoric (hear, for instance, his notoriously bombastic Twelfth Symphony, as close to musical Soviet poster art as any composer ever got) as he did deeply, sometimes mystifyingly personal works of musical and emotional substance. His Tenth Symphony is considered one of the latter, however, and in this 1982 recording it found a surprisingly sympathetic interpreter in Karajan, who captures the full measure of its tragic pathos and wounding ironies. The third and fourth movements of the Tenth features a four-note motif that Shostakovich considered his own "musical signature"; the aural spectacle of hearing that four-note signature triumphantly, demonically tap-dancing on Stalin's grave at the exhilarating end of this symphony is worth waiting for.

★ Vespertine (2001, Björk)
★ Medúlla (2004, Björk)
With its gorgeous toy-chest sonorities and fairy-tale lyricism, Vespertine is probably my favorite Björk album so far. Medúlla is a far more earth-bound achievement compared to it; an experiment in a cappella music-making with a certain measure of electronic manipulation, it's less immediately appealing but still fresh and interesting.

Theater

★ Satyagraha (1980, Philip Glass/Constance de Jong), seen at Metropolitan Opera House in New York
Yes, I paid a fortune to see this, a revival of a celebrated Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass's 1980 opera from a couple of years ago...but it was totally worth it.

Glass's famously minimalist musical style is by now perhaps too familiar: rippling patterns repeated almost endlessly with minor variations that, in the right frame of mind, could induce a genuinely hypnotic state in a listener. You might not think that such a style might work all that well in an operatic work like this one...but Satyagraha is no ordinary opera. It isn't so much a drama as it is an abstract meditation on political and philosophical themes, taking Mohandas Gandhi's development of his philosophy of nonviolence as its starting point. The brilliance of Glass's Satyagraha score is that it has just enough variety and lyricism in its patterns and repetitions to be stimulating on a "conventional" musical level, but is also nondescript enough to allow both a listener enough room to intellectual contemplation, and a stage director enough creative wiggle room to illustrate the content with all the imagination he/she can muster. So it proved in this production, where the music was sometimes secondary to director Phelim McDermott's thrillingly imaginative stage effects—newspapers that formed into objects/characters, rear projected text translations (Constance de Jong's libretto is in Sanskrit, based on the Bhagavad Gita), and so on. Satyagraha, in other words, is a complete theatrical experience, the kind of Gesamtkunstwerk Richard Wagner held as an ideal for his operas—and frankly, after seeing it, I wonder whether a standalone audio recording would be half as effective without the visual component to go along with it.

The only possible "flaw" in Satyagraha is a third act—depicting the 1913 New Castle March, in which Gandhi, along with his Satyagraha army, encouraged striking miners to march all of 36 miles to the Transvaal border to protest racially discriminatory laws in India—that rather drags. But even then, there's a purpose to the slower pace: I, for one, gradually began to feel something not only the full extent of the long journey traversed, but also the full weight of their struggle. And the sense of heroic catharsis that greets you as it reaches its concluding "Evening Song" makes it all worth the time it takes to get there.

Literature

★ Boroughs of the Dead (2011, Andrea Janes)
A friend of mine wrote this self-published collection of 10 short horror stories set in an around New York City in both past and present times, so I can't say I read this as a completely unbiased party. So all I'll say here is that, while not all the stories are equally great, generally I enjoyed this breezy and varied collection, and that its final story closes out the slim volume on a deliciously perverse note.

Video for the Day: A Lovely Saturday Afternoon in New York's Columbus Park

2011-11-11T12:30:00.001-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This past Saturday, I was wandering around in Chinatown (the Manhattan one) with a friend, and we both wandered into Columbus Park. I had never been to this park before; in fact, I don't I had ever even heard of Columbus Park before that day.

But, what with the elderly Asian men playing chess, others doing tai chi, still others singing and playing instruments, and most of them speaking Chinese of some sort...well, the hardcore Asian in me was satisfied—so satisfied that, of course, I took out my iPhone and took some video.

Finally, last night, I edited that video into this form and posted it on YouTube, naturally:

Side note: With all the videos I've been shooting and posting recently, I'm starting to wonder whether I should consider documentary filmmaking in the future, or something along those lines...

DOC NYC 2011: Two Short Films About Japan

2011-11-09T14:30:00.011-05:00

NEW YORK—The Kenji Fujishima review-writing train merrily rolls along (for now, at least).

Yoshihiro Takishita, from Minka

On Monday night, as part of the ongoing DOC NYC festival, I decided to check out a program of two short documentaries set in Japan, both made by non-Japanese filmmakers. One of them, Minka, is about the intersection of history and architecture; the other, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, is about cultural symbols and the ways in which many Japanese are projecting feelings of both resignation and hope in the cherry blossom now more than ever in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March. Both are good, but both also show the benefits and limits of perceiving a culture from an outsider's perspective. All of this I elucidate in my latest House Next Door review.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, by the way, is on the shortlist for a Best Documentary Short Subject Oscar nomination...so you may be hearing more about Lucy Walker's film in the near future (a future, it appears, that will not include Brett Ratner as Oscar producer and Eddie Murphy as Oscar host, for those who care about such things).

Congratulations to all the New York City Marathon Runners!

2011-11-07T18:00:00.003-05:00

NEW YORK—I shot more video and posted it for all to see on YouTube!

Yesterday's New York City Marathon was the first I got to see up close and personal...so naturally, I decided to commemorate this personal landmark by capturing some of it on video.

It was actually rather inspiring to be part of the crowd, cheering on these millions of runners. Hell, it was so infectious that I even got into the running spirit, however briefly (I ran a few blocks from the Atlantic Avenue MTA station in Brooklyn down 4th Avenue to around Satter Street in Brooklyn in order to try to meet up with a couple of friends and spot another friend of mine actually running the marathon; then I ran back up to the Atlantic Avenue station in order to try to rush to work).

Amidst the cheering, I briefly flirted with the idea of maybe running this marathon one of these years. We'll see if that ever becomes a reality...

In any case, congratulations to all the intrepid people who ran, and successfully finished, the marathon yesterday. You all are more awesome than I will probably ever be!

Artistic Consumption Log, Oct. 31, 2011 - Nov. 6, 2011: Shifting Priorities(?) Edition

2011-11-07T08:15:00.003-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—An anecdote, to start this log.

At around 5 p.m. on Saturday, I was sitting on a bench across from Lincoln Center, waiting around for a 6:15 p.m. screening of Robert Altman's California Split, a film I had never seen before. Suddenly, I received a text message from a friend of mine who had recently passed the New York bar exam and had planned on celebrating that evening; she informed me in her text that she and her friends had decided, as part of the celebration, to skate at the ice rink in Bryant Park. After maybe a minute of deliberation, I decided to do something I rarely do when it comes to films: I decided to forgo the movie and go join them. (Sorry, Bob.) My decision was influenced in part by the fact that one of my roommates has a copy of the out-of-print DVD of the film—albeit a DVD that is apparently missing about three minutes of footage that had to be cut as a result of music-rights issues. Apparently, the possibility of seeing a print of the film that would be considerably closer than its home-video counterpart to Altman's original vision wasn't quite enough to stave off the lure of socializing.

I recount this little anecdote to suggest the way I've been feeling about my usually rabid moviegoing habits since coming back from San Francisco: I haven't felt quite the same drive to see a film theatrically here in New York virtually every day, the way I was doing throughout, say, this past summer. Have I started to burn out on moviegoing in general? I don't think so, but...let me put it this way: I ended up seeing only one film, theatrically or otherwise, all weekend, and for once I was totally okay with that.

Where are my priorities, man???

Anyway...a side note: A friend of mine recently curated this pop-up art exhibit that went up at a space in the Meatpacking District last week; I omitted it from the log below only because, while I did get to see most of the show, I arrived at the tail end of its closing reception and ended up having my experience cruelly cut short when someone began shutting down the exhibit while I was being mesmerized by a video of one of the artists—a female, mind you—standing around in the nude and more or less melting an entire ice sculpture on her back (it was supposed to be a representation of the anxiety she felt when, a few years ago, she almost killed someone). So I feel like I didn't get as complete an experience as I would have liked. From what I saw, though, it was a pretty interesting exhibit all in all (that video, by an artist named Danielle Riechers, was probably my favorite part of it).

Onto the log!

The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

Films

★ Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979, Jeff Margolis), seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York
Before seeing this (in a pink-ish but watchable 35mm print on Thursday night), I had only seen this legendary comedian in a handful of his film roles; I had never seen his stand-up. After seeing this famous filmed performance...well, I can certainly see why he was considered one of the, if not the, best, in the business. This is stand-up comedy as performance art—and I use the word "art" in the highest sense: the kind of art that has the power to illuminate aspects of the human condition. Seriously. In Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Pryor riffs on everything from parenting to boxing with Muhammad Ali to sex, and he often does so by inhabiting various objects, animals, and even at one point a heart attack; if his ability to go physically and emotionally naked in this way isn't a sign of true artistry, I don't know what is. Most importantly, though, all of his material seems to come from a deeply, and sometimes darkly, personal place. Pryor's delivery is what makes his observations funny, but some of the observations themselves have the power to stick in your throat even as you're laughing maniacally. And make no mistake: Richard Pryor: Live in Concert is truly hilarious stuff all around.

★ The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York
Here's another comedy that is filled to the gills with the kind of hilarity that carries an undertone of discomfiting seriousness to it. The perpetually underrated Elaine May's subject here is, to put it simply, the male ego, finding its embodiment in Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a handsome, callow guy who rushes into a marriage with Lila (Jeannie Berlin, May's daughter, who I also saw just a few weeks ago giving a great performance in Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret) only to find himself dissatisfied with her as a partner; he then meets blonde dream-girl Kelly (Cybill Shepherd) and immediately decides she, rather than Lila, is the one. Through all his machinations to try to win both Kelly and her protective father (Eddie Albert) over, as well as his attempts to break off his marriage with Lila, May observes with a detached but not wholly unsympathetic eye, twisting Lenny's vacuous "determination" for a wealth of cutting character comedy, all the way to a final shot that arguably says more about the limits of American ambition in one facial expression than Paul Thomas Anderson did with that hysterical 10-minute bowling-alley epilogue in There Will Be Blood.

Music

★ Ravel: Orchestral Works (1975, Orchestre de Paris/Jean Martinon)
I've been on something of a Maurice Ravel kick recently...and no, it has nothing to do with Boléro, that perennially popular bonbon which was featured in two films I saw recently (Blake Edwards's 10 and Sion Sono's Love Exposure). Actually, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin—a short solo-piano suite that may or may not have anything to do with French Baroque composer François Couperin, and of which four of its six movements were later orchestrated—suddenly popped into my head one day and marinated there until I was finally driven to download this two-disc collection of Ravel performances from a conductor known mostly for his performances of French classical music. Overall, it's a fine set. The orchestral playing isn't always top-flight (the brass sometimes sounds more recessed than usual, though maybe that's more the result of the recording venue than the playing), but it's always spirited and characterful; and Martinon's interpretations are generally marked by a vivid sense of play and imagination (especially necessary qualities for something like Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye).

Ravel—a 20th-century musical impressionist along with his compatriot Claude Debussy—wrote a lot of gorgeous music. If all you know of his work is the aforementioned Boléro, then you all are missing out on some seriously beautiful stuff.

★ Bossanova (1990, Pixies) [third listen]
★ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998, Lucinda Williams) [second listen]
I visited San Francisco's Amoeba Music record store while I was out in the Bay Area visiting about two weeks ago (has it really been that long?) and decided to pick up these two albums on CD; hey, they were cheap, and I didn't care that they were used copies. Because I had the CDs on hand, I listened through both of them, in succession, on Monday night while unpacking my suitcase. I played them more as background music than anything else, though, so my listing them on this log is more for the sake of completeness than out of anything new I can say about them: Bossanova is still my favorite Pixies album (though this time around, I found it a bit less consistent than I remembered it to be), and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is still Williams's finest collection of songs.

★ Post (1995, Björk)
★ Homogenic (1997, Björk)
As I expected, Björk gets a bit bolder with her experimentation in her second solo album Post; it's the kind of album that isn't afraid to juxtapose techno beats and trip-hop atmospherics with, say, a big-band jazz number ("It's Oh So Quiet"). Neither Debut nor Post, though, could quite prepare me for Homogenic, which goes deeper and darker with its electronic sonorities, and features the Icelandic pop princess sounding positively angry in some of these cuts, sporting a snarl that is an embodiment of "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." I'm impressed more than moved, to be honest, but I found it still intriguing enough to soldier on in exploring Björk's discography.

Literature

★ Miss Lonelyhearts (1933, Nathanael West)
Based on this and The Day of the Locust, West is a writer with a style that will take some getting used to if you go into his works expecting "realism." West isn't afraid to blow up realistically grounded scenarios into something near-mythic in scale; thus the apocalyptic finish of The Day of the Locust, though that certainly didn't come out of nowhere. Miss Lonelyhearts likewise becomes much more than the story of the titular newspaper advice columnist's internal struggle of trying to maintain optimism amidst extreme disillusionment; that internal struggle eventually acquires grand religious overtones, as if Miss Lonelyhearts was trying to move Heaven and Earth to hold onto his belief in the goodness of people and of life. It's also often bitterly funny and ironic, which is partly why West is able to get away with his deliberate overscaling. How much of it is meant to be taken seriously? Maybe some of it. Maybe none of it. The fact that we can't always tell is part of what makes West's novella such a fascinating read.

★ Howl and Other Poems (1956, Allen Ginsberg)
Yes, I bought a copy of this book at the historic City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, if nothing else just to say that I bought the famously controversial volume from that actual bookstore. Then I read the poetry. All I can say is: Holy shit. Loads of magnificently boundary-pushing surrealistic imagery tied to a painfully personal vision, but not without a redeeming sense of humanity and even a kind of rough spirituality underpinning it all. Howl is pretty magnificent, but the rest are hardly also-rans ("Sunflower Sutra" is another one that I found particularly memorable).

