I wrote a short appreciation of the director Anthony Minghella when he died last month at the age of 54. I have a new, longer piece on the filmmaker in the April 21 issue of The Weekly Standard (which has been given a wonderful headline, by the way):
Some might think that Minghella will be remembered as a capable but not particularly creative interpreter of other people's work. That's like calling Alfred Hitchcock or David Lean mere translators rather than the genre-changing geniuses they were. Of course, Minghella hasn't left a legacy as rich as theirs, but his body of work is stunning, and includes one film every bit as masterful as their best.Minghella's films--besides the instant classic The English Patient, his best known are Cold Mountain (2003) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)--are a varied lot, but just about every one features the music of Bach.
"I listen to Bach every day," he told me when I interviewed him at the Toronto International Film Festival a year and a half ago, noting that he keeps two photographs on his desk: one of Samuel Beckett and the other of the pianist and Bach interpreter Glenn Gould. (Minghella was a very learned man, but wore his learning lightly.) Like many English actors and directors, he began his career in theater and television; he actually got his start as a student at the University of Hull writing incidental music for the theater. He wanted to become a pianist or a composer but didn't feel he had the talent. Instead, more than any other contemporary filmmaker, he brought a distinctly musical sensibility to the cinema...
In today's Washington Times:
I reviewed the French flick The Duchess of Langeais:
It's not easy to make Balzac, at his most melodramatic, engrossing on the modern screen. With The Duchess of Langeais, Jacques Rivette not only accomplishes this feat, the French director suggests a new model for the literary adaptation, one that keeps some of the wordy beauty of the novel while taking advantage of the poetic possibilities of the cinema...
I reviewed Smart People, opening wide after Sundance buzz:
Vanessa Wetherhold (Ellen Page) and her father, Lawrence (Dennis Quaid), don't feel they have to do charitable works or even be nice because their intellectual accomplishments contribute enough to the world.In the Media Room column, I look at the DVD release of Fortysomething, which starred and was partly directed by Hugh Laurie:Two people arrive on the scene and turn that assumption on its head in Smart People, a film that, despite agreeable performances and some witty lines, is all too predictable...
Fans of Hugh Laurie and there must be many, given that he was just named America's fourth favorite TV personality in a Harris Poll will want to snap up this British series that ran for six episodes in 2003. Don't expect the same man that plays the brash, overconfident American doctor Gregory House in Fox's medical drama "House," though. In Fortysomething, Mr. Laurie again plays a doctor, but this time a bumbling, insecure one who's facing his forties with some fear...
And while I'm playing catch-up, I realized I forgot to post a link to my review of Hari Kunzru's novel My Revolutions, which ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer a couple Sundays ago:
How does fervent idealism morph into at-any-cost fundamentalism? What makes a radical cross the line to revolutionary? What goes on in the mind of a terrorist?In My Revolutions, his third novel, British author Hari Kunzru offers one answer to those questions, which have particularly troubled us over the last 6 1/2 years. His novel focuses on just one man, who, in his quest to make people's lives better, found himself threatening those lives, but its insight and implications reach much further.
My Revolutions is no boring political parable, though. Kunzru is not just a thinker, but an impressively talented storyteller and stylist as well...
From Friday's Washington Times--
I wrote a feature on how high-definition television is spurring a new industry -- high-def makeup:
The high-definition revolution calls for a slew of new products big flat-screen televisions, pricey DVD players, surround sound stereo systems, state-of-the-art makeup.Makeup?
High-def TV provides an unprecedented clarity of picture. Anyone who's bought an HDTV has compared regular and HD channels and marveled at the difference in quality. When the camera catches an actor in close-up, it's no exaggeration to say you can practically see the person's pores.
And therein lies the problem. The same technology that lets you see a perfect sunset in jaw-dropping detail also lets you see an imperfect face in jaw-dropping detail. Wrinkles and blemishes are suddenly visible. Actresses that look perfect in airbrushed magazine photographs or the more forgiving medium of film begin to look a little more like the rest of us in high-definition.
The cosmetics industry is responding...
For the Media Room column on new DVD releases, I spoke with Robert Elswit, the cinematographer who won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood:
Robert Elswit is a busy guy. While directors rarely make more than one film a year, cinematographers are often responsible for two or more. If you're Mr. Elswit, both might get Oscar nominations for best picture he was the director of photography for There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton. Now he's filming Duplicity, Tony Gilroy's follow-up to Michael Clayton, but instead of kicking back on his day off, he's spending it talking to reporters, promoting the DVD release of There Will Be Blood...
I reviewed Priceless, a delightful French flick starring Audrey Tautou and Gad Elmaleh:
Priceless, which centers on a woman who makes her living dating rich men and the impoverished man who loves her but ends up becoming her "colleague," will inevitably be compared with Breakfast at Tiffany's.Like the exclusive south-of-France resorts in which the French flick takes place, though, Priceless is in a class of its own...
From last Friday's Washington Times--
I reviewed Stop-Loss, the latest Iraq War-themed film:
War-on-terror-themed films, on the whole, didn't do well at the box office last year. Although these movies were made by acting powerhouses including Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep (Lions for Lambs) and writing-directing powerhouses including Crash's Paul Haggis (In the Valley of Elah) audiences proved uninterested in having their entertainment mirror their headlines.I wrote the second item in the Beyond Hollywood column, an interview with British actor Jim Sturgess:Kimberly Peirce, with her first film since her 1999 debut, Boys Don't Cry, might believe her movie will have a different fate. Perhaps she would point out that Stop-Loss isn't merely a war film but something of a fast-paced thriller, too. Maybe she would argue that Stop-Loss isn't an antiwar film but a pro-troop one.
Elah could have made those same claims, however, and they didn't help. What Stop-Loss has that the other films didn't, though, is a first-rate young cast that could draw in the younger crowd. It's too bad the script they were given, co-written by Miss Peirce with Mark Richard, is so riddled with ridiculousness...
Jim Sturgess is on the brink of stardom. He has top billing on a big-budget film opening today, 21, while appearing in a smaller role in another film currently in wide release, the period drama The Other Boleyn Girl. He was named one of Entertainment Weekly's "30 Under 30" actors just last month.The 26-year-old English actor is quick to point out he's no overnight success, but he notes that when success starts happening, it starts happening pretty fast. "It comes in a big tidal wave," he says in an interview in the District earlier this month. But "I didn't just fall out of bed and someone gave me the opportunity to be in a film," he quickly adds. "It's a process that's gone on all my life, really."