Another realization: I need to read more poetry! I'm open to suggestions for a poet whose work I should read next.

Video for the Day: The Sun Setting on Ocean Beach in San Francisco

2011-11-04T13:45:00.000-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—As a result of a couple of leftover writing obligations (one of which I highlighted on this blog yesterday, another which I admittedly have not started yet), I haven't gotten around to sifting through the many photos and videos I took while vacationing in San Francisco last week. So I'm not sure when I'll post something further about the trip here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second.

To tide you all over until that happens, though...I posted this video:

Here are two shots I took while a few friends and I were walking along the Ocean Beach shore on Sunday, Oct. 30, as the sun set in the distance.

I don't know if it comes across at all, but I did have in mind Abbas Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu when I took these shots on my iPhone—particularly its opening shot following a piece of driftwood floating along the shore. To wit:

Screengrab courtesy of DVDBeaver

There are no drifting objects in my shot, though—just waves crashing and water falling back, creating patterns of their own. And, in my recollection (which should be relatively fresh, because I just saw this film recently for the first time—and wrote about it here, by the way), none of Kiarostami's five long takes take place as the sun sets.

So, uh, take that, Abbas Kiarostami! (Your film is still gorgeous, though.)

DOC NYC 2011: Undefeated and Kumaré

2011-11-03T18:30:00.004-04:00

NEW YORK—I've recently written things! Things that actually got published somewhere!

My latest published (dual) review, for The House Next Door, are of Undefeated and Kumaré, two documentaries screening as part of the ongoing DOC NYC festival (of which you can find details here), a veritable explosion of old and new documentary cinema that started last night and runs until Nov. 10. Though I'm not unreservedly positive on either film, the latter—an account of Borat-style satirical stunt that, from what I can see, ends up blowing up in filmmaker Vikram Gandhi's face in provocative ways—is considerably more interesting than the former, yet another sports-underdog tale in the mold of Hoop Dreams that contains few narrative surprises and even fewer genuine revelations.

Whether this heralds a new explosion of film-critic creativity on my end remains to be seen. But for now...enjoy!

Artistic Consumption Log, Oct. 24, 2011 - Oct. 30, 2011: Bay Area Edition

2011-10-31T11:30:00.002-04:00

SAN FRANCISCO—By the time you all read this, I will most likely be on my way to San Francisco International Airport to fly back to New York after a wonderful week here in the Bay Area!

Because I've been trying to keep busy sightseeing, meeting up with friends and all that, I wasn't able to find much time to give last week's artistic consumption log my usual annotations. So once again, here's a barebones accounting of what I consumed artistically this week. As you can imagine, it's a rather, um, lean list...but a good one, for the most part.

The legendary Castro Theatre in San Francisco

Films

★ A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan), seen at Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, Calif.

★ Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger), seen at Castro Theatre in San Francisco [third viewing]
★ The Red Shoes (1948, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger), seen at Castro Theatre in San Francisco [second viewing]

Music

Audium 9 (2008, Stan Shaff), experienced at Audium in San Francisco

Literature

★ Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (2010, Jonathan Rosenbaum)

San Francisco! Days 2 and 3, in Photos

2011-10-28T12:00:00.008-04:00

SAN FRANCISCO—

Oh hey, it's Sun Yat-sen!

More Vertigo-related sightseeing! Here are the Brockleback Apartments, where Scottie Ferguson begins tailing Madeleine Elster early on in the film.

On Wednesday, I took a Caltrain down to Palo Alto, Calif., to not only meet up (or, more accurately, "tweet up") with friends/acquaintances, but to visit the lovely Stanford Theatre to see Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd for the first time. The company was marvelous, the film even more so.

On Jack Kerouac Alley, one of many alleyways in the Chinatown/North Beach part of San Francisco that has a rich history. Once I passed through that alley, I turned left on Columbus Ave. and encountered...

...this famous bookstore, known as the beating heart of the Beat Movement. It is there that I picked up...

Yeah, I couldn't resist picking up a copy of Allen Ginsberg's famously controversial poem Howl in San Francisco? Fitting, right? I actually read the first section of it, and already find its imagery thrillingly urgent, impassioned and devastating (no, I had never read it before). I read it, by the way, at...

...the Caffe Trieste, which, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook I've been consulting, is where Francis Ford Coppola drafted his screenplay for The Godfather.

This is the Coit Tower, located in Telegraph Hill, and named after its benefactor, Lille Hitchcock Coit (1843-1929), who was apparently a female firefighter back in the day. The top of this building is where I captured...

...this view of the Bay Area.

Fitting to find a memorial erected to Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, in Telegraph Hill.

This shot was taken in Russian Hill, which took yet another hike to climb. (All these hills in San Francisco sure giving me some exercise even on vacation!) I believe that's Alcatraz in the distance, right? I was considering visiting, but may not have the time. We shall see.

The Dragon Gate—which I guess I considered the entrance into Chinatown. (Taiwan, also according to Lonely Planet, was donated this structure in 1970.)

Covering all the bases: state, country and city, from left to right.

Greetings from San Francisco!

2011-10-26T14:03:00.001-04:00

SAN FRANCISCO—I suspect posting will be sparse in the coming week as I try to relax here in the Bay Area, but I'll try to keep you all up to date a bit on my adventures here on this blog through photo-driven posts like this one. (And if you can't get enough of these posts...well, there's my Twitter feed, of course.)

Here is a taste of the places I visited yesterday, my first full day in San Francisco:

Clarion Alley, one of many alleys in the Mission district housing all sorts of amazing pieces of street art

The Mission Dolores chapel. Vertigo fans—of which I am most certainly one—might find this a familiar sight...

Is Carlotta Valdes's grave anywhere here? (Another Vertigo reference, for those who didn't get that; this is the cemetery in the Mission Dolores.)

The view of San Francisco from Dolores Park

The rainbow flag in the Castro. This is for all my gay friends.

This is 237 Steiner St. in the Lower Haight district. Fans of the Shut Up Little Man! audio recordings—as well as the recent documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure—would understand the significance of this address.

Video for the Day: Razor the (Super Hyper) Dog

2011-10-24T12:30:00.004-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—There's one more thing I want to post here on my blog before my Bay Area vacation begins for real.

It's this:

Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook already know a little bit about Razor, the Siberian husky that resides in the Brooklyn apartment in which I and three others live. For the rest of you, though...well, here he is, in a particularly excitable mood one evening last week after I came home from work. (I don't consider Razor my dog, by the way; one of my roommates bought him last year and generally takes care of him. But, after some initial resistance, I've come to embrace the big ol' bugger...especially when he acts like that.)

Oh, and Razor was recently featured on Gothamist! See here!

All right, back to packing for San Francisco now.

Artistic Consumption Log, Oct. 17, 2011 - Oct. 23, 2011: Pre-San Francisco Edition

2011-10-24T09:00:00.366-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—In a few hours, I will be heading to John F. Kennedy International Airport in order to fly out to San Francisco to visit the city for the first time ever.

Why am I going? Well...in this case, just because. No film festival, no film-review or job-related obligations. This trip is just for me—to relax, recharge, reflect. I don't think I've really had that kind of trip in a long while. (And unlike my last venture to the West Coast, last year when I visited Los Angeles, I'm going this one alone. We'll see how that goes.)

So I'm not sure how much art I'll be consuming in the coming week. The Bay Area has a fairly rich alternative-film scene which I intend to explore to a certain extent, so some film-watching will probably be on the menu. Other than that...maybe a concert at Davies Symphony Hall with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra?

Until then...here's my latest artistic consumption log for the past week. I didn't come across anything extraordinarily overwhelming on the art front—though the Dardenne Brothers' latest film, The Kid With a Bike, came close.

The Kid With a Bike (2011)

Films

The Skin I Live In (2011, Pedro Almodóvar), seen at AMC Empire 25 in New York
I remember walking out of Pedro Almodóvar's latest film feeling underwhelmed. Days later, upon reflection, I feel a bit more affection for the film than I did immediately afterward. What I remember most from the film is its sometimes exhilarating sense of narrative freedom, with Almodóvar boldly taking his story into unapologetically perverse territory. (I'll give you only one hint as to where this film heads: The Skin I Live In features music by Throbbing Gristle, the British avant-garde band led by Genesis P-Orridge. If you know who Genesis P-Orridge is...) This might have been a truly great film if Almodóvar's characters had been sketched with nearly as much care as he puts into his plotting and his imagery. Still, at its best, The Skin I Live In carries some of the aggressively transgressive charge of his early, pre-All About My Mother work. And hey, at least it isn't boring—which is more than could be said for his last film, Broken Embraces, the rare instance where his taste for melodrama felt, for the most part, fatally rote.

★ Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh), seen at Regal Union Square Stadium 14 in New York
The common knock against Steven Soderbergh as an auteur, it seems, is that he doesn't have much of a signature, that he's difficult to pin down, that his films sometimes tend to be chilly theoretical experiments. There is perhaps truth in all of that, and Contagion—a biological disaster film that's shot more for clinical realism than freaky sensationalism—won't do much to lessen those impressions. Maybe the fact that I ended up enjoying the film anyway has to do with the fact that I expected all this going in and thus found Soderbergh's detachment actually somewhat comforting. There are themes to be found in this film if you care to look deep enough, I'm sure—half-formed ideas about self-interest vs. selflessness, old-school journalism vs. new media, and so on; I suspect, though, that Soderbergh mostly focused on telling the story as efficiently as possible and leaving Scott Z. Burns's script to take care of itself. Contagion works as a fairly engrossing thriller in which moments of genuine emotion are allowed to pop up amidst the deliberately drab technological spectacle.

DOC NYC, all films seen at IFC Center in New York
Undefeated (2011, Daniel Lindsay & T.J. Martin)
★ Kumaré (2011, Vikram Gandhi)
I volunteered to review these two films in the upcoming DOC NYC documentary film festival for The House Next Door, so I'll let that piece speak for itself, when I get around to writing it up.

★ The Kid With a Bike (2011, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne), seen at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.
More film-festival catch-up! Here, the Dardenne Brothers come up with an affecting coming-of-age fable in which a troubled but headstrong young boy named Cyril (Thomas Doret, amazing) tries to adjust to life without his deadbeat dad (Jérémie Renier, natch after the role he played in L'Enfant) after he leaves him. With their last film, Lorna's Silence (2008), you could sense the Dardennes trying to at least take some baby steps away from their usual emphasis on naturalism; in The Kid With a Bike, they go even further by introducing fairy-tale elements within their realistic style. At least, that's the only way I can explain, say, the near-angelic nature of Cécile de France's surrogate-mother character (we barely get an idea about why this stranger suddenly takes an interest in Cyril; she just kinda does) or the melancholy snatches of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto that the Dardennes include on the soundtrack (placed at strategic moments, as if marking off important stages in Cyril's emotional arc).

That is not to say that the Dardennes are going for a more simplistic version of their previous morality plays; moral ambiguity still plays a major part in their worldview, except this time around, it's filtered through the point-of-view of Cyril, a kid who is only now getting his first, brutal taste of the adult world. But the Dardennes, as ever, somehow manage to adopt a main character's viewpoint without ever fully inhabiting it—and some of its most memorable moments come from the way they look at a particular situation from various perspectives without losing the essential sympathy they have for Cyril.

Good stuff, all in all...though I wonder if, with their next film, the Dardennes will maybe just drop the pretense of realism altogether and do something completely and utterly different from the style they're known for. No more of these baby steps, guys! Just do it!

Music

★ Watch the Throne (2011, Jay-Z & Kanye West)
I finally got around to hearing this much-hyped collaboration between two recent hip-hop giants, and it turns out Watch the Throne lives up to its name in one respect: some of these cuts positively abound in regal, majestic, deliberately overblown sounds and production. And, of course, there's the usual quota of braggadocio you have to put up with from these two. But such ego-tripping coexists fascinatingly with moments of brutal honesty, most notably in Jay-Z's case (listen to the second half of "New Day," for instance). Watch the Throne ends where West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy began, and it's far less consistent—but it's generally enjoyable overall.

Debut (1993, Björk)
Thanks to the release of Björk's latest work, the multi-platform Biophilia, I've finally decided to dive into the much-celebrated music of this Icelandic iconoclast. (And yes, this means that I haven't yet watched Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, in which she played the lead role and wrote the songs.) As usual, I started from the beginning: her first solo album, cleverly titled Debut. It's an interesting if somewhat uneven effort; I'm guessing later albums will be even stranger and more experimental than this one, which is, more often than not, tied down to fairly same-y dance beats.

Dance

★ Radio & Juliet (2009, Edward Clug), performed at NYU Skirball Center in New York
This abstract modern take on the Shakespeare classic, set to music by Radiohead and performed by the Slovenian dance troupe Ballet Maribor, has apparently been touring the world for a couple of years now. It finally made it to New York over the weekend, and if you don't mind the hour-long ballet's clinical feel, it's a fascinating trip. Instead of two warring clans, Radio & Juliet basically features one female dancer and six male ones, one of whom takes a romantic interest in the woman...or do all of them take an interest? At a couple points in the ballet, "Romeo" and "Juliet" dance with each other...but then one "Romeo" is replaced with another, then that other is replaced yet another...you get the idea. What does that signify? It certainly doesn't recall anything in Shakespeare's text. But then, a lot of elements in this ballet don't recall anything in Shakespeare's text; it borrows certain elements, but stakes out an identity of its own. What matters, in the end, is that Radio & Juliet works on its own alien terms; even better, it manages to bring out the creepier aspects of Radiohead's music—most of it from Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001) and Hail to the Thief (2003), their more experimental albums—that honestly I don't think I had really, truly felt while listening to their music in isolation.

My Day Occupying Wall Street

2011-10-19T12:45:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK—On Saturday, I finally got a chance to go to lower Manhattan and visit Zuccotti Park, site of the very first Occupy Wall Street demonstration in what has become a world-wide movement.

Don't worry, Wall Street Journal, I didn't go there to either support or condemn the protesters! I was just there to observe and discuss. And observe I did, as this video attests:

As you can see, Zuccotti Park has become something of a virtual community, complete with food bank and library. It's actually rather impressive; I never thought I would see Rutgers University's annual Tent State University movement spread into the outside world in this way!

Whatever you think of the movement's ideas and beliefs, though, I still find it heartening to see regular people (the so-called "99%," as per this movement's characterization of middle-to-lower-class folk) being this passionate and engaged in American political discourse. Who says us young folks are all self-absorbed and apathetic???

Here are some more photos I took from Saturday's tour through Zuccotti Park:

Later that day, some of the demonstrators took the cause up to Times Square for a more conventional kind of rally. I checked out the scene there, too:

As you can see and hear, these demonstrators have hit upon a fairly inventive way of spreading their message across a wide area so everyone can hear: "human microphones" in which everyone in the crowd passes the words of a speaker along, round-robin style. Maybe this has been done in rallies before, but it was the first time I experienced it in person.

And even later, the Times Square demonstrators gathered in Washington Square Park to continue the rally. I checked this out briefly, but didn't stick around too long; all I got from this nightcap was this photo...

...which reminded me somewhat of that famous Eugène Delacroix painting "Liberty Leading the People":

Thus ended my day occupying Wall Street.

At Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square on a Sunday Morning

2011-10-18T15:30:00.001-04:00

NEW YORK—Amidst all the New York Film Festival coverage I've done in the past month or so, I wasn't able to put up this video I took of Yonge-Dundas Square while I was at the Toronto International Film Festival in September...until today.

It's not much: just a slow 360° shot (a signature of mine as an amateur videographer, if I was to exalt myself to the level of amateur auteur or something pretentious like that). But this footage was taken at around 8:30 in the morning...and unlike New York's Times Square, apparently Yonge-Dundas Square that early in the morning looks and feels like a dead zone of sorts. Not a whole lot of people, few cars on the roads—frankly, it almost looked as if the apocalypse had already hit, that's how barren it looked!

But hey, what a sunny, beautiful apocalypse, am I right?

Artistic Consumption Log, Oct. 10, 2011 - Oct. 16, 2011

2011-10-17T08:00:00.297-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Wait...I actually have time to annotate my latest artistic consumption log? Amazing!

Margaret (2011)

Films

New York Film Festival 2011 (all films screened at Walter Reade Theater unless otherwise noted):
Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011, Alex Stapleton)
★ The Descendants (2011, Alexander Payne)
I wrote about the enjoyable if skin-deep Roger Corman documentary Corman's World in my last House Next Door New York Film Festival review here.

The festival ended last night with Alexander Payne's latest film as its closing-night selection...and it turned out to be a pretty good selection. Those who are worried that Payne indulges in his usual penchant for caricature and condescension can rest assured that, in The Descendants, he largely abandons it here...and even when the film threatens to slip into such tendencies with certain supporting characters (Alexandra's dim boyfriend Sid, the philandering real-estate agent), Payne manages to include scenes or moments that humanize even those relatively minor players. What emerges is an often moving portrait of a workaholic father (George Clooney) living in Hawaii who, when faced with the prospect of having to shut off the life-support system of his comatose wife, is forced to not only grow as a father, but also face familial skeletons in the closet that he had long suppressed. Even more so than his last two features, About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004), The Descendants proves that Payne is capable of something approaching genuine human drama, not just the wicked satire of Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999).

And now, thanks to the Toronto and New York film festivals, I think I'm all "film-festivalled" out for the time being!

★ Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan), screened at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in New York
I agreed to write up something about this film for the film- and music-review site In Review Online, so I'll have a chance to flesh out my thoughts on this film later.

For now...well, here is the last line of legendary film critic Pauline Kael's review of Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder back in 1975: "I don't know when I've been so moved by a picture that I knew was riddled with flaws. It must be that [Satyajit] Ray's vision comes out of so much hurt and guilt and love that the feeling pours over all the cracks in Distant Thunder and seals them up." That's exactly what I would say about Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan's wildly ambitious follow-up to his 2000 chamber drama You Can Count On Me. It's far from perfect—some of its editing rhythms are oddly disjointed, for one thing, especially in its last hour—but it's so intelligent, impassioned and deeply felt in its exploration of one adolescent's response to death and guilt that its flaws, such as they are, are mere piddles in what it successfully accomplishes. It is indeed a staggering achievement, in many ways—and so it's a shame that the film (which was shot way back in 2005 and has a copyright of 2008 on it) only got a token two-week run here in New York as a result of a troubled production history and pending lawsuits over the film's ownership. It deserved far better.

★ Dead Alive (1992, Peter Jackson), screened at 92YTribeca in New York
★ Re-Animator (1985, Stuart Gordon), screened at 92YTribeca in New York
92YTribeca screened these two splatter classics in a double bill on Friday night, so I seized upon the opportunity to fill in two major blind spots in my horror knowledge. Horror? That's just the name of the genre; these two films are more accurately described as gruesome black comedies. These aren't ironic parodies, though; the last thing you could call either Dead Alive or Re-Animator is smug or contemptuous of genre. Dead Alive, for all its extreme bloodletting (this may well be the bloodiest film I've ever seen), works quite beautifully, actually, as a sincere coming-of-age tale about a mama's boy (played by Timothy Balme) who learns to break away from his overcontrolling mother (hey, I can relate!); in this case, though, his maturation requires him to eventually wield a lawnmower and mow down scores of zombies in a masterfully orchestrated half-hour setpiece of blood, guts and mayhem. Jackson's film is full of such witty, bravura blood-soaked setpieces, all shot with a proliferation of exaggerated wide-angle lenses that lend the whole film a comic-book air that takes the brutality out of the grotesque violence.

Dead Alive is a lot of fun, at least for those with strong stomachs (and it's also a welcome reminder of the kind of filmmaker Jackson was before he became all respectable with the Lord of the Rings epics). But Re-Animator—an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft short story—is on a whole other plane of greatness. The best way I can think to describe this, for those who haven't seen this film yet, is that it is a serious comedy about the fear of death, its outré humor borne out of a genuinely serious consideration of the ways people deal with mortality—especially the possibility of avoiding it, as Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) offers with the shiny green serum he develops. What if you were given a second chance at life? What would you do with it? The answers for some of the re-animated characters here are sometimes outrageously perverse (I sure as heck haven't seen a film in which a live severed head goes down on a naked blonde, have you?), but its morbid undercurrents lend the film a coherence that Dead Alive barely manages (not a knock on the Jackson film, mind you). I wouldn't call Re-Animator disturbing, exactly...but in its own gleefully tasteless way, it's thought-provoking.

One minor quibble with Re-Animator: Are people generally okay with how blatantly derivative of Bernard Herrmann parts of Richard Band's score are? Like, his opening-credits music is pretty obviously a rip-off of Herrmann's Psycho opening; Band doesn't even try to hide it.

Music

★ Scary Monsters (1980, David Bowie)
★ Let's Dance (1983, David Bowie)
As some of you can tell in my previous barebones artistic consumption logs, I've been slowly introducing myself to a good majority of David Bowie's recorded output, at least up to the early 1980s (I hear that it's basically all downhill from Let's Dance onward, so I'm inclined to move on to some other artist at this point...but I'm willing to hear arguments to the contrary). For the most part, it's been an immensely enjoyable and often exhilarating experience, with each album a true musical adventure, for well and ill. These two latest "adventures" aren't quite on the exalted plane of my two personal favorite Bowie albums, Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977), but they all have their moments of brilliance. In fact, "Ashes to Ashes," from Scary Monsters, may well be my favorite Bowie song ever, if only because I find it a rather disturbing song underneath its whimsical oddball surface, especially towards the end, with the arrangement laying on a foreboding bass synthesizer as Bowie's voice, enhanced with a halo-like effect, repeatedly intones, "My mother said to get things done / You'd better not mess with Major Tom." Sounds like an ominous children's nursery rhyme, that. Weird and wonderful: That's Bowie in a nutshell. (Maybe now would be a good time to rewatch The Man Who Fell to Earth, which I found generally boring when I saw it at Film Forum earlier his year...)

New York Film Festival 2011, "Confused Young Girls" Edition

2011-10-12T08:00:00.025-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

My latest New York Film Festival dispatch couples together two films I saw at Toronto International Film Festival: Sean Durkin's tense debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene and Mia Hansen-Løve's warm and wise third film Goodbye First Love. At first, the only reason I decided to bunch these two together was because I had previously seen them in Toronto; as I started writing this piece, however, I realized that there are some other similarities connecting them—most notably, the fact that both films feature young female heroines under duress, whether extreme in the case of the former or universal in the case of the latter. Similar or not, both are very much worth seeing.

(Both of them have theatrical distribution, by the way, so you won't have to pay, like, $24 to see them in upcoming public screenings. But, hey, far be it from me to discourage you from giving money over to the Film Society of Lincoln Center and their New York Film Festival! Without them, I wouldn't be keeping busy right now and keeping my mind off my stagnant professional career and all that!)

New York Film Festival 2011: Catching Up on Some Links

2011-10-11T08:00:00.001-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

I've fallen behind on linking you all to my recent contributions to The House Next Door's New York Film Festival coverage, so...if you haven't seen them already thanks to my links to them on my Twitter and Facebook pages, here are my reviews of Two Years at Sea, the hypnotic first feature film of British avant-garde filmmaker Ben Rivers; and a dual review of German director Ulrich Köhler's so-so anti-imperialist screed Sleeping Sickness and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's slow but rewarding police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Enjoy! I have three more films to review, and then I'll be done with this year's New York Film Festival. Home stretch, baby!

Artistic Consumption Log, Oct. 3, 2011-Oct. 9, 2011

2011-10-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—It's the home stretch, folks: the last week of the New York Film Festival. I have three more reviews to write up this week, and then it's all over and done with...and maybe then I can go back to more extensive artistic consumption logs!

For now, though, you will all have to make do with another barebones one.

One thing I'd like to explain, though, as a preface. This weekend was Views from the Avant-Garde weekend at NYFF—a four-day showcase of some of the latest and brightest in experimental film. So a lot of the films I saw at the festival this past week were a part of this sidebar—all the Ben Rivers and Ernie Gehr shorts, Jerome Hiler's Words of Mercury, Nathaniel Dorsky's The Return and James Benning's Twenty Cigarettes. With the exception of the last title (not a bad film, by any means, just far less revelatory than Benning's last film, Ruhr), most of the rest was pretty mind-blowing; as I soaked up these images, I felt my conception of cinema literally expand in my head. (I'm almost thankful I didn't see a lot more of this kind of filmmaking this weekend than I did; my mind might have felt like it was about to explode!)

Oh yeah, and Melancholia is damn good—better than Lars von Trier's last film, Antichrist, for my money. It's available to view on demand, but it's certainly worth seeing on a big screen, if you can.

The Return (2011)

Films

New York Film Festival 2011 (all films screened at Walter Reade Theater in New York unless otherwise noted):
★ This Is Not a Film (2010, Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
★ Melancholia (2011, Lars von Trier), screened at Alice Tully Hall in New York
★ Sack Barrow (2011, Ben Rivers), screened at Francesca Beale Theater in New York
★ Slow Action (2010, Ben Rivers), screened at Francesca Beale Theater in New York
★ Crystal Palace (2011, Ernie Gehr)
★ Thank You for Visiting (2010, Ernie Gehr)
Mist (2010, Ernie Gehr)
★ ABRACADABRA (2009, Ernie Gehr)
★ Words of Mercury (2011, Jerome Hiler), screened at Francesca Beale Theater in New York
★ The Return (2011, Nathaniel Dorsky), screened at Francesca Beale Theater in New York
My Week With Marilyn (2011, Simon Curtis)
Twenty Cigarettes (2011, James Benning)

★ Weekend (1967, Jean-Luc Godard), screened at Film Forum in New York [second viewing]

Music

★ "Heroes" (1977, David Bowie)
★ Lodger (1979, David Bowie)

Theater

Nightlands (2011, Sylvan Oswald), performed at HERE Arts Center in New York

New York Film Festival 2011: The Student and This is Not a Film

2011-10-05T08:00:00.008-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

I didn't have much of an idea going into Santiago Mitre's The Student what I was in for; heck, I didn't even have much of an idea of what other critics were saying about the film, if anything. Turns out, this is a reasonably engaging political drama from Argentina that manages to yield some dividends with its college-as-microcosm-of-Argentinian-politics conceit. It's a solid piece of work overall—as I try to suggest in my latest House Next Door New York Film Festival dispatch. (It screens on Saturday, Oct. 8, at 12:30 p.m. and Wednesday, Oct. 12, at 6 p.m., if any of you in the tri-state area are interested in checking it out.)

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this in passing: Yesterday, I saw what I would probably consider my favorite film of the festival up to this point: This Is Not a Film (2010), the recent collaboration between Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb done while Panahi was still under house arrest and awaiting what would eventually be his sentence to six years in prison and 20 years banned from filmmaking. It's a documentary that doubles as a richly self-reflexive piece of cinema—but, like fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's great Close-Up (1990), it balances intellectual concerns with real, heartfelt emotion. The result is a heartening middle finger to a repressive regime and a deeply moving personal testament of an artist maintaining his humanistic stance even in the midst of imminent imprisonment that threatens to completely silence his voice. (Even the story of how the film was smuggled out of Iran is inspiring, being that it was smuggled in a USB drive hidden in a cake.)