Anyone who saw last year's Across the Universe could have predicted this tidal wave. Mr. Sturgess was the best thing about the Beatles musical; the virtual unknown with the boyish face who could sing and act flawlessly was the find of the year.
Some actors carefully plan out their careers, working ruthlessly toward stardom. Not Mr. Sturgess, as he amusingly relates...
In the Media Room column, I looked at new releases, including David Lynch's Lost Highway, finally making its debut on DVD in this country:
Lost Highway, which begins when a couple's life is disrupted by the arrival of videotapes showing their home under surveillance, marked a turning point in avant-garde director David Lynch's career. It and his films since, with the exception of the aptly titled The Straight Story, explore our deepest desires through increasingly blurred lines between reality and dreams.Although a decade old, Lost Highway holds up well not even its distinctively claustrophobic rock soundtrack sounds dated...
CBS just canceled Jericho -- for the second time. I realized I never posted my Washington Times piece on the second-season premiere last month. Here it is:
Many people watch science fiction-tinged, post-apocalyptic movies and television for a wild escape from the often dreary, uneventful real world. But viewers of CBS' post-disaster series Jericho will get a dose of reality as it starts its second season tonight at 10.A lame duck president who's taking orders behind the scenes from a bald guy in Wyoming. A private contractor cum mercenary who seems to be above the law. A shady company with government ties hired to do reconstruction amidst allegations of wrongdoing.
Sound familiar?
In today's Washington Times:
I take a look back at David Mamet's career and find I'm not surprised at his piece "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain Dead Liberal,'" which got a fair amount of press after he published it in the Village Voice last week:
The entertainment industry particularly the more intellectual professions of author and playwright is well-known as a hotbed of liberalism. So when playwright, screenwriter, director and author David Mamet published a piece provocatively titled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" last week, pundits from both the left and right took notice.I review this year's Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, The Counterfeiters:Even observers abroad found the writer's coming out as something of a conservative to be big news. Billed as an "election-season essay" and published in the dependably left-wing Village Voice, Mr. Mamet's piece "appalled many of his liberal admirers," the Independent newspaper of London declared, and left the intelligentsia "startled."
Anybody who has closely followed the writer's 30-year career, however, shouldn't be surprised...
Countless films have been made about the Holocaust. It's one of those defining but inexplicable events we go over again and again, hoping finally to understand.I also wrote most of this week's Media Room DVD column, mentioning new releases such as The Kite Runner and the new Criterion edition of The Ice Storm:Surprisingly, though, it seems there are still Holocaust stories to be told.
The story of Operation Bernhard, for example, until now was explored only in a BBC miniseries. The Counterfeiters (Die Faelscher) is the first feature film and straight drama to tell the tale of the largest counterfeiting operation in history.
The Austrian film, written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, won the Oscar this year for best foreign-language film. It's hard not to make a moving film about the Holocaust. Mr. Ruzowitzky, though, also has made a fascinating and fresh one...
I Am Legend (Warner Home Video, $28.98 for one-disc DVD, $34.99 for two-disc DVD, $35.99 for Blu-ray) It's not often that a big-budget Hollywood film chooses to forego the Hollywood ending that's why, after all, it's so named. However, that's what happened with I Am Legend. If you buy the two-disc special-edition DVD or the Blu-ray edition, you'll get not only the theatrical version of the film which made more than $550 million worldwide but also an alternate version with a different ending...
Tom Stoppard, on being asked what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is about: "Its about to make me very rich."
"Bach opens a vista onto the Universe. After hearing him, people feel there may be meaning to life after all."
--Helmut Walcha on Johann Sebastian Bach, born March 21, 1685 (O.S.)
"My work has been a shameless advertisement for Bach."
--Anthony Minghella
Let me get this straight. You can run for president of this country after admitting in your memoir that you did "blow." You can become president of this country after admitting to drinking "too much" alcohol, being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, and refusing to comment on whether you did any illegal drugs before 1974. But you can't enter this country simply to talk about your memoir if you've admitted to previously having had a drug addiction.
(Oddly enough, Sebastian Horsley's Wikipedia entry says his claim to fame is not a rather checkered past nor a talent for writing about it, but rather that he's "best known for wearing a stovepipe hat.")
Is The Week some sort of revisionist newsmagazine? Or did a feminist copyeditor prove a little overzealous in the latest issue's arts section?
The (delightful) film is actually called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, as was the novel on which it's based. There weren't too many women styling themselves "Ms." in the England of the 1930s, after all.
(On a slightly unrelated note, my colleague Christian Toto, in a spirit of equality, offers a treat for the ladies.)
My short appreciation of Anthony Minghella is in today's Washington Times. Look for a longer magazine piece from me in the upcoming weeks. The English Patient remains my favorite film and I'm glad I had the opportunity to interview the director in person before he died.
Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director who helped reinvigorate British cinema, died yesterday at London's Charing Cross Hospital after apparently routine surgery led to a brain hemorrhage. He was just 54...
In today's Washington Times:
Funny Games is brilliant. I implore you to go see it this weekend, to boost its opening box office. I wrote the lead item in the Beyond Hollywood column, talking to Austrian director Michael Haneke about the film:
Many critics are asking why Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has remade his controversial 1997 Austrian feature Funny Games. It's a nearly shot-for-shot remake, so the only differences are the actors and the language spoken the new Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as a vacationing couple with child who are taken hostage by a pair of young sadists, was filmed mostly on Long Island.When I asked that question, he and his translator both laughed. "That's a new angle," the translator said. (He only used her for about half the interview, speaking English the rest of the time.)What I want to know, however, is why it has taken Mr. Haneke so long to make an English-language film. Funny Games, after all, clearly was meant to provoke American audiences and shows a deep interest in the effects of American cinema...
I reviewed the first two installments of HBO's new miniseries John Adams:
If you want confirmation of Thomas Carlyle's great-man theory of history, look no further than the new HBO miniseries John Adams.I wrote most of Media Room, the weekly DVD column, looking at both big releases and lesser-known titles:The first two installments of the seven-part drama premiere Sunday night at 8. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name by historian David McCullough, John Adams chronicles the first 50 years of the United States of America through 50 years in the life of one man. According to the series, the former would not exist without the latter...