I wasn't assigned this film to review, so consider that my (too short) review. Even shorter version: You must see this! (It screens at the New York Film Festival on Thursday, Oct. 13 at 6 p.m.)

NYFFing and TIFFing It Up!

2011-10-04T08:00:00.008-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Over the weekend, my New York Film Festival review of Le Havre went up at The House Next Door. Le Havre is the latest film from Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki—yet another well-regarded world-cinema auteur whose work I wasn't really familiar with before undertaking the assignment to review it. So I decided to make my inexperience with Kaurismäki's work a part of my review. I have the freedom to do that kind of thing at The House! The movie's not bad, either.

Oh, and here's a blast from the (recent) past: I contributed a few capsule reviews for In Review Online's recently published wrap-up of this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Surprisingly, I had a pretty easy time of sticking to 90-100 words for each of my contributions; I totally expected to struggle to condense my always complex opinions on films to such a short amount of space, but they just seemed to flow out of me once I got into a groove.

Anyway, enjoy my latest output! I need to keep up this writing thing, seriously.

Artistic Consumption Log, Sept. 26, 2011-Oct. 2, 2011

2011-10-03T14:43:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK—

Low (1977)

Films

New York Film Festival 2011 (all films screened at Walter Reade Theater in New York unless otherwise noted):
★ Two Years at Sea (2011, Ben Rivers)
★ The Student (2011, Santiago Mitre)
Sleeping Sickness (2011, Ulrich Köhler)
★ Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
★ Ben-Hur (1959, William Wyler), screened at Alice Tully Hall in New York
★ A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi), screened at Alice Tully Hall in New York

★ 10 (1979, Blake Edwards), screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.

★ The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich), screened at Film Forum in New York

Music

點解 (1987, 劉美君)

★ Low (1977, David Bowie)

New York Film Festival 2011: The Loneliest Planet and Dreileben

2011-09-30T17:44:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK—

Tonight the New York Film Festival officially gets underway with lavish opening-night gala screenings of Roman Polanski's latest film, Carnage.

I won't be there, being that, even for members, getting into gala screenings at this festival can cost someone up to $50—hardly a cheap proposition! And alas, I had to miss the press screening for it, because this year I'm not taking any days off from work for them; instead, I find myself having to go to morning screenings and arrive to work just a bit late (though don't worry, my boss has so far been totally okay with this, provided I give her advance notice and all).

I have been able to see some other good films playing at the festival so far...and my reviews for two of them are finally up at The House Next Door—those of Julia Loktev's latest film The Loneliest Planet; and Dreileben, a trilogy of made-for-TV German films featuring three different directors offering different perspectives on the same crime. The links for both reviews are embedded on the individual film titles.

So go on, read 'em and then comment, why don'tcha?

There is plenty more to come, of course. "Watch this space," as they say here on the Web...

From One Filmmaker to Another: Abbas Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003)

2011-09-27T15:00:00.006-04:00

NEW YORK—

Amidst my attempt to balance New York Film Festival coverage for The House Next Door with my day job and even the occasional night out at the movies, this was published recently: a piece I wrote about Abbas Kiarostami's experimental 2003 film Five Dedicated to Ozu as my contribution to the site In Review Online's near-complete retrospective of the legendary Iranian filmmaker. Enjoy, and then by all means, go check out the other articles in this exhaustive series!

Hopefully my New York Film Festival reviews—or, rather, the two I've completed so far—will be going up soon (the festival starts on Friday).

Artistic Consumption Log, Sept. 19, 2011-Sept. 25, 2011

2011-09-26T08:00:00.110-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Another week, another barebones artistic consumption log.

My workload for The House Next Door's New York Film Festival coverage was a bit larger than I had expected (I requested a lot of titles—basically, just about every film screening I thought I could make—and got a lot more than I anticipated), and already I feel like I'm on the verge of falling behind! So once again, I didn't have much time to annotate this week's log as I usually like to do, prioritizing work on a review over commenting on stuff I saw over the past week. But hey, I'll end up writing extensively about a good portion of it anyway, and it'll be published on a forum for a wider audience to see—so you all have that to look forward to. (Of course, I'll try to post links to those reviews on this blog as they go up.)

For now, though, I just want to say right here: I know Sleep No More—the fantastically inventive and immersive theater piece/art installation/adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth being staged on a few floors of the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea here in New York—is super expensive, ranging from $75-$95 depending on when you go. But you all owe it to yourselves to go, if you're in the area. It's a truly amazing, one-of-a-kind experience, and I think the sheer novelty of it is enough to justify the extra expense. Read this New York Times review to get an idea of what you're in for.

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

Films

New York Film Festival 2011 (all films screened at Walter Reade Theater unless otherwise noted):
★ The Loneliest Planet (2011, Julia Loktev)
★ Le Havre (2011, Aki Kaurismäki)

Dreileben trilogy:
★ Beats Being Dead (2011, Christian Petzold)
Don't Follow Me Around (2011, Dominik Graf)
One Minute of Darkness (2011, Christoph Hochhäusler)

Andrew Bird: Fever Year (2011, Xan Aranda)

Drive (2011, Nicolas Winding Refn), screened at Regal Union Square Stadium 14 in New York

★ The Bad and the Beautiful (1952, Vincente Minnelli), screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Music

★ 雪在燒 (1987, 黃鶯鶯) [umpteenth listen]

★ Kronos Quartet: Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11, performed at BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Theater

★ Sleep No More (2011, Punchdrunk), experienced at The McKittrick Hotel in New York

Artistic Consumption Log, Sept. 12, 2011-Sept. 18, 2011

2011-09-19T08:00:00.056-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Alas, I ended up not being able to find a whole lot of time to do much beyond coming up with little tweet reviews of all the films I saw in Toronto during the recently finished Toronto International Film Festival. I will eventually write something about at least some of the films I saw at the festival; hell, I may even write about the experience itself, which was overall pretty awesome.

For now, though, this latest log will once again consist only of titles...especially now that I have the upcoming New York Film Festival to suck more time away from writing about TIFF 2011. There are a lot of titles, though, for what it's worth.

Films

Toronto International Film Festival 2011:
★ Albert Nobbs (2011, Rodrigo Garcia), screened at Winter Garden Theatre
★ You're Next (2011, Adam Wingard), screened at AMC Yonge & Dundas 24
★ Faust (2010, Alexander Sokurov), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Shame (2011, Steve McQueen), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Damsels in Distress (2011, Whit Stillman), screened at Elgin Theatre
The Moth Diaries (2010, Mary Harron), screened at Scotiabank Theatre
★ Alps (2011, Yorgos Lanthimos), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Sleeping Beauty (2011, Julia Leigh), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Lovely Molly (2011, Eduardo Sánchez), screened at Ryerson Theatre
★ Invasión (1969, Hugo Santiago), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
★ Love and Bruises (2011, Lou Ye), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
★ A Simple Life (2011, Ann Hui), screened at Scotiabank Theatre
★ The Turin Horse (2011, Béla Tarr), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
★ Outside Satan (2011, Bruno Dumont), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Take Shelter (2011, Jeff Nichols), screened at Scotiabank Theatre
★ Good Bye (2011, Mohammad Rasoulof), screened at AMC Yonge & Dundas 24
The Other Side of Sleep (2011, Rebecca Daly), screened at Jackman Hall
★ Himizu (2011, Sion Sono), screened at Scotiabank Theatre
★ From Up on Poppy Hill (2011, Goro Miyazaki), screened at Scotiabank Theatre
★ The Deep Blue Sea (2011, Terence Davies), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
★ Life Without Principle (2011, Johnnie To), screened at Scotiabank Theatre
That Summer (2011, Philippe Garrel), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Pina (2011, Wim Wenders), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox

Artistic Consumption Log, Sept. 5, 2011 - Sept. 11, 2011

2011-09-12T11:15:00.007-04:00

TORONTO—I'm knee deep in Toronto International Film Festival screenings, so I haven't much of a chance to add my usual commentaries to this latest artistic consumption log. But I didn't want to neglect this weekly feature altogether...so here you all are.

In skeleton, all the art I've consumed in the past week (commentaries to come later...maybe):

Seven Chances (1925)

Films

★ Seven Chances (1925, Buster Keaton), screened at Film Forum in New York
★ The Navigator (1924, Buster Keaton), screened at Film Forum in New York

★ The Wrong Man (1956, Alfred Hitchcock), screened at Film Forum in New York

Toronto International Film Festival 2011:
★ The Artist (2011, Michel Hazanavicius), screened at Elgin Theater
★ Into the Abyss (2011, Werner Herzog), screened at AMC Yonge & Dundas 24
★ Goodbye First Love (2011, Mia Hansen-Løve), screened at AMC Yonge & Dundas 24
Gerhard Richter - Painting (2011, Corinna Belz), screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Chicken With Plums (2011, Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud), screened at AMC Yonge & Dundas 24)
Take This Waltz (2011, Sarah Polley), screened at Ryerson Theatre
★ Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011, Sean Durkin), screened at Ryerson Theatre
★ Crazy Horse (2011, Frederick Wiseman), screened at AMC Yonge & Dudnas 24
★ UFO in Her Eyes (2011, Xiaolu Guo), screened at Isabel Bader Theatre

Music

★ Young Americans (1975, David Bowie)
★ Station to Station (1976, David Bowie)

★ 親愛的小孩 (1985, 蘇芮) [second listen]

Toronto International Film Festival 2011: An Introduction

2011-09-09T17:00:00.002-04:00

TORONTO—Two whole years after I first resolved to one day attend the Toronto International Film Festival, I am finally here in this bustling town, gearing myself to see 29 films in the next 10 days, and basically inundate myself with cinematic discoveries.

I'm not here under the most ideal of circumstances. I would have preferred to have attended the festival as a member of the press, if only so I could pretend, for 10 days, that I had somehow moved up in the world and was actually working on the same level as some of the "big dog" film critics I admire so much. Maybe I should have just said "fuck it" and tried to apply for press credentials even without a more "official" affiliation than this here blog (I had always assumed this blog wasn't good enough to be taken seriously). (Why am I always so reluctant to take those kinds of risks?) In any case, this year one of my roommates offered up a spot in a suite he had reserved, free of charge, in Toronto; combine that with an offer to split a 50-ticket package with a friend of his, and I finally decided that I couldn't pass up this opportunity to finally attend one of the biggest film festivals of the world, money be damned.

So here I am. Either I keep on regretting what this experience could have been, or I can just forge ahead and make the best of it now that I'm here. I'll do the latter. And I'll certainly try my best to update you all on the films I see here in Toronto as the festival goes on.

Besides, once I come back from Toronto, I then have the New York Film Festival to look forward to—and at least, for that hometown festival, I'll be once again covering it for Slant Magazine's The House Next Door. After a summer in which I pretty much allowed my professional life to dwindle to near-nothingness, I could certainly use the infusion of work.

Stay tuned for more dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival, dear readers!

Small Triumphs

2011-09-08T23:15:00.000-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—When you're stuck in a less-than-wholly-stimulating job, it's worth basking in the small triumphs.

Case in point: Remember those "skybox refers" I briefly discussed in this post from last year? Yesterday, I wrote this one for a story about a paper publisher who had recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection:

Maybe half an hour after I write that thing and see it cleared, one of my superiors comes up to me and asks me if I was the one who wrote it? "Yeah," I say in a slightly guarded voice, expecting to hear some criticism. "Good job," the editor proceeded to say. "We decided to change the headline of the story to that one."

On a day in which I was feeling especially crappy about things (not helped by the minor ruckus I caused when I inadvertently "spoiled" a supposed big plot point of the TV series Breaking Bad for a bunch of newbies at work, some of whom hadn't even heard of the show), hearing this compliment had the effect of brightening up my entire day.

Apparently I still am capable of stretching my creative muscles at this "job" every once in a while!

Artistic Consumption Log, Aug. 29, 2011 - Sept. 4, 2011: "Art Bender" Edition

2011-09-06T19:30:00.007-04:00

NEW YORK—Is there such a thing as going on an art bender? Because that's the way I'd characterize my recently ended Labor Day weekend! In three days, I saw six films (one of them four hours long—without intermission, mind you), two live musical performances and a stage play, with a fair amount of fine dining and drinking thrown in, plus a lot of sleep deprivation in between it all. Hey, no rest for the weary art consumer, right?

Below, then, are the results of that art bender, with my usual brief commentaries. As I'm heading to Toronto at the end of the week to attend my first-ever Toronto International Film Festival, I suspect this weekend is merely a prelude to the longer bender I'm about to embark on.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Films

★ Handsworth Songs (1987, John Akomfrah), screened at Film Forum in New York
I hadn't heard a thing about this hour-long documentary/essay film from the Britain-based artist-group the Black Audio Film Collective before seeing this on Tuesday night at Film Forum; all I knew going in was that a) it was being programmed by Light Industry, a Brooklyn-based project devoted to screening little-known classic and contemporary visual and audio work, and b) it was screening at a time and evening I could actually make! So I went...and I was thoroughly bowled over by it. A stimulating mix of sensuous visual poetry and sober sociopolitical analysis, Handsworth Songs takes a dialectical approach to exploring the factors that lead up to the race riots that engulfed Handsworth, a suburb in Birmingham, U.K., in 1985. It's a lot to absorb in one viewing; luckily, it's on YouTube, for all of you who are curious (because the user who uploaded it disabled embedding, here is a link to the first part of it).

★ Tabloid (2010, Errol Morris), screened at IFC Center in New York
My short take on it says it all.

★ Red Desert (1964, Michaelangelo Antonioni), screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y. [second viewing]
Oddly enough, I found this, the legendary Italian filmmaker's first color film, even stranger and more elusive on this second viewing than I did on my first, on the Criterion Collection's gorgeous Blu-ray edition; its psychological depths are still mysterious and near-impenetrable. Its painterly visual splendors and sense of aimless drift remain as haunting as ever, though—even more so on a big screen, in the new 35mm print I saw on Friday. (I previously wrote about the film here, by the way.)

★ Love Exposure (2008, Sion Sono), screened at Cinema Village in New York
This is the four-hour film I referred to earlier...and what a riveting four hours it is, bursting with thematic ambition and narrative audacity, all of it building up to a surprisingly moving conclusion that essentially confirms that, in a surreal world gone seemingly mad with religious extremism and adolescent romantic/sexual longings...well, "all you need is love," as The Beatles famously sang. Actually, Sono's epic puts more much more meat onto the bones of that time-honored sentiment...but anyway...this was about as mindblowing an experience as I hoped it would be based on everything I had heard about it since it screened to great acclaim in New York two years ago at the New York Asian Film Festival. (It's screening two more times until it leaves Cinema Village on Thursday.)

★ Back to the Future (1985, Robert Zemeckis), screened at Landmark Sunshine Theatre in New York
Yes, it's true: I hadn't seen this generational classic before seeing it at a midnight screening Friday night at Landmark Sunshine Theatre. Or, more accurately, I had seen only certain sequences before seeing it theatrically on Friday night. But yes, it's a blast, and a legitimately great film. Now can everyone stop expressing incredulity at the fact that I hadn't seen this in full 'til this weekend? Please?

★ Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950, Otto Preminger), screened at Film Forum in New York
★ Laura (1944, Otto Preminger), screened at Film Forum in New York [second viewing]
Laura is still as wonderful as ever...but in some ways, Otto Preminger's later Where the Sidewalk Ends—also featuring (a markedly older-looking) Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney—is even better. At the very least, this brooding urban Crime and Punishment seems less bound by genre requirements than Laura, with its endlessly twisty plot, occasionally does.

★ Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee), screened at Museum of Modern Art in New York
Yet another major cinematic blind spot that I finally filled in on Sunday (and, alas, I had to sacrifice seeing Abbas Kiarostami's complete Koker trilogy at Walter Reade Theater to do it; my lack of sleep was finally getting to me that morning). Yes, it's a masterpiece. No, it most certainly is not the call to violence that critics like Joe Klein feared at the time; apparently those critics were blind to the dialectical aspects of Spike Lee's rigorously even-handed treatment not only of the racial issues he pointedly raises, but even of the characters themselves. (Mookie, the pizza-delivery boy Lee plays, may be the one that starts the climactic riot, but that doesn't automatically mean that character and that action speaks for Lee himself.) If nothing else, it remains a master class in impassioned but fair-minded political filmmaking that never forgets the human figures populating its grand and energetic canvas. (Take note, Paul Haggis.)

Apparently my week in film-watching began and ended with race riots (Handsworth Songs at the beginning, Do the Right Thing at the end). Just felt like pointing that out to y'all.

Music

★ Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 "Pastorale"/Schubert: Symphony No. 5 (1971/1980, Karl Böhm & Vienna Philharmonic) [second listen]
The Beethoven—one of symphonic literature's most glorious hymns to nature—made for fitting listening in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, especially considering that its fourth movement is intended to be a musical depiction of a thunderstorm, and the finale its joyous, peaceful aftermath.

★ Pin Ups (1973, David Bowie)
★ Diamond Dogs (1974, David Bowie)
Neither of these are close to the level of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars or even Aladdin Sane, but I did enjoy listening to them. Pin Ups—a collection of covers of a bunch of cherished tunes from the 1960s—is especially interesting, to me at least, for Bowie's quicksilver changes of vocal style from cut to cut. Apparently he was willing to be a chameleon not only across albums, but within them.

The more I listen to Bowie's music, the more fascinated I become by him, even when he's at less than his best.

★ Dapp Theory, seen at Blue Note Jazz Club in New York
★ Michael Driscoll, seen at The Scratcher in New York
One's a jazz group that features atonal harmonies and beat poetry; the other is a folksy-ish, introspective singer-songwriter. Both live gigs featured friends of mine I know personally, so I don't feel I can say a whole lot about 'em here; conflict of interest, you know. I would urge you to at least give Dapp Theory a listen (the group has a couple of records to its credit); I found their sound thrillingly unique, and am looking forward to listening to their recorded output.

Theater

★ Follies (1971, Stephen Sondheim), performed at Marquis Theatre in New York
The more Sondheim shows I see live, the more I'm convinced that a) I should just prioritize seeing his musicals over anything else; and b) he may well be the only composer that wrote any musicals that are still worth a damn today. Certainly, very little I've seen live has matched Sondheim's theatrical wit and mature emotional insight. This searing look at faded glories and middle-age disappointments is no less witty, tuneful and affecting than his earlier masterpiece Company, but man, that "Loveland" climax—in which the romantic battlefield of its two main couples is transformed into an extravagant fantasy landscape in which they are all allowed to articulate what they are seemingly unable to express in reality—is something else entirely. Follies is currently in a limited run at the Marquis Theatre with a cast featuring Bernadette Peters (good) and Jan Maxwell (even better) as the two lead female characters; it's a fantastic production, worth seeing for those looking for real quality Broadway theater.

★ The Select (The Sun Also Rises) (2011, Elevator Repair Service), performed at New York Theatre Workshop in New York
There are pretty much only one or two sets in the Elevator Repair Service's version of Ernest Hemingway's classic 1926 novel; changes of mood and locale are suggested mostly through lighting and sound effects, imaginative blocking and Hemingway's own words. Unlike Gatz, the group's nearly eight-hour version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that they performed in New York last year (and which they're bringing to Princeton, N.J. in December; I've already procured my ticket), The Select presents only choice selections from Hemingway's novel, with these selections presented more or less verbatim from the text. What the Elevator Repair Service's adaptation adds, though, is a dreamlike memory quality to The Sun Also Rises that suggests what inspired Hemingway to write this sad, wistful story in the first place. Plus, the near-minimalist approach encourages a level of theatrical invention that sometimes enhances the text and sometimes merely calls attention to itself.

If you know the book well, The Select won't necessarily enhance your understanding of it...but as an illustration of the source material, it's uneven but often vivid. And that last line of dialogue is still as devastating on stage as it was on the page. (It's running at the New York Theatre Workshop through Oct. 9.)

Short Take: Tabloid (2010)

2011-09-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

In tackling the notorious "case of the manacled Mormon" in his new film, veteran documentary filmmaker Errol Morris puts Joyce McKinney—the woman who made all the headlines in the British press when she, as they reported it, kidnapped a Mormon named Kirk Anderson, chained him to a bed and proceeded to rape him—in the front and center of his Interrotron to tell her side of the story. On the surface, this sounds like a strategy that should yield revelations about the human being behind the sensational headlines...and I suppose the gambit works, if only to reveal the woman at the center of this nutty sex scandal to herself be locked into some of her own illusions (delusions?) about Kirk, about love, about celebrity.

But man, what a force of personality McKinney is! She so thoroughly believes in her own take on events—that, for instance, Kirk Anderson fully consented to the sex they had during those three days—that she can't help but hypnotize us, perhaps in spite of our better judgment. (Perhaps her magnetism pulverized Morris, too, in a sense: Tabloid is notably free of his usual reenactments. Who needs 'em, with McKinney as vivid a storyteller as she is?) This is not to say that Morris is completely taken in by her story, as evidenced not only in the handful of other voices offered (two British tabloid reporters, a Mormon, a Korean doctor) but in Morris's visual approach, which not only embodies a tabloid-like aesthetic, but also uses that similarly sensationalistic style to occasionally undermine and contradict McKinney's story, going so far as to suggest underlying societal causes for the illusions she still harbors. (Did 1950s media present that idealized an image of romance, family life? It, at the very least, seems to be one that McKinney bought hook, line and sinker.) And yet, for this viewer at least, Morris generally stays on the right side of the empathy/condescension fence; he's too fascinated by this creature to make her a target for easy mockery (though that's not to say he doesn't sometimes find her funny).

So this is not a film in which one should expect the truth of what really happened in the so-called "Mormon sex in chains" affair to come out; after all, we do get only one side of the story, ultimately. And yet that inherently limited perspective is perhaps the point of Tabloid. If Morris intrepidly seeks the truth of a muddy situation in a film like The Thin Blue Line (1988), in Tabloid he is content to simply muddy the waters of what we think we know about a given situation and the parties involved. In the end, the truth, such as it is, remains stubbornly outside of Morris's grasp—and for such a lurid and outrageous story, that may be the most unsettling thing of all.

Me, Myself and (Hurricane) Irene

2011-08-30T09:00:00.022-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—After all the media-induced hoopla over the supposedly apocalyptic implications of an approaching weather system, and after said implications so spooked New York City officials that they decided to stage an unprecedented complete shutdown of the MTA public-transportation system, the hurricane ominously named Irene came and passed by New York, at least, with generally a whimper, as what had been a Category 4 storm as it approached landfall while coming up the Atlantic weakened into a Category 1 upon touching down on land and eventually became a tropical storm. (Neighboring New Jersey, however, wasn't quite so lucky; as of now, there is still serious flooding on some major roadways, and many areas are still without power.)

Nevertheless, all of us prepared for the worst...especially Wall Street Journal employees, some of whom, upon hearing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announce the MTA shutdown midday Friday, immediately scrambled to make hotel reservations and/or other such last-minute accommodations in order to be in a more convenient position to be able to get to work on Sunday morning. As I've undoubtedly said before: Welcome to the journalism world, folks, where the news never sleeps and reporters and editors are always on call.

Actually, I was already preparing Thursday evening, when one of the editors I work with came over to my desk and suggested I start thinking about how I planned to be in the office on Sunday (because, it seems, they really really wanted me to be there! For once!). So that night I decided to be on the safe side and book a hotel immediately.

My company usually recommends Club Quarters, a discount hotel chain with which I assume Dow Jones has a special pricing deal or something like that. But when I tried to reserve a room there online, I discovered they were all booked up for Saturday night. Then someone sitting near me suggested I look into the Marriott Marquis located in Times Square; "they always have vacancies," he said. He was right...but, even though this particular hotel stay would ultimately be on the company's dime, I figured I might as well see if there were cheaper or similarly priced options even closer to my office. So, through the Marriott Marquis website, I looked into other Marriott hotels in the surrounding area....and came upon...

...the Algonquin Hotel, legendary for being the daily lunchtime meeting place during the 1920s of a slew of writers, critics and actors including such luminaries as writer/critic Dorothy Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, comedian Harpo Marx and playwright George S. Kaufman. The price for one night's stay seemed pretty close to that being offered by the Marriott Marquis, so...I decided to stay there. At the Algonquin. With this...

Natalie Ascencios's The Vicious Circle

...and this...

First time I've been at a hotel that offered a complimentary issue of The New Yorker!

...and this...

This was on the door of my room at the Algonquin.

...and this...

A portion of the wallpaper at the Algonquin—a virtual museum of New Yorker cartoons!

...and this...

This is what my hallway looked like. Jokes related to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining popped up often.

...and this:

Apparently, the Alongquin has a famous cat named Matilda. Well, here she is.

Not a bad way to spend an evening gearing for a supposed hurricane apocalypse, huh?

Yes, I just conceived and executed a blog post as an excuse to post photos of my stay at the Algonquin. I hope you, um, aren't too jealous...

Artistic Consumption Log, Aug. 22, 2011-Aug. 28, 2011

2011-08-29T09:00:00.002-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This was a relatively spare week for artistic consumption; blame both my efforts to come up with a schedule for this year's Toronto International Film Festival (yeah, I'm finally going—not as a critic, though, but as a paying civilian) and the weekend hurricane (of which I actually have more to say in an upcoming post) for said spareness. But hey: quality, not quantity, right? Even when it comes to art consumption!

Onwards and upwards, as they say:

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

Films

★ The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), screened at IFC Center in New York
Honestly, I'm not sure I really have much to say about this much-written-about film, only the fourth Fassbinder film I've seen. If anyone could maintain a stagey, theatrical approach and make it play cinematically, it's Fassbinder, with his typically elaborate mise-en-scène brilliantly relaying all sorts of themes, ideas and characterizations through purely visual inflections. As a psychological tug-of-war between two women—one wealthy yet yearning for human connection, the other ruthless and conniving—it's an endlessly fascinating, pitilessly funny, unsparing yet strangely compassionate film.

The Future (2011, Miranda July), screened at IFC Center in New York
My admiration for the intentions behind July's latest film—a whimsical yet melancholy meditation on growing old and dealing with life's disappointments—is tempered by my impression of the two main characters—an aimless couple played by July and Hamish Linklater—as basically just walking repositories of July's brand of aggressively twee quirk, and by the frequent irritation their barely recognizably human behavior evokes in me. Am I just being too literal? With the many magical-realist touches July throws into the film (her second after Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I still haven't seen, by the way), I suppose The Future isn't meant to be seen in the same way as, say, one of those documentary-style "mumblecore" films about similarly aimless younger folk. That surely has to be the case, because no one can come off as this cut off from anything resembling the real world, right? I suppose my big question is: Is July at all aware of how insufferably self-absorbed these two characters are, or is she too close to the characters—or, perhaps, too committed to her brand of quirk—to have the necessary distance to truly interrogate them?

All I know, based on one viewing, is that, for every moment in which I was rolling my eyes (a lot of the inane never-ending conversations; the scenes with Paw Paw, the narrating cat sporting July's squeaky voice), there were other moments where genuine pathos broke through the conceits and touched upon something palpably real, and sometimes even devastating. I suppose I'll eventually give this film another shot to see if there are enough of those truly affecting moments to make this film more than the sum of its parts.