Lake of Fire (ThinkFilm, $27.98) It was a year for war documentaries at the Oscars in 2008. That's one explanation for why Lake of Fire didn't get a nomination. The other is that academy members seem to find discussion of abortion too difficult to bear the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days also was robbed of a nomination, in the foreign-language category.I also wrote the first item in the TV column Tuning In, taking a quick look at the new sitcom starring Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose:Lake of Fire easily bests some of the docs that did get the nod...
The Return of Jezebel James, the Fox sitcom premiering tonight at 8, might strike a chord with American women. After all, more and more of them are putting off having children and finding, when they eventually decide to try, that it's not always easy to conceive.That's basically what happens to Sarah (Parker Posey). She's a successful children's book editor in Manhattan who's newly single. If she wants a baby, it's now or never though the thirtysomething woman seems unable to admit her age even to her father...
"If he was man enough to order a woman as if he were ordering a sandwich off a deli menu, he should have been man enough to go out there and take it on his own."
--Manhattanite Kathleen Carroll, quoted in The New York Times
In today's Washington Times:
I talked to English actor Jason Statham:
Jason Statham is enthusiastic about his new film "The Bank Job." He loves the story, he loves the central character he plays. The London-born actor enjoyed the extensive research that he and the director, Roger Donaldson, did before making the movie, which is based on a true story.But he's surprised to learn, via this reporter, just how much of that real-life tale the movie apparently reveals.
"The Bank Job" is based on the 1971 robbery of a Baker Street bank in London. No one was ever arrested for the crime, in which safety deposit boxes were looted. It made headlines at the time, but only for a few days the case was slapped with a D-Notice, an official request to quit publicizing it because of national security concerns.
Only after the heist is complete does Mr. Statham's leader discover that he's been sent in by a government agency to recover compromising photos of a member of the royal family that an unsavory blackmailer has been using to stay out of jail. The film names that member of royalty: Princess Margaret. The real Princess Margaret was, of course, Queen Elizabeth II's younger sister and notorious for a controversial love life.
Mr. Statham, speaking by telephone from Paris where he's shooting "Transporter 3" and reprising his role as the title character in the action franchise, sounds shocked to hear "The Bank Job" actually names a real royal personage. "We might be getting a knock on the front door soon," he laughs...
I enjoyed Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a new film based on the 1938 novel:
Guinevere Pettigrew just can't catch a break.First, the middle-aged governess in late-1930s London is unceremoniously fired without pay. Then, her single suitcase of possessions falls open when she bumps into a man just getting out of jail. Frightened and embarrassed, she abandons her stuff. The unassuming woman is bumped again at a soup kitchen and loses her last chance at a meal.
When she calls at her employment agency the next morning, she's told she'll never get a job from them again. So we don't blame Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) when she steals the calling card of a woman looking to hire someone.
When she arrives, she's immediately told by the fluttery American singer Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) to wake up her boy. But instead of the young charge Miss Pettigrew expects to find, it's a grown man in bed. The owner of Delysia's flat is about to arrive and wouldn't be too happy to find another man there.
Miss P, a vicar's daughter, is shocked by the proceedings though she quickly dispatches the "crisis." Delysia, who wants to hire her as a social secretary, begs her to stay. "The crisis is ongoing," she cries.
The red-headed Miss Adams, who just performed a song from the Oscar nominated "Enchanted" at this year's ceremony, is so enchanting here in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day" that Miss P is simply swept along on her energy, much as the audience will be by this supremely delightful film...
I wrote the weekly DVD column, Media Room, examining new releases including the movie that just won the Oscar for Best Picture:
No Country for Old Men (Buena Vista, $29.99 for DVD, $34.99 for Blu-ray) I thought this genre flick was vastly overrated, a good film but not a great one. It certainly appeared to have something serious to say Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff bookends the film with searching voice-overs. In between, though, we hear very little from the sheriff. "No Country" was simply a well-executed film whose desolation has been mistaken for moral gravity. Most people beg to differ, however. The film just won four Oscars, including best picture, and was the one most commonly on the very top of critics' Top 10 lists. So nothing I say will affect sales, which, if Amazon.com's preorders are any indication, will be very high...
"It came down to money, the sweetness it added to the soul. Money was a kind of grace. Everywhere he had been, the having of it and the holding of it had set people apart. It gave men a beautiful distant control over the world, and it gave woman a poised sense of themselves, an inner light which even old age could not obliterate."
--Colm Tσibνn in The Master
Let's play some catch up with recent Washington Times pieces.
I looked at how opera in high-definition might change the way the art is staged:
Few of the reviews of the Metropolitan Opera's current production of Puccini's "Manon Lescaut" had complaints about star soprano Karita Mattila's voice. The Met is presenting the work that made Puccini's name for the first time in 18 years simply so Miss Mattila can perform the title role.Some critics, though, wondered whether a 47-year-old woman could convincingly play a young girl. "Youth Is Not Served in Met's 'Manon' " ran the headline in The Washington Post, whose reviewer wrote, "It is a tough job for any actress of a certain age to play a young teenager."
Few of those sitting in Lincoln Center's grand opera house would have noticed. Unless you've got a very good pair of opera glasses, you wouldn't be able to make out much of the singers' faces across the cavernous room.
Miss Mattila's lovely though aging face will be on full display for tomorrow's matinee performance, however: "Manon Lescaut" will be shown on huge movie screens across the country, including at Arlington's Ballston Common and Alexandria's Hoffman Center, as part of the Met's high-definition simulcast series.
With the great success of this series last month's "Macbeth" by Verdi was sold out in hundreds of venues, including some in New York itself the question opera critics around the country may be asking is: Are Karita Mattila and other middle-aged opera stars ready for their close-ups?
I wrote a piece about (now French First Lady) Carla Bruni, arguing that she's a lot more than just a pretty face. (You might recognize the topic. The Washington Post published a similarly-themed piece a few days after mine was printed.)
What seems to have captured public attention is not merely the fact that the 53-year-old head of one of Europe's most powerful nations is dating again. It's that Carla Bruni, the Italian-born, French-raised woman whom Mr. Sarkozy says he'll marry, is a beautiful 39-year-old former model.Most men would be high-fiving one of their peers who managed to snag a catwalker, but Mr. Sarkozy has gotten almost nothing but grief since he embarked on the affair. Reacting to pictures of a smiling Mr. Sarkozy looking adoringly at his new girlfriend, most critics believe that the head of France has lost his head over a pretty ex-model. The general feeling has been one of resentment, not admiration.
Writing in the Washington Post, a snarky Robin Givhan summed up the sentiment: "Models already get the star athletes. The bookish debate-team captain should get the prime minister."