★ House of Bamboo (1955, Samuel Fuller), screened at Film Forum in New York
I don't think this is a great film, but it's still a generally engrossing Japan-set crime drama with some gorgeously composed CinemaScope photography (courtesy of Joseph McDonald), interesting culture-clash elements and a terrific performance from Robert Ryan as the cold yet strangely magnetic villain opposite Robert Stack's relatively stiff hero. I must be dense, however, because the supposed homoerotic subtext between the two male leads that I kept reading about in reviews of the film (like this and this) afterward is something I didn't pay much attention to in the moment. Not that I think it necessarily adds to or takes away from the film significantly.

Music

★ The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972, David Bowie)
★ Aladdin Sane (1973, David Bowie)
Here's yet another case where I'm finding myself slightly preferring the follow-up to a consensus classic. Aladdin Sane is, at least on the basis of one introductory hearing, a very strange album: full of extravagantly weird tunes wrapped up in a wildly eclectic array of styles. It's far less cohesive than Ziggy Stardust, but its messiness is part of what makes it more interesting to listen to and ponder than its more "perfect" predecessor. On the other hand, Ziggy Stardust can be seen as perhaps Bowie's most direct expression of his obsessions with fame and style, so that one has that going for it, at least. Both are certainly worth hearing, in any case.

Theater

Zarkana (2011, François Girard), seen at Radio City Music Hall in New York
To a certain degree, I agree with Pia Catton, the Wall Street Journal critic/reporter who wrote a column about two months ago in its Greater New York section expressing her own befuddlement at Cirque du Soleil's continuing popularity and acclaim. I've only seen this one show of theirs, but, like Catton, all I see are a bunch of well-executed acrobatic stunts staged against the backdrop of some breathtakingly lavish and elaborate sets and costumes. It's not art, it's a glorified traveling sideshow, and those who claim that they're something more are, frankly, just being pretentious. But, notwithstanding some bland, ill-placed songs and extremely halfhearted attempts at a storyline, Zarkana—written and directed by Girard, who I know better as the director, among other things, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and The Red Violin (1998)—mostly delivers the goods. It never pretends to be anything other than a virtuosically empty spectacle; on that level, though, it succeeds. I enjoyed myself.

Literature

★ The Sun Also Rises (1926, Ernest Hemingway)
This is such a legendary work—a novel about the so-called "Lost Generation" of expatriate writers and artists in the 1920s, the kind of artists Gil Pender (mindlessly?) idolized in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris—that I don't really have much to add to the vast amounts of criticism written about it. It itself is kind of aimless as a narrative, but that aimlessness is all too appropriate to the kind of lifestyle that Hemingway so tenderly evokes in his own tough, spare style. Its final sentence just slays me, with the sense of loss and regret it so eloquently evokes in just a single line of dialogue—more affecting than all of his posthumously published A Moveable Feast, for my money.

Artistic Consumption Log, Aug. 15, 2011-Aug. 21, 2011

2011-08-22T18:00:00.003-04:00

NEW YORK—

Caught (1949)

Films

★ Breakdown (1997, Jonathan Mostow), screened at 92YTribeca in New York
No need for me to actually write up something for this...because I already have! Here!

"Robert Ryan," all films screened at Film Forum in New York
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959, Robert Wise)
★ Caught (1949, Max Ophüls)
★ Clash by Night (1952, Fritz Lang)
★ The Wild Bunch (1969, Sam Peckinpah) [second viewing]
The most notable discovery for me in this quartet of films with Robert Ryan in them was Caught, a film I've been meaning to see for years, probably since first hearing about the film in the context of the release of Martin Scorsese's The Aviator in 2004; Robert Ryan's paranoid millionaire character in the Ophüls films is said to be based on Howard Hughes. The film was worth the wait; it's a terrific film that points the way toward the great German-born director's later investigations of class-based fantasies versus grim realities in something like The Earrings of Madame de... (1953). Alas, it seems to be near-impossible to find on home video, for some reason; here's hoping it finds its way to DVD eventually.

3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (2011, Christopher Sun), screened at Village East Cinema in New York
The hit 3-D Category III softcore porn hit from Hong Kong has finally made its way to U.S. shores...and it turns out to be an occasionally amusing but mostly clumsy and even rather icky mess. This modern update of Michael Mak's 1991 hit Sex and Zen suffers mostly from a severe case of divided intentions. It wants us to have a good laugh over the outsize conceitedness of its main character, Wei Yangsheng (Hiro Hayama)—so obsessed with trying to become a better lover that he ends up divorcing his devoted wife (Leni Lan) in order to join the Prince of Ning (Tony Ho) at the Pavilion of Ultimate Bliss, bed a lot of hotties and get a transplant for a bigger penis—and then, in the considerably more violent and mean-spirited second hour, slap us in the face for enjoying the unabashed decadence. Frankly, though, it's hard to take its "love is all you need" moralizing all that seriously considering how entertaining it makes the spectacle of carefree sex. Plus, the sex isn't all the erotic, and the 3-D effects are generally of the "throwing shit at the audience" variety—which, by this point, I find more boring than fun. I'll take one memorable shot of a woman shoving her breasts in front of our faces in 3-D, but you can keep the rest.

Music

Space Oddity (1969, David Bowie)

★ The Man Who Sold the World (1970, David Bowie)
★ Hunky Dory (1971, David Bowie)
My David Bowie explorations continue. It's strange in retrospect that I find Space Oddity an incoherent mess with some great moments, and that I find Hunky Dory far more cohesive even though it is just as stylistically adventurous. Somehow, though there's a sonic consistency in the later album that Bowie fails to locate in the earlier one—either that, or Bowie was just that much of a better songwriter by the time he made Hunky Dory (Space Oddity has more than its fair shares of go-nowhere filler). In any case, I pretty much have "Space Oddity," "Changes," "Life on Mars?" and even The Man Who Sold the World's "Black Country Rock" stuck in my head on an endless rotation these days. It's probably no coincidence that most of these I heard originally in Portuguese as part of the soundtrack of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which remains my first gateway into the musical worlds of David Bowie, a bridge I've only recently decided to finally cross.

Short Take: Breakdown (1997)

2011-08-17T08:00:00.054-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

For the most part—in its first half, especially—Jonathan Mostow's thriller has the lean, brutal efficiency of a B-movie thriller from the 1930s and '40s, crossed with the elegant widescreen framing and attention to landscapes of a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. The characters aren't developed much beyond standard archetypes—with Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan playing all-American yuppies (with the distinctly unremarkable names of Jeff and Amy Taylor) who, while on a cross-country trip moving to San Francisco, eventually cross paths with a band of ruthless redneck villains led by the genuinely menacing Red Barr (J.T. Walsh)—but they're sketched in with some welcome detail by the actors embodying them, so that you find yourself as drawn into the human drama, so to speak, as much as you are thrilled by the action, which includes all sorts of beautifully orchestrated cat-and-mouse mayhem with cars, trucks and even a child wielding a rifle.

It's all wrought so skillfully and paced so breathlessly that I suppose it'd be churlish to lament the much richer film that Breakdown occasionally (very occasionally) suggests it might become but never delivers on. When Earl (M.C. Gainey), playing one of Walsh's henchmen, taunts Jeff at one point about his yuppie-ness, there is, briefly, the suggestion of class resentment fueling the behavior of these baddies—a promising hint of social commentary that's entirely dropped once Jeff turns the tables on his tormentors, as Hollywood formula dictates he must. And what at first looks to be a subversive attempt to humanize Red when Jeff follows him to his family home ends up basically going for nought once Jeff wreaks his expected havoc in trying to rescue his wife from near death. Maybe it's only fitting, then, that the film ends with a curlicue of nastiness involving a truck dropping from a bridge without so much as a comment on whether such a gruesome gesture was ever necessary in the first place. The audience is prepared for the villain's comeuppance, and Mostow goes the extra mile to oblige.

As action craftsmanship, however, Breakdown is a breathtaking achievement—literally. It's been a while since I felt like I was actually on the edge of my seat from start to finish, and this film accomplished that feat brilliantly, the cumulative visceral effect akin to a coil ready to snap at any moment. If nothing else, if you want to know what Roger Ebert means by a Bruised Forearm movie, see this immediately. Just, you know, adjust your expectations accordingly.

Screened at 92YTribeca in New York on Monday, Aug. 15

Artistic Consumption Log, Aug. 8, 2011-Aug. 14, 2011

2011-08-15T15:00:00.027-04:00

NEW YORK—

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Films

"Essential Pre-Code," all films screened at Film Forum in New York

Jewel Robbery (1932, William Dieterle)
★ Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
★ The Bowery (1933, Raoul Walsh)
She Done Him Wrong (1933, Lowell Sherman)
Random thoughts on this quartet of pre-Code films:

1. Kay Francis...daaaaaamn! She makes craven materialism sexy in Jewel Robbery alongside the ever-debonair William Powell, but she shows more emotional depth in a similar character in the classic Trouble in Paradise. Either way...she's smokin'! I mean, just look at this photo:

2. The Bowery is by far the burliest and manliest of the pre-Code films I saw at Film Forum, dealing as it does with a rivalry between two (real-life) blowhards, Chuck Connors (Wallace Beery) and Steve Brodie (George Raft). It's also the most blatantly racist; it opens with references to "chinks" and "coons." But, of course, that was probably merely a reflection of its 1890s New York setting. For all that, it's all still pretty lively and entertaining. (This, by the way, is the first Raoul Walsh film I've seen. If all of his films are as full of testosterone as this, then sure, sign me up on the bandwagon!)

3. I had never seen Mae West in a film before seeing She Done Him Wrong. Now that I have...is it just me, or is there a numbing sameness to West's delivery of her admittedly clever lines that gets a bit grating after a while? Not all of her lines of dialogue sexual innuendo, but West apparently delivers just about every single line as if it were. (I'm assuming her performance in her other big film of 1933, I'm No Angel, is no different?) Personally, I found Sherman's film—an adaptation of a play West herself wrote—more interesting for Cary Grant, here in one of his earliest roles playing a not-too-characteristic Grant role...at least, not until its ending.

"Taking Head," all films screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York
★ Italianamerican (1974, Martin Scorsese)
★ American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978, Martin Scorsese)
★ Numéro Zéro (1971, Jean Eustache)
★ Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007, Wang Bing)
All of these films are basically extended filmed interviews with one or two subjects. That doesn't sound too cinematic, does it? And yet...

The two short Scorsese documentaries—the earlier one about his parents' immigrant histories, the later one about a close friend and heroin addict—are the ones that feel the most like actual movies, Scorsese more than willing to illustrate certain moments in the interviews with cutaways to archival footage or still photographs. The Eustache and Wang films, however, deny viewers even the comfort of such conventional cinematic qualities, focusing almost entirely on their respective interview subjects as they talk, reminisce and emote. Both could arguably be just as effective as radio plays or audio books, but seeing the interview subject face-to-face does admittedly add a visual dimension—the possibly of scrutinizing a face as their words spew forth—to the enterprise that you wouldn't get from just hearing them.

Numéro Zéro, by dint of occasional bits of self-reflexive business—most memorably, a clapboard Eustache occasionally trots out during his interview with his grandmother to mark each reel change—comes the closest to turning into one of the film's main subjects the question of the validity of the talking-head approach as cinema. Wang Bing goes the other way in Fengming, however, and adopts an unobtrusive aesthetic of long takes and still camera set-ups that could almost be considered "literary," since it gives near-complete prominence to Fengming's words, trusting that her sometimes harrowing anecdotes will be enough to carry the film for all of its whopping 186 minutes.

I'm glad to have seen all four films, and the interview subjects are usually compelling enough to ride past questions of whether what we are watching are actual movies as opposed to merely filmed radio plays or audiobooks. Frankly, though, after seeing all of these films in close proximity to one another, I feel ready to swear off talking-heads documentaries of this type for a while.

American Boy, by the way, is especially worth seeing to hear Steven Prince recount an anecdote that would eventually become the famous needle-in-the-heart scene in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

"Robert Ryan," all films screened at Film Forum in New York
★ Crossfire (1947, Edward Dmytryk)
★ The Set-Up (1949, Robert Wise)
Ah, Robert Ryan. I usually give less thought to actors in films than I'd like to admit, but Ryan is one major exception—I always look forward to watching his coiled intensity in any film he's in. So I was excited to see that Film Forum was programming a near-complete retrospective of his work.

Crossfire is marred a bit by a turn toward heavy-handed preaching in its last act (in which Robert Young, playing a detective, lectures a young soldier about how discrimination is baaaaaad), but it's not enough to detract from the pungent atmosphere of Dmytryk's moody visuals (courtesy of director of photography J. Roy Hunt) and Ryan's chilling portrayal of an anti-Semitic soldier. He gives a richer performance in The Set-Up, though, as a down-on-his-luck boxer looking, just once, to relive some of his past glory. I had seen Wise's film previously on DVD, but revisiting it on a big screen Friday, I found it even better than I had remembered—a truly great film without reservations. (Plus, for all you 24 fans out there who think Kiefer Sutherland & co. pioneered the real-time format, here is arguably the earliest example of "real-time" cinema, with 72 minutes of screen time corresponding 72 minutes of diegetic story time.)

Here's to more Robert Ryan goodness in the coming weeks!

Cannibal Holocaust (1980, Ruggero Deodato), screened at Landmark Sunshine Theater in New York
Well, I didn't barf.

Actually, I do think Deodato's infamous exploitation film has genuine points of interest beyond its notoriety as an extreme gross-out. It's an early precursor to The Blair Witch Project, with its second half consisting mostly of footage of a bunch of unprincipled documentary makers exploiting Third World tribesmen for the sake of "entertainment." They end up getting their just desserts—but does the bloodlust this narrative inspires in us suggest that we in the audience are not that much better than the people on the screen? ("I wonder who the real cannibals are," star Robert Kerman didactically asks in voiceover as the film ends with a shot of the building in which I work.) Or is that just a cover to add a spurious intellectual patina to the filmmaker's own disgusting imagination? Me, I find the film fascinatingly thorny and genuinely thought-provoking in that regard; others will find Cannibal Holocaust indefensibly hypocritical and vile. It may well be an artistic failure (my ambivalence is reflected in the absence of a recommending star next to the title), but for those who are brave enough to try it, I honestly think it is worth experiencing...once, at least. (Those who are sensitive to animal cruelty, though, will probably want to avoid this movie altogether; animals were definitely harmed during the making of this film.)

Music

★ 劉美君 (1986, 劉美君)
Sorry, Shirley Kwan, but Prudence Liew—another Cantopop singing star from the 1980s—has officially captured my imagination more than you did in your first two albums. Here's a voice that isn't pretty in the conventional sense; "no-nonsense" might be the best way to describe it. But it feels almost soulful in spite of, or maybe because of, its occasional bits of awkwardness. Plus, she seems to have a thing for jazzy rhythms and harmonies, as the last two tracks of this legitimately great debut album most explicitly indicate (and which her later albums bear out more extensively). That's always a plus, in my book. Nevertheless, this album—still her most popular—is remembered mostly for its first track, "最後一夜 (The Last Night)" an evocative, dark-toned dance song that remains her best known hit. Check it out (if you're willing to put up with the blurry video quality):

★ David Bowie (1967, David Bowie)
I may not have been crazy about the Bowie-led The Man Who Fell to Earth when I saw it at Film Forum weeks ago, but Nicolas Roeg's film did, at the very least, re-awaken my interest in finally delving into Bowie's recorded musical output, of which I have only superficial familiarity beyond some of his major hits (plus Seu Jorge's Brazilian covers in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). As usual, I started at the beginning with his eponymous debut album, a collection of theatrical-sounding numbers that bear only passing resemblances to the shapeshifting glam-rocker we would all get to know in the 1970s. Still, these songs are never less than tuneful, and some of them, like "We Are Hungry Men," are just straight-up bizarre—in a good way, of course. An interesting listen.

Literary Interlude, "Irony and Pity" Edition

2011-08-12T09:00:00.008-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

As I [Jake Barnes] went down-stairs I heard Bill [Gorton] singing, "Irony and Pity. When you're feeling . . . Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity. Oh, give them Irony. When they're feeling . . . Just a little irony. Just a little pity . . ." He kept on singing until he came down-stairs. The tune was: "The Bells are Ringing for Me and my Gal." I was reading a week-old Spanish paper.

"What's all this irony and pity?"

"What? Don't you know about Irony and Pity?"

"No. Who got it up?"

"Everybody. They're mad about it in New York. It's just like the Fratellinis used to be."

The girl came in with the coffee and buttered toast. Or, rather, it was bread toasted and buttered.

"Ask her if she's got any jam," Bill said. "Be ironical with her."

"Have you got any jam?"

"That's not ironical. I wish I could talk Spanish."

The coffee was good and we drank it out of big bowls. The girl brought in a glass dish of raspberry jam.

"Thank you."

"Hey! that's not the way," Bill said. "Say something ironical. Make some crack about Primo de Rivera."

"I could ask her what kind of a jam they think they've gotten into in the Riff."

"Poor," said Bill. "Very poor. You can't do it. That's all. You don't understand irony. You have no pity. Say something pitiful."

"Robert Cohn."

"Not so bad. That's better. Now why is Cohn pitiful? Be ironic."

He took a big gulp of coffee.

"Aw, hell!" I said. "It's too early in the morning."

"There you go. And you claim you want to be a writer, too. You're only a newspaper man. An expatriated newspaper man. You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity."

"Go on," I said. "Who did you get this stuff from?"

"Everybody. Don't you read? Don't you ever see anybody? You know what you are? You're an expatriate. Why don't you live in New York? Then you'd know these things. What do you want me to do? Come over here and tell you every year?"

—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

If "irony and pity" are what it takes to be a great writer, well...

I'd like to think I have a reasonable amount of "pity," if by "pity" one means a sense of humanity and empathy. I'm not sure any artist worth serious consideration doesn't have that quality, to a certain extent. "Irony," though...I dunno. These days, I feel like there's quite possibly too much irony out there, and too much of the distance, emotional or otherwise, that that kind of snark and sarcasm suggests. Sincerity almost seems undervalued these days. You have to be serious about something, not just crack wise about everything!

Maybe "detachment" is what Bill Gorton really meant? (But, of course, "irony and pity" as a phrase certainly rolls off the tongue easier.)

Artistic Consumption Log, Aug. 1, 2011-Aug. 7, 2011

2011-08-08T19:30:00.004-04:00

NEW YORK—This past week was a rather light one in artistic consumption, mostly because I spent my weekend back home in East Brunswick, N.J., hanging out with a dear hometown friend back in the area for a week from Singapore. Still, I managed to expose myself to some good stuff, all of which I've recounted below, as usual.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Films

★ Dragon Inn (1992, Raymond Lee), seen at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.
I missed this at New York Asian Film Festival last month, so I'm grateful to BAM—with, I assume, the blessing of the fine folks at Subway Cinema—for programming this last week. I can't speak to any similarities or differences of this remake to King Hu's 1967 Taiwanese original, having not seen the earlier film; on its own terms, though, the later Dragon Inn—produced by Tsui Hark, and with action choreography courtesy of Duel to the Death director Ching Siu-tung—is reasonably entertaining stuff. It might have been a masterpiece if the relationship between the two romantic leads—Chow Wai-on (Tony Leung Ka-fai) and Yau Mo-yan (Brigitte Lin)—didn't feel so rote; Maggie Cheung, as Jade King, the owner of the titular inn in which much of the action takes place, has the far more interesting character and story arc, as a conniving woman who grows out of her own political apathy partly as a result of her own personal attraction to Chow. There's no doubt about the action sequences, however, all of them as deliriously inventive as the best that Hong Kong cinema has to offer.

★ Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander Mackendrick), seen on Criterion Blu-ray at home in East Brunswick, N.J.
Yes, it has taken me this long to finally expose myself to the manifold glories of Alexander Mackendrick's deliciously cynical noir satire of journalistic corruption and ruthless, power-hungry social climbing. But yes, it is truly brilliant, right down to Elmer Bernstein's fantastically multilayered score, by turns brassily ironic and meltingly sincere. If you haven't seen this film yet, Rupert Murdoch...

★ Beginners (2010, Mike Mills), seen at Montgomery Cinemas in Skillman, N.J.
Oh hey, I actually caught up with a new release this weekend! (Does it really take weekends back home in New Jersey for me to actually catch up with new releases? Maybe...) This is a good one, too: a complex, idiosyncratic and painfully personal evocation of one man's messy attempts to come to terms with his father's death—a father who, after his mother died, finally came out of the closet and tried to live life again, even in the throes of terminal cancer. It's true that Christopher Plummer's scenes as the father are generally more interesting than the "present-day" (it's set in 2003) scenes with his shell-shocked son (Ewan Macgregor) and the oddball love interest he meets (Mélanie Laurent)...but even in those scenes, writer/director Mike Mills (whose previous film was Thumbsucker) is able to generate a mournful, reflective vibe that I found often moving—so much so that its occasional lapses into preciousness (dog subtitles? really?) aren't enough to damage the whole. This film is so low-key that it feels fragile to the touch! Perhaps that's appropriate, though, because Mills is dealing with some emotionally fragile subject matter—and for the most part he's willing to stare at it right in the face rather than evade it with cutesy quirk.

I really should write at length on Beginners, because there's much to parse here. For now, allow me to suggest that Beginners might actually make for an interesting double bill with Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, at least as far as formally inventive, meditative approaches to grief is concerned. Mills's gaze may be less grand in scale than Malick's, but that doesn't mean it's no less ambitious. Maybe I'll develop this line of thinking in a later post. Maybe.

Games Gamblers Play (1974, Michael Hui), seen on Fortune Star DVD at home in East Brunswick, N.J.
Along with his brothers Samuel and Ricky, Michael Hui—especially with his commercially popular slapstic comedies for the Hong Kong film studio Golden Harvest, of which Games Gamblers Play was his first—helped shape the region's film industry into the juggernaut it became in the 1970s and '80s. Games Gamblers Play suggests why, at least in spots. This episodic, comic look at an oft-imprisoned con man (Michael) and a wannabe con artist who befriends and idolizes him (Samuel Hui) features an undercurrent of blue-collar frustration over the fact that this is the kind of criminal behavior that some working-class folk in Hong Kong are forced to engage in as a result of bureaucracy and poor working conditions. Some of the lightly subversive appeal of Games Gamblers Play comes in the way Hui slyly aligns our sympathies with these criminals, to the point that we're rooting for them to succeed, even as the authorities—or even their own character flaws—threaten to bring them down. I imagine that Hui's later films will develop these themes in a funnier, tighter and more coherent package than this one, which is a bit too uneven and slackly paced to be as great as it could have been. But it certainly isn't lacking in amusing moments—a sequence involving alligators and a TV game show is a particular highlight—and it has some great music in it courtesy of Samuel, who also scored popular success as a musician during the '70s and '80s.

Music

難得有情人 (1989, 關淑怡)

Meh. This second album from Shirley Kwan (whose first album I briefly wrote about in last week's log) has a great first side (the title track is infectious) but a far less interesting second side. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for it (frankly, I was in a really crappy mood for much of last week). Anyway, her voice is still spectacular...and so is she, physically speaking.

Here's the title track, by the way, which roughly translates to "Happy Are Those in Love." Love? Yeah, I could use some of that these days:

EDIT (12:53 A.M., Aug. 9, 2011): As "The Social Media Guru" reminded me in the comments section, I did see a band named Root Glen perform a live show on Saturday night at Rolf's Restaurant in Warren, N.J. The Guru, however, is a good friend of mine from my East Brunswick schooling days, and his brother is a member of the band, so I don't feel I can offer comment as even a halfway objective party. So I won't, other than to say I enjoyed their set and that you can check out the band's website here.

Oh, and this photo was taken at that show:

The band has an original song called "Dieting Bears." That partly explain the photo above.

Literature

★ The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956, Yukio Mishima)

If there was one criticism I'd make of the stage adaptation of Mishima's 1956 novel that I saw a few weeks ago at Lincoln Center (and which I wrote about here), it's that, even at its most dazzling, it couldn't help but feel like a mere approximation of the seemingly bottomless psychological depths of the source material. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a very interior book (it's narrated by its main character, Mizoguchi, in the first person, after all), and thus contains a lot of specific nuances that the more visual/abstract medium of theater can't always be relied on to successfully convey. So while I enjoyed that stage production, I would add that one's appreciation for it would be enhanced by a foreknowledge of Mishima's novel.

As for the novel itself, one's reaction to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion will probably depend on your reaction to Mizoguchi; he isn't a particularly likable type, and Mishima rarely stoops to softening his more curiously neurotic edges. I think he's one of the most intriguing figures I've encountered in a work of art in quite some time: a man so warped by his childhood experiences, his stutter and his loneliness that he's developed a distinctly personal way of viewing the world around him, especially when it comes to what he considers "beautiful." Sometimes the man is just plain inscrutable—but for me, that just adds to the fascination.

This, by the way, is the first Mishima novel I've read. I look forward to reading his other work—and eventually getting to his film Patriotism and then Paul Schrader's 1985 biopic of the writer.

Theater

★ The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944, Bertolt Brecht), performed at the Lion Theater in New York

"Brechtian" is a term I've heard tossed around a lot, especially in film and theater reviews...but until last week, I had never actually exposed myself to the dramatic work of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), the German playwright who inspired the term. So when a friend of mine who lives in my apartment building in Brooklyn, N.Y., told me he was going to be in a production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, of course I was intrigued. So I saw it last week, and the experience was...interesting.

Brecht's most famous innovation essentially had to do with tearing down a theatergoer's expectations of emotional identification in a play by introducing all sorts of distancing devices—characters addressing the audience directly, songs interrupting dramatic action, and so on. His driving thesis behind what he called "epic theatre" was that by placing such barriers, an audience member would be shaken out of his complacency and thus be more open to receiving political and social ideas, and possibly be more inspired to effect change on the outside world once one left the theater.

That is not to say that Brecht's plays are merely cold and intellectual in effect. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, at least, Brecht imbues his intellectual ambitions with a playful sense of humor that is certainly entertaining even as it highlights the kinds of class and political inequalities he wished to highlight. And for me, at least, it even somewhat worked as an emotional drama—though the parts that moved me (anything involving Grusha, the peasant who is forced to care for a baby that a high-class mother carelessly leaves behind) may not necessarily have moved others in the audience. Maybe the most bracing thing about Brecht's conception of theater is its refusal to hold the audience's collective hand; what you get out of it depends on what you personally bring to it.

I can't say this generally fine production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle necessarily brought out the inner activist in me—but I found the experience genuinely scintillating and look forward to seeing more live Brecht.

Artistic Consumption Log, July 26, 2010-July 31, 2010

2011-08-01T08:00:00.629-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Dress, Widows of Culloden, autumn/winter 2006-7, Alexander McQueen

Films

★ All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse), screened at IFC Center in New York
This was my first time seeing this legendary choreographer/filmmaker's own variation on 8½...and yeah, it's pretty brilliant. But then, this is the kind of extravagantly personal filmmaking that often moves me however successful or unsuccessful the end result: the kind of film in which its director dares to put all of his fears, hopes and contradictions onto the screen without giving a damn as to what an audience will make of it all. That last part is rather ironic in this particular case, being that Joe Gideon (the late, great Roy Scheider) is himself very much a crowd-pleasing entertainer and showman, with as much of an eye on his audience as on his own artistic obsessions.