Notice how Miss Bruni is invariably described as an ex-model. Few columnists mention on first reference that she has a new career of her own now, as a singer-songwriter. It's her looks that matter, and in this context they work to her detriment.
Catholics like to claim that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in the Western world, but the case of Miss Bruni and others suggests something else: Bigotry against beautiful women is one of the oldest, and longest-lasting, forms of prejudice.
Miss Givhan wrote prissily in the Post, "Bruni posed and pouted for fancy European houses and, in the late 1990s, she cashed out and embarked on what has been described as a singing career. Alicia Keys, she is not."
Ouch.
Miss Givhan is correct on one count: Miss Bruni is not a melismatic singer like Miss Keys. But is that pyrotechnic American style the only standard of musical quality nowadays? Miss Bruni comes from a different tradition, and for pure enjoyment, I would choose one of her modern chansons any day.
Not too many people this side of the Atlantic have heard Miss Bruni's music, which might account for Miss Givhan's comments. Miss Bruni sold almost 2 million copies of her first album, the French-language "Quelqu'un m'a dit," which certainly sounds like a successful European career to me.
I've been listening to it since I first discovered the music in reviewing the indie movie "Conversations with Other Women" a year and a half ago...
James McAvoy is on the verge of becoming the biggest Scottish leading man since Sean Connery. But whereas Mr. Connery is notorious for keeping his accent in his films, whatever the nationality of the character he's playing, Mr. McAvoy has proven to be a chameleon who can handle any role and any accent.In "Atonement," the best-picture Oscar nominee that has brought the young actor his greatest fame, he's the English working-class striver Robbie Turner. In "Becoming Jane," he's the Irish rebel who captures the heart of a young Jane Austen. In "Penelope," opening in theaters today, he's a down-and-out American who sounds just like Tom Cruise.
So it's something of a shock to talk to Mr. McAvoy by phone and hear a Glaswegian brogue even more pronounced than that of the character he plays in "The Last King of Scotland," one of the few Scotsmen he's actually portrayed.
In fact, though this reporter's own grandfather also hails from Glasgow, she had a bit of trouble understanding Mr. McAvoy when he apparently started talking and eating at the same time...
I reviewed Penelope, starring Christina Ricci:
"Penelope" made its debut at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival and has been sitting on the shelf ever since. If it weren't for the newfound fame of Mr. McAvoy, who starred in the Oscar-nominated "Atonement," it might still be collecting dust...
I wrote a Beyond Hollywood column talking to Eran Kolirin, the writer-director of the great Israeli film The Band's Visit:
"The Band's Visit" ("Bikur Ha-Tizmoret") didn't win the Oscar for best foreign-language film on Sunday night. It wasn't even nominated. That wasn't because the hilarious and poignant story of culture clash isn't one of the best foreign films released in the last year it most certainly is. It's because the academy decreed that the film, which Israel submitted as its official entry, contained too much English to qualify.The English dialogue that's interspersed between the Hebrew and the Arabic, though, highlights one of the movie's most important themes: The Egyptians and Israelis in the film are near-neighbors who can only understand each other by speaking a language in which none of them are completely adept...
For another Beyond Hollywood column, I interviewed Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian writer-director of the Palme d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days:
"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" is a somber film about one aspect of life in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. Writer-director Cristian Mungiu purposely made it that way.The idea for the film came in part, he said at the AFI Silver Theatre late last year while in town for the European Union Showcase, after he wrote a script for a series of shorts he wanted to make starting with "the urban legends of the late communist times" and "the small side effects of a grand dictatorship." A young actor, who wasn't old enough to know much about the 1965-1989 Ceausescu era, read the script and told him, "Wow, it must have been very funny to live then."
Mr. Mungiu realized, "If this is what you get from it, then it's not all right. That's not how it was."
I also reviewed 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days:
Every year, every critic feels some movie was snubbed when Oscar nominations are announced. It's not often, though, that so many people are upset about one film's exclusion that even the chairman of the category's committee promises to get the nominating rules changed.That's what happened this month when "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" ("4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile") didn't even make the nine-film shortlist for best foreign language film, let alone the five-film list of actual nominees. The Romanian film had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and ended up on many critics' top-10 lists for the year, topping a couple of them.
There's no question the academy should be embarrassed. "4 Months" is a powerful film, so gripping in both theme and execution that you can't tear your eyes away even as it becomes almost too harrowing to watch...
For another Beyond Hollywood column, I talked to Jean-Jacques Beineix about his 1981 film Diva, which was just re-released here:
With its fantastically intricate plot and striking visual style, "Diva," a 1981 French film that exploded onto American screens in 1982, heralded a new movement in French and American film. As part of a 25th anniversary re-release, it opens today locally at Landmark's E Street Cinema.The return of his film to the big screen must please the director, Jean-Jacques Beineix. Speaking by telephone from Paris, however, it turns out Mr. Beineix is happiest not for himself but for his country.
"It just shows that sometimes you shouldn't read too much into the magazines when they say French culture is decadent and doesn't exist anymore," he pointedly says. A provocative cover story in Time just two months ago, headlined "The Death of French Culture," argued that Gallic culture was in decline, particularly in terms of international appeal...
I reviewed In Bruges, one of the best films I've seen this year so far:
Watching a trailer for "In Bruges," you might wonder just what sort of film this is. Is it a comedy? A gangster flick? A drama? A thriller? A farce?Yes, it is all of the above.
And somehow, it works.
"In Bruges" is the feature film debut of London-born Irish playwright Martin McDonagh,who won the Oscar for best live-action short two years ago. With this practically perfect film, he's made an auspicious debut, combining satire and sensibility to make a hilarious but touching movie quite unlike anything else at the multiplex this season...
I reviewed the Oscar-nominated French animated film Persepolis:
"Persepolis" is an odd mix a French-language film that tells the story of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath through the eyes of a girl using a relatively primitive form of mostly black-and-white animation. Yet for the first half of the film, this unlikely blend works wonders, creating captivating images of an almost unimaginable time without sacrificing insight into either political change or emotional realities.Unfortunately, as the world changes around her, Marjane doesn't change much herself. That lack of emotional maturity on the part of the film's main character means a lack of emotional maturity on the part of the film that follows her feelings so closely...
And, though it's rather late now, you can read my Oscar picks for the major categories -- what I thought would win and what I thought should win.
I also reviewed the Oscar-nominated shorts:
It's hard for even the most die-hard film fanatics to see every Oscar-nominated film. There are, however, two categories you can knock off in a single afternoon or evening: live-action shorts and animated shorts...
Finally, here are a few weeks of the DVD column I usually write, Media Room. Most notable is the Oscar-themed edition, in which I interviewed In the Valley of Elah and Crash director Paul Haggis:
Paul Haggis is one of the best known progressives in Hollywood. "I'm a little left of Mao," he readily said during an interview in the District last year.So critics expected "In the Valley of Elah" to serve as his artistic riposte against the war. The film stars Mr. Jones as Hank Deerfield, a retired Army sergeant investigating both the murder of his son, who disappeared after returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq, and what his son saw while serving. In "Elah," however, Mr. Haggis focuses not on why we're in the war but rather on the people fighting it.
Mr. Haggis wrote two best picture Oscar-winners back to back, 2004's "Million Dollar Baby" and "Crash" the next year, which he also directed. Puffing away on Native American Spirit cigarettes polite to a fault, he asked for permission first the Canadian-born director says the idea for "Elah" came before he had even released "Crash."
Earlier, I spoke to Clueless director Amy Heckerling about a new film of hers that went straight to DVD:
It sounds as if it could be a box-office bonanza: a romantic comedy written and directed by Amy Heckerling, who has made such huge hits as "Clueless" and "Look Who's Talking," and starring Paul Rudd, who has been in recent megahits "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" and the always-in-demand Michelle Pfeiffer.So why has I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Products and the Weinstein Co., $24.95) gone direct to DVD, with no theatrical release?
It's certainly not because it's a bad film...
In January, I looked at another Oscar-nominated film, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience:
In the old days, literary lights like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Evelyn Waugh chronicled the wars in which they served almost at the same time as they were fighting them.How times have changed.
Now it seems we need the National Endowment for the Arts to send authors to military bases to teach writing workshops for the soldiers stationed there...
In February, I also looked at Valentine's Day releases and checked out The Brave One, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and some other releases. In the latest column, I reviewed new releases including The Darjeeling Limited:
The Darjeeling Limited (20th Century Fox, $29.99) is one of Wes Anderson's funniest films. Perhaps paradoxically, it's also his most grown-up.Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman star as three brothers who embark on a trip through India on the titular train in search of their mother and themselves. Well, that's what they end up doing, anyway Mr. Wilson's character has tricked his two brothers into joining him on his spiritual search. The trio have barely spoken to each other since their father's funeral a year before...
"His moral deficiencies as an artist were quite extraordinary. When he found the natural superiority of his genius in conflict with the ignorance and frivolity of the public - and the musical ignorance and frivolity of the Venetians and Neapolitans can hardly be overstated - he surrendered without a struggle. Although he was so able a man that it was easier and pleasanter to him to do his work intelligently than to conventionalize it and write down to the popular taste, he never persevered in any innovation that was not well received."
--George Bernard Shaw on Gioachino Rossini, born Feb. 29, 1792
"Arts, religions, doctrines, laws and immortality itself are nothing but weapons invented by men to resist the universal prestige of women. Alas, these vain attempts are and always will be without the slightest effect, for woman triumphs over all abstractions."
--Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine (A. Brown trans.) (thanks, R)
"You're not really a huge power broker of the female variety until some bitchy man writes a nasty biography of you, a literary pap smear meant at once to diagnose and humiliate."
--The Atlantic's Caitlin Flanagan in an astonishingly interesting review of a biography of Katie Couric
Before I head out for a jaunt abroad, I thought I should catch up with my last few weeks of work.
I wrote three pieces about Woody Allen. He's one of my favorite directors, so it was a pleasure to interview him on the occasion of his new film:
Has Woody Allen killed someone?I reviewed that new film, Cassandra's Dream:He seems awfully obsessed with the idea of murder and its guilty aftermath, after all. His new movie, Cassandra's Dream, is just the latest of his films to explore the theme. Most recently, there was his 2005 masterpiece, Match Point. Before that, 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Mr. Allen patiently explains his interest in the subject. "Crime has been a staple of playwrights and dramatists from Shakespeare to Alfred Hitchcock," the 72-year-old writer-director says by telephone. "Half the movies out all the time are about crime, because it's just a dramatic atmosphere. So I resort to it."
He sounds just a little defensive as he goes on to point out that in his directorial debut, 1969's Take the Money and Run, he played a criminal. A few years after that, in 1973's Sleeper, he notes, he was being chased as a criminal.
Finally he comes right out and says it: "I've never killed anybody."
One doubts he would have the time to cover up the crime. Mr. Allen is the most prolific American director, making about a film a year since he started four decades ago...
Woody Allen, in the last couple of decades, has often seemed like a victim of his own success.I also wrote the On the Edge piece, asking if Woody Allen is on the Kennedy Center's blacklist:The prolific writer-director made such great movies in the 1970s and '80s, such as Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters, that for many critics, the films that came after them seemed somehow disappointing.
With 2005's Match Point, critics finally started using the m-word again. Some complained, however, that the plot centering on a murder and its aftermath bore too much similarity to Mr. Allen's 1989 classic, Crimes and Misdemeanors.
That same objection will be raised to Cassandra's Dream...
What do you have to do to get recognized by the Kennedy Center these days?Get your short stories published in the New Yorker and win the O. Henry Award?
Have one of the greatest stand-up comedy acts of all time?
Win three Oscars and be nominated for a total of 21 (including more best-screenplay nominations than anyone in history) as a writing-directing-acting triple threat?
Be one of the top male box-office stars (No. 8 in Quigley Publications' rankings) of the '70s?
Win a lifetime-achievement award from the Directors Guild and be one of just two people (Ingmar Bergman is the other) to win a Cannes lifetime-achievement award?
Write for some of the biggest names in early television? Appear on the cover of Life magazine?
Woody Allen has done every one of those things. Yet he continues to be passed over year after year for both the Kennedy Center Honors, which recognize a lifetime of achievement in American culture, and the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Why is he continually snubbed?
I reviewed There Will Be Blood:
There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's magnificent and strange new film, delivers on the menacing promise of its title. The early oil business was a dangerous one, and there's plenty of blood spilled here, but the real fight in this film a social epic that turns out to be an arresting character study isn't between man and man but, rather, between the dueling impulses in a single man's heart...Mr. Anderson's meticulously crafted film can only be compared to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk in its ambition...
I talked to Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Principal Pops Conductor Jack Everly about music and the movies:
A pairing of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and science-fiction film might seem a little out of this world. It turns out, though, that one of the country's top pops conductors might not have pursued a career as a musician if not for the unearthly genre.BSO Principal Pops Conductor Jack Everly says he's been "terrified and fascinated" by the sci-fi genre since he saw the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still as a child.
"Aside from that marvelous story and screenplay and the fact it was so brilliantly directed by Robert Wise, what really stuck in my memory was the music by Bernard Herrmann. It's incredibly evocative. It's a subliminal effect it has on you," the maestro says. "His style of composition is definitely unique. He gets under the surface of what it is he's writing the music for."
Mr. Everly says it's one of the things that inspired him to become a conductor...
I interviewed the writer and the director of The Orphanage:
The story behind The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is almost as interesting as the haunting tale the film tells.The Spanish psychological horror film, which opens in District theaters today, is the first film to be "presented by" Guillermo del Toro. The Mexican director made one of last year's most acclaimed films, the visually extraordinary adult fairy tale Pan's Labyrinth, in Spain and is a hot commodity in Hollywood.
Just how did a first-time director and a first-time screenwriter get Mr. del Toro's name and the attention that comes with it on their film?
After the Britney Spears ambulance drama, I wrote an On the Edge column suggesting that it's only a matter of time before the highly-paid stalkers called paparazzi maim or kill someone:
The term "ambulance chaser" was coined to scorn that profession seen as the lowest of the low the unsavory trial lawyer who trolls for business from vulnerable accident victims. I suggest a new use for the word, however, to describe members of a profession that now has unscrupulous attorneys beat in terms of trying to profit from other people's misfortunes the paparazzi...
I reviewed Francis Ford Coppola's new film, Youth Without Youth:
Pity poor Francis Ford Coppola.Few complain anymore that David Lynch's films are incoherent or inexplicable. However, the director of such cinematic classics as The Godfather and The Conversation doesn't have the luxury of being too experimental, if early reviews of Youth Without Youth are any indication.
Critics have said just those things about Mr. Coppola's first film in a decade. They grumble that the movie is too unfocused, tackling too many big subjects, without making much sense in the process.
But you shouldn't go into this film, based on a meandering novella by Romanian religion and philosophy scholar Mircea Eliade, expecting a straight-across narrative as in, say, Mr. Coppola's adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula and John Grisham's The Rainmaker.
The problem with Youth Without Youth isn't that Mr. Coppola is overreaching. It's that, in exploring the nature of time, consciousness and love, he's forgotten that his greatest talent lies in telling a gripping story...
I reviewed the first installment of the new Jane Austen series on PBS' Masterpiece Theatre.
I also wrote two and a half of the last three Media Room DVD columns. In the first, I take a look at Zodiac:
Zodiac, a very thorough film about the real-life "Zodiac Killer" who terrified Californians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has appeared on a number of film critics' top 10 lists. When it came out last spring, though, more than a few reviewers complained about its long running time. But it seems that even 2 hours and 38 minutes wasn't enough for director David Fincher. Zodiac: 2-Disc Director's Cut (Paramount, $36.99 for DVD, $39.99 for HD DVD) hits stores next week with a new cut of the film that's four minutes longer...In the last, I take a look at Moliere and the Star Wars episode of Family Guy:
Moliere (Sony, $29.95) was one of 2007's overlooked gems. Out on DVD next week, the French film seems even better on a second viewing.It's a frothy comedy in the vein of "Shakespeare in Love" and "Becoming Jane," but much more insightful than either of those films on how artistic genius transforms life into art...
Lee Siegel is unrepentant about posting praise of himself in comments on his New Republic blog under a pseudonym. "I just wish people would get over the whole thing. I dont think its really that big a deal," he tells New York magazine. "I didnt use Internet anonymity to pursue a secret agenda, I used it to protest anonymity, and no one wants to concede that to me. I did it as a prank, and a provocation, strictly out of exasperation." One wonders how an act manages to be a protest when the rebel doesn't want anyone to know he's performing it.
New York interviewer Boris Kachka notes that in his new book, Siegel spends a lot of time "attacking other writers." That's no surprise. But memo to Lee Siegel: If you want to publish an angry rant against a learned writer, as you did recently in The New York Times Book Review, it helps if you yourself know how to spell The Waste Land.
It seems like the fact checkers in the literary section of the Times are on vacation these days. In a piece on historical artifacts, James Gleick writes that in Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle, "a dealer in antiquities holds up two identical Zippo lighters, one of which supposedly belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and says: 'One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object has ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? ... You can't. You cant tell which is which. There's no mystical plasmic presence,' no 'aura' around it.'" But it wasn't the dealer that made that comment -- It was Wyndham-Matson, a man whose company produces fake artifacts. The difference is rather important. Then there was this list of corrections to a Rachel Donadio piece on J.M. Coetzee, which provoked a lot of letters. There are obviously no Eliot fans at the Book Review -- before that Waste Land error, no one caught the rather glaring mistake Donadio made of calling him a Catholic convert.
If you get a print copy of today's Washington Times, you'll see a familiar face on the front of the Show section: My picture accompanies my picks for top ten films of the year.
This was a particularly tough year to single out 10 movies from the hundreds released. Two of our greatest directors released masterful films that didn't even make my cut David Lynch with Inland Empire and David Cronenberg with Eastern Promises. As with most Top 10 lists, this is a varied group of films. But I noticed one theme this year: The best filmmakers, particularly the Europeans, grappled with their countries' sometimes complicated histories, including two that almost made my list: Englishman Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Romanian Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile).My interview with Denzel Washington for the Beyond Hollywood column is also on the Show front:1. Red Road For the second year in a row, I've put a debut on the top of my list. (Last year it was the powerful German film The Lives of Others, which also fits the theme I mention above.) English director Andrea Arnold has crafted a perfectly paced thriller, a moving drama and a profound character study, all in her very first film. Kate Dickie also makes a staggering screen debut as a woman who becomes obsessed with a man from her past she sees on one of the CCTV screens she monitors in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the many scenes from this film I'll never forget is a heartbreaking moment near the end. The woman makes a scarecrow of sorts by stuffing her dead daughter's clothes in an attempt to remember what it was like to hold her. I get chills just recalling it now...
The Great Debaters is Mr. Washington's second film from behind the camera, after 2002's Antwone Fisher. He starred in that film as well.In this week's Media Room column, I take a look at two DVD releases coming out New Year's Day: Shoot 'Em Up and The Tudors: The Complete First Season.Is he just unwilling to take a break in front of the camera?
"It's strictly business. It helps me get the budget I need to make the movie. They say, 'We'll give you $2 if you're not in the movie to make the movie, and we'll give you $4 if you are in the movie,'" Mr. Washington explains...
It's hard to imagine anyone not paying attention to the man we all want to see on-screen, but Mr. Washington says that wasn't always the case. He says he relates to the youngest member of the debating team, played by Denzel Whitaker, who is hopelessly in love with the female member of the team. He recalls a time as a student when he would rush to a class to catch a glimpse of a certain girl. "Trust me, that Denzel Washington, they weren't looking at," he says, laughing. "Or maybe she was looking. But if she talked to me, I probably wouldn't have known what to say."
In the film, the girl is more interested in the team's third member (Henry, played by Nate Parker) though he doesn't treat her particularly well. "Isn't that who they always go for?" Mr. Washington says, chuckling. "I remember when I was doing interviews for 'Training Day.' Women would tell me, 'I could have changed him.' " though the corrupt cop Mr. Washington played in Training Day was a pretty unrepentant villain...
If you or someone who loves you a lot put a high-definition DVD player under the tree this week, you're probably wondering what movies you should buy to take full advantage of the increased quality of sight and sound.Well, you're in luck: One of the movies I put on my Top 10 list (see Page D1) is a nonstop 90-minute thrill ride that comes out on DVD and Blu-ray on New Year's Day.
Shoot 'Em Up (New Line, $27.98 for DVD and $35.99 for Blu-ray) was the most entertaining movie of 2007 and also one of the most original. It's an exciting action flick that's also a hilariously over-the-top sendup of an action flick...
My Q&A with Robert O. Collins, co-author of the publisher-pulped book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World from the December print edition of Reason magazine is now online. My previous Washington Times piece on this important story is here.
Oops. It's been a while, hasn't it?
Here's a roundup of most of my last month of work at The Washington Times.
I wrote a feature on the controversy surrounding the film The Golden Compass:
"It's fairly clear that William Donohue's a loon," says Chris Weitz, writer-director of The Golden Compass, of the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. "I've published several books, been a college professor, have a Ph.D. Why would I worry about a screenwriter?" Mr. Donohue retorts.I covered the State Department dinner at which the Kennedy Center Honors were bestowed earlier this month. It featured what for me was a rather exciting moment:He implies that Mr. Weitz is a coward for not debating him in person and so, for that matter, is Philip Pullman, the author of His Dark Materials, the young adults book trilogy (which includes the source novel for The Golden Compass) that has sold 10 million copies.
"It's hard to have intellectual respect for such people," sniffs Mr. Donohue.
On the surface, this nasty back-and-forth is about, of all things, a children's fantasy film.
But its roots run deeper.
The dispute over The Golden Compass, which opens today, is part of a larger, surprisingly bellicose debate between atheists and Christians that reignited complete with best-selling books on both sides after followers of an entirely different creed attacked America on September 11, 2001...
Last night's Kennedy Center Honors Gala included soon-to-be-televised performances by some of the world's great artists in tribute to the five honorees. At the much quieter Trustees Dinner on Saturday night at the Department of State (where the awards were actually bestowed) attendees were treated to a very special performance of a more intimate nature.I got to chat briefly with a number of big names at that event, including Martin Short, Diana Ross and Ricky Jay. I also briefly spoke to Martin Scorsese, whom I profiled as part of our Honors coverage:Two members of "The President's Own" Marine Corps string quartet gave up their seats to violinist Itzhak Perlman and cellist Yo-Yo Ma for an impromptu performance. Delighted guests couldn't believe their good fortune and neither could the two musicians who got to play with the pair (one of whom made a motion to indicate her heart was all aflutter). And then violinist Joshua Bell wandered by looking as if he wished he'd been in on the fun, too...
We might see Martin Scorsese as many things: An American filmmaker who chronicles American stories of immigration, power and wealth through techniques he learned watching French and Italian films.I wrote a Beyond Hollywood column featuring my interview with Frank Langella, best known as Dracula and now getting major Oscar buzz for his performance in one of the best films of the year:A master at pulling you into the point of view of his larger-than-life characters while, as one of our most strikingly cinematic of filmmakers, never letting you forget you're watching a film. A champion of film history who has drawn much-needed attention to the importance of film preservation.
But the director of modern classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas sees himself as, above all, a storyteller...
On the surface, Frank Langella isn't much like Leonard Schiller, the aging novelist he plays in the new film Starting Out in the Evening.For another Beyond Hollywood column, I took a look at the Washington Jewish Film Festival, including capsule reviews of great films like Sixty-Six -- a warm, nostalgic British coming-of-age tale co-starring Helena Bonham Carter and directed by Paul Weiland, who's written and directed episodes of Mr. Bean -- and Mauvaise foi (Bad Faith) -- a funny and touching look at religion and relationships, a sort of Look Who's Coming for Dinner for the 21st-century, that stars two of France's hottest young stars and is the directorial debut of one of them."I'm quite gregarious I'm Italian, I'm not Jewish. And I tend to be very demonstrative. I like life, and I like to laugh, and Leonard is very closed down," says the veteran actor, in the District last week to promote the film. But he found a way into the character nonetheless. "Years ago, I remember seeing a professor or someone like Leonard giving a lecture," he recalls. "I looked at him with his legs very tightly closed, and I thought, 'This guy is very repressed.' And I remembered it and I thought, 'That's Leonard.' "
Mr. Langella is constantly taking from life in developing his characters, of which he's played dozens in a forty-year career.
"I can't help it," he says of his watchful eye. "If I were playing you, I'd do this about four times during the scene," he remarks, demonstrating a hair-flipping mannerism this reporter didn't even know she had. "If you're an actor, you're like a writer. You're storing things," he says. "You just remember it when it's time to act."
Here are my film reviews:
For his adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, director Tim Burton has mercilessly shaved about an hour off the 1979 musical's running time, and the opening number was the first to go. It's a real shame, since "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" has some of the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical's best music and lyrics and sets the tone for the delights that follow.Atonement:Luckily, there aren't many other disappointments in this Todd, which is as brutal and bloody as the legendary man himself...
After a lavish reception in Europe, "Atonement" arrives stateside to take its place as one of the front-runners for the best-picture Oscar. It has all the ingredients of a leading nominee impressively felt performances, beautifully photographed scenery, ambitious themes and an impeccable literary pedigree.The Savages:So why did I leave the film feeling strangely unsatisfied?
It's taken Tamara Jenkins almost 10 years to release a follow-up to her highly lauded, bleakly funny debut Slums of Beverly Hills.The Kite Runner:It actually wasn't enough time, though The Savages still needs a lot of work.
The story line of writer-director Jenkins' sophomore effort has a lot of dramatic and comedic potential. A brother and sister, living in different cities and not particularly close, must take responsibility for their long-ignored, aging father, who was abusive while they were young but now doesn't even always remember who they are as dementia hits.
Even better, the brother and sister are played by two of independent film's brightest lights Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.
So it's a shame that in almost two hours of running time, there are only a couple of scenes that stand out in a film that tries to be both funny and touching, but doesn't much succeed in being either...
What little knowledge most Americans have of Afghanistan comes from the newspapers, but, of course, the country partially bordered by Pakistan, Iran and China had a long and storied history before the September 11 attacks brought it, through the ruling Taliban's connections to al Qaeda, to our attention again.Starting Out in the Evening:The Kite Runner offers us a glimpse of the decades before that, starting with the civil war that began in 1978 and continues today. But the film teaches us far more than the tragic recent history of this country, as interesting as that is; it teaches us that though it sometimes takes courage, we cannot ignore our responsibilities to be human.
It reminds us of this through one of the most gripping and well-told stories of the year. There are no big-name stars in The Kite Runner, and the only special effects seem to be the high-flying kites that gracefully soar over the sky in Kabul and San Francisco...
You might not have heard much about Starting Out in the Evening yet, but you will: Frank Langella is almost assured of an Oscar nomination as best actor for his performance in the film that has one of the year's sharpest screenplays.Beowulf:This small movie is the sophomore effort of director Andrew Wagner, whose 2004 film starring his family, The Talent Given Us, made a splash at Sundance.
Mr. Langella plays writer Leonard Schiller. "He was one of the New York intellectuals Bellow, Schwartz," one character comments, but unlike the works of his contemporaries, his novels are no longer in print. He hasn't been able to complete a novel for 10 years. And why bother? "Most of the business we do is celebrity confessions and self-help books," an agent tells him, in one of the film's typically sad and human scenes...
For a poem that everyone seems to avoid reading, written in a long-dead language, Beowulf, unlike its title warrior, seems surprisingly unwilling to die.Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium:Most of us may have skipped the 1,000-year-old Old English epic in college, but it continues to inspire everyone from novelists to artists to filmmakers.
Just in the last few years alone, we've seen the film Beowulf & Grendel, a made-for-TV movie Grendel, a graphic novel, comics and even an opera Grendel, itself based on a 1971 novel.
Now comes a new film and with it the obvious question: Do we really need another Beowulf?
I can answer that question with three short words: Beowulf in 3-D.
Robert Zemeckis' latest film may have eye-rollingly obvious sexual innuendo, some bland dialogue and a Geats hero who sounds straight out of East London (everyone in the cast has a different accent). But it's also one of the most exciting film experiences of the year...
Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is a film about growing up and a film about rediscovering your inner child although not both at the same time, of course...Margot at the Wedding:
Margot at the Wedding was made by the young American writer-director Noah Baumbach, but it's trying very hard to be a certain type of European film.And a theatre review, of Avenue Q:The atmosphere is tense and moody; even nature seems cold and forbidding. Accusations and recriminations follow a family reunion.
Plot isn't particularly important here; the relationships between people are. And just to drive the point home, most of the characters have French names.
Yet for all the similarities, Margot at the Wedding doesn't have the weight or the humor of the thoughtful, talky films of Eric Rohmer, the French director who was clearly one of Margot's inspirations...
"This is real life," Princeton (Robert McClure) says, with a sense of wonder, early on in Avenue Q. It's an apt line: Perhaps no musical has captured the truth of contemporary life as well as Avenue Q. In such numbers as "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," "What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?" and "The Internet Is for Porn," our conflicts with race, technology, work and even the meaning of life are laid bare on the stage.Here are a few weeks of Media Room, the weekly DVD column I usually write:Never mind that this "real life" is presented to us by a cast of adorable puppets that owe more than a little to the classic children's series Sesame Street.
Avenue Q opened at the Vineyard Theatre off-Broadway in March 2003 and moved four months later to Broadway, where it's still running. The adult-themed puppet musical, with music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx and book by Jeff Whitty, overthrew favorite Wicked to win the Tony Award for best musical. It picked up two other top awards as well, best book and best original score.
The score isn't actually that original, and in the national touring company production now at the National Theatre, the very small group of musicians playing it doesn't even sound live. But the music isn't really the point in this musical. The Sesame Street-influenced score serves as a cozily familiar backdrop for song after song of jaw-dropping comedy...
November 16's edition, featuring my look at some classical DVD releases:
Maria Callas died 30 years ago, but her voice remains eternal, as EMI Classics reminds us with the release next week of The Eternal Maria Callas ($24.98), a compilation commemorating the anniversary of the Greek-American singer's early death at age 53 in 1977.November 30's edition, featuring the Live Earth DVD and the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie.The DVD features a generous sampling of material in three categories: "Maria Callas on stage," "Maria Callas her life" and "Maria Callas speaks." However, those seeking to understand what all the fuss is about should head directly to the recital clips...
Schubert's Fierrabras didn't get its first performance in Vienna until 1988. Yet it's filled with the same heartfelt, melancholic music as the composer's other works. This 2005 staging is both clever and cute by turns, although sometimes too much of the latter men in 18th-century clothes look a bit silly high-fiving each other but the quality of the singing is high, as are the production values...
December 7's edition, featuring my look at the extras on The Bourne Ultimatum and a colleague's look at the HD DVD version of the latest Harry Potter movie.
December 14's edition, featuring some great releases from the Disney vaults and the long-awaited re-release of Blade Runner.
December 21's edition, featuring my review of The Kingdom:
Some observers made much of the fact that The Kingdom (Universal, $29.98) was the most successful of this year's crop of war-on-terror-themed movies although it didn't even make back its estimated $80 million budget in the U.S., with just a $47.5 million gross.And this is late, of course, but scroll down the page here to see my contributions to our last-minute gift guide.It's true that The Kingdom is the most friendly to American military and law-enforcement intervention. In the Valley of Elah suggested that the Iraq war, with its mixed motives, is having deleterious effects on the soldiers fighting it; Rendition focused