The danger of this kind of deeply personal filmmaking is that an artist will make a work so insular in nature that it'll leave the audience out in the cold completely. Frankly, I've always thought Federico Fellini fell into that trap in 8½—the film that pretty much wrote the book on this kind of confessional filmmaking, a canonical work that I've admittedly always admired without ever fully embracing. In the case of All That Jazz, however, I couldn't help but identify with Gideon's pursuit of artistic perfection, for all the serious defects in his personal life (his womanizing, his heavy drug use, and so on). He wants to create great art, but he also wants to be loved and admired—how to reconcile those two impulses? To Fosse's credit, he never hits upon a solution to that probably insoluble question. Instead, he just dramatizes those conflicting impulses with some of the most amazing theatrical spectacle ever filmed, all seductively captured by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (a frequent Fellini collaborator). Seriously: Why have I taken this long to finally encounter the famously raunchy "Air-rotica" number? It's awesome.

"Essential Pre-Code," all screenings at Film Forum in New York
★ Beauty and the Boss (1932, Roy Del Ruth)
The Mouthpiece (1932, Elliot Nugent & James Flood)
★ Possessed (1931, Clarence Brown)
★ Red-Headed Woman (1932, Jack Conway)
The Public Enemy (1931, William Wellman)
★ Blonde Crazy (1931, Roy Del Ruth)
This film series began earlier this month, but only during the past week was I finally able to catch some of these pre-Hays Code films at Film Forum. It's amazing just how potently racy these films remain even to this day!

That's all I'll say for now; I think I'd like to devote a bit more space to some of these films in a future post. For now, though...well, some of you may notice I didn't give a star of recommendation to The Public Enemy, the much acclaimed 1931 gangster classic with James Cagney playing the nasty, ruthless Tom Powers, a character who is supposed to epitomize a certain problematic strain of American society at the time that Wellman's film aimed to capture, as an opening and closing title crawl oh-so-helpfully makes explicit. Not that most viewers these days, I imagine, care all that much about the film's pretensions to social commentary; whenever Cagney is onscreen, we're surely not thinking about sociology, and instead thinking all about the electricity of a Hollywood idol in a star-making role. He is great, to be sure. And yet, Cagney aside, I'm not sure how well The Public Enemy has really worn. Maybe I've just seen too many gangster movies of this type since this one was made for me to find Tom Powers's rise and fall to be all that fresh or interesting to me personally.

So yeah, I honestly can't say I was all that crazy about The Public Enemy, despite its reputation. This showed on a double-bill on Saturday with another film with both Cagney and Joan Blondell, Blonde Crazy...and frankly, I preferred that lighter, sexier, funnier confection to The Public Enemy.

★ Die Hard 2 (1990, Renny Harlin), screened at IFC Center in New York
Readers of this blog will know that I hold this sequel to the indisputably great Die Hard (1988) in higher esteem than generally seems to be the case among most of the cinephiles/film critics I know (as I wrote here, I find this to be the wild-child Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom of the Die Hard franchise). So when I saw that IFC Center was screening this over the weekend as part of a new midnight-movie series of supposed "Sequels That Don't Suck" (a series that, at least so far, includes stuff like Back to the Future Part II, French Connection II, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Escape from L.A. as part of its lineup—sequels around which there is no clear consensus, as far as I can see, as to whether they are, in fact, good sequels or not), of course I jumped at the chance to see it on a big screen, having only ever seen it on television.

It was slightly disappointing, then, to see that IFC Center chose to screen Die Hard 2 in one of their smaller theaters; a film as grand in scale as this demands as big a screen as possible, perhaps even more so than its predecessor. Considering how sparsely attended the screening was on Friday night, though, I guess the smaller venue made sense...but then, the sparse attendance was disappointing to see, too. This definitely had none of the electricity of seeing the original Die Hard on Christmas Eve at New York's Landmark Sunshine theater last year.

Thankfully, the print, though hardly pristine, was quite watchable (the print of Die Hard that I saw last year sometimes came perilously close to being unwatchable, alas). Seeing Die Hard 2 projected in 35mm enhanced my appreciation of the appropriately hellish look cinematographer Oliver Wood captures via its many low-light interiors and exteriors—a contrast to the purposefully industrial, earthy tones of Jan De Bont's cinematography in the original.

The film still holds up as a lean, mean action-movie machine, its second hour still smashingly effective as a furiously paced rollercoaster ride of thrills and spills. So yeah, I'll continue to defend it. That said, it's probably about time for me to take a looooong detox from Die Hard 2. After countless viewings over the years, there's only so many new facets to discover about this film, and the initial thrills have long since worn off. (I could probably do movie-oke with this film by now!)

I need a new Bruised Forearm action epic to obsess over. Oh hey, Tsui Hark's Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain is screening again at BAM, I hear...?

In the meantime: This is probably the most thorough defense of Die Hard 2 I have yet encountered.

Music

★ BiRd-BrAiNs (2009, tUnE-yArDs)

★ W H O K I L L (2011, tUnE-yArDs)

The lettering of tUnE-yArDs sure looks insufferably twee, huh? Merrill Garbus: strange lady...but what amazing music! BiRd-BrAiNs has a lo-fi approach and vibe that I find quite bracing; apparently recorded on a cassette through a handheld voice recorder, Garbus wholeheartedly embraces the sonic distortion such relatively primitive means of recording bring, and the result is startlingly fresh and original. tUnE-yArDs's latest album, W H O K I L L, may have a cleaner sound to it than BiRd-BrAiNs, yet there's no sense of compromise here—and one listen to the lyrics of its opening cut, "My Country," suggests she's tackling more ambitious subject matter than previously. As for Garbus herself, her voice is utterly fascinating in its plainness and androgyny. "Fascinating" certainly describes these two albums as well.

★ This Year's Model (1978, Elvis Costello)

Disappointing discovery: This album doesn't quite work as well as I expected as running music. With the exception of "Little Triggers" and "Night Rally," the beats are pretty hard-driving...but apparently not hard-driving enough while running at reasonably high speed on a treadmill. I don't generally need music to, um, pump me up to run harder, but I tried to adjust treadmill speeds to the various cuts of This Year's Model this past week; the experiment, alas, wasn't exactly the success I hoped for. Back to ignoring musical beats and just treating music as background noise, I guess. This, by the way, is still the English singer-songwriter's best album from his 1977-'86 Columbia glory years.

冬戀 (1989, 關淑怡)

"關淑怡" is "Kwan Suk Yee," or the Cantopop artist generally known as Shirley Kwan. Western viewers may know her best as the singer of "Forget Him," the song Leon Lai's disillusioned killer requests to be played on a jukebox as a good-bye message to his "partner" Michelle Reis in Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels. (The song, by the way, is a sultry modern remake of a popular Cantonese tune from the 1970s recorded by another Chinese pop legend, Teresa Teng.) But Shirley Kwan has a catalog of albums that goes back to 1989 with the release of 冬戀 (Winter Love). And as someone who loves Fallen Angels to death, naturally I was curious to finally dip into the singer's back catalog. So, as usual when I start exploring an artist's work, I started right from the beginning.

冬戀 is a solid album overall, with a reasonable amount of lyrical and stylistic variety among its 10 cuts (in other words, they ain't all love ballads). It's nothing truly remarkable, though, and for once some of the synth-heavy late-1980s production sounds rather icky to me. The only thing worth nothing about it, really, is that Kwan's voice was apparently much less breathy in her early years than it would become by the time she recorded "Forget Him" in 1995. It's no less alluring, however.

Kwan supposedly becomes a more interesting and adventurous artist from her next album, 難得有情人 (Happy Are Those in Love) onwards. We shall see...or, at least, I shall see. I'll leave it up to you to determine if you actually care about this or not.

Art

★ Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

When I heard that British fashion designer Alexander McQueen had died last year, my initial response was: Who is Alexander McQueen? I had never heard of the guy before; that's how little I have paid attention to the world of fashion over the years. So when I heard a few months ago that this exhibit was coming to the Met, I figured this would be a good opportunity to, at the very least, to get a sense of why this fashion designer was so celebrated, possibly even more so than other big names in fashion like Tommy Hilfiger, Gianni Versace, Christian Dior, Vivienne Tam, etc. Plus, it would probably be my first sustained exposure to the art of fashion ever.

So upon realizing that Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty was only a week away from closing for good, I finally decided, on a Saturday afternoon in which I found myself actually having no set plans to speak of, to go check it out.

It's perhaps too much to call this a life-changing experience...but after waiting on a long line for about 75 minutes to get into this exhibit and then spending the next 75 minutes going through one packed room after another, I walked out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that night feeling that familiar but glorious high of having my senses refreshed and my worldview permanently expanded. In this case, I actually found myself paying serious attention to the clothes people—well, women, mostly—were wearing as I sat in front of the museum steps and watched them passing by. I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and reflected on clothing! In fact, I don't think I've ever done that!

The slippery dividing line between humans and animals was one of McQueen's major themes, and he expressed this in many different ways and styles, implicitly and explicitly. Some of his dresses and accessories lean toward the Gothic in style; others are lathered with extravagant animal designs (with some even featuring bird feathers and such to add to the animalistic nature of the design). All of it evokes a mind fascinated with the exploring the darker recesses of human existence and expressing his morbid obsessions onto clothing, a medium that we see in front of us everyday. I mean, really: What better way is there to get all of us to confront the darkness that resides within all of us? Much more so than books, films, music, sculptures, paintings, etc., clothing is something we all wear on our own person. You're wearing that darkness on you; until you take those clothes off, there's no escaping it. The more I think about that idea, the more brilliant I find it, especially with designs as boldly creepy and unnerving as McQueen's could be.

There's tons more to say about McQueen's art, but I'm not here to write a whole book about it. So I'll just end by saying: It runs until August 7. Don't let the large crowds stop you from taking in an overwhelming, eye-opening artistic experience.

Artistic Consumption Log, July 18, 2011-July 24, 2011

2011-07-25T08:00:00.229-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

World on a Wire (1973)

Films

★ Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003, Abbas Kiarostami), screened on DVD at my apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y.
I'm taking part in a "directrospective" of Kiarostami's work over at this site run by one of my roommates, so a proper review of this will be forthcoming.

"Prince of the City: Remembering Sidney Lumet," all films screened at Walter Reade Theater in New York
★ The Offence (1972, Sidney Lumet)
The Pawnbroker (1964, Sidney Lumet)
Honestly, I could never really work up much of an interest in The Pawnbroker, which is about a Holocaust survivor (played effectively by Rod Steiger) who has developed such a cynical view of humanity that he has basically shut himself off from any meaningful human relationships. It felt too much like filmed theater at the start, and even when Lumet tries to jazz it up stylistically with fancy editing tricks, even those felt too much like Alain Resnais-lite for me to find it all that interesting. Plus, what is up with the Quincy Jones score, which often works at cross-purposes with the material in ways that seem almost counterproductive to the fundamental seriousness of the material?

The Offence, which Lumet made in Britain, is a more impeccably crafted work, and a lot more engrossing both in style and substance. It's a somber examination of what led Detective Sergeant Johnson (a gritty and intense Sean Connery) to kill a suspected child molester during an interrogation; it doubles back and forth in time to explore the circumstances, psychological and otherwise, building up to that fateful moment. In some ways, it anticipates Lumet's last film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), in both its temporal hopscotching and in its final shot, in which a tragic event becomes engulfed in a bright white light before the end credits roll. Is this Lumet's way of suggesting a subtle spiritual dimension to these two films—the possibility of a higher power that will ultimately be the judge of these troubled human beings?

★ World on a Wire (1973, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), screened at IFC Center in New York

Having already seen the film during its North American premiere run at the Museum of Modern Art last year (I wrote about it briefly at my blog here), I went to see this again mostly to accompany a friend of mine from East Brunswick, N.J., as he had been dying to see Fassbinder's fascinating made-for-TV science-fiction epic for a long while. It remains an impressive achievement, though this time I found myself less fascinated by the sci-fi and philosophical aspects than simply by its human and formal elements. Apparently one can always count on Fassbinder to find endlessly inventive ways to stage, frame and shoot a scene; his mise-en-scene rarely lacks for inspiration. His frequent use of mirror reflections is especially interesting; I really ought to do, like, a video or image essay about Fassbinder's use of mirrors in World on a Wire.

Plus, thanks to this film, I now have this stuck in my head:

Music

★ Helplessness Blues (2011, Fleet Foxes)
With maybe a couple of exceptions, this Seattle-based American indie folk band doesn't really do a whole lot in this sophomore effort that they didn't already do in their even finer 2008 self-titled debut. It's still a pleasant listen, though...and in its two longest tracks, "The Plains / Bitter Dancer" and "The Shrine / An Argument," both featuring suite-like structures and fairly abrupt changes in time signatures and styles, Robin Pecknold & co. show a greater lyrical and musical ambition than anything on Fleet Foxes. Their sounds retains a charming retro quality that satisfies this particular old soul plenty.

★ Lucinda Williams and Amos Lee, seen live at the Beacon Theatre in New York
Terrific show overall, with Williams on generally fine form (with the exception of a few bum high notes in "Hot Blood"), and with about half her set devoted to songs from her 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road—still her best to date.

Theater

★ The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (2011, Amon Miyamoto), performed at Rose Theater in New York
As a theater piece, Amon Miyamoto's adaptation of Yukio Mishima's famous novel is loaded with dazzlingly imaginative stage effects...but, rather than just being empty flash, they are all put in the service of conjuring up an interior portrait of a deeply obsessive, neurotic character, obsessed by the elusive beauty of the titular temple for reasons that not even he himself can quite fathom. Though there is some voiceover narration here, Miyamoto, for the most part, trusts the material and his actors to suggest a lot of what Mishima explains, psychologically speaking, in his book. Still, a knowledge of the book—a book I started but didn't finish in time for the Friday night performance I went to—would probably be helpful in fully appreciating Miyamoto's achievement here. (This, by the way, was an all-Japanese production, so it was performed in Japanese with English supertitles.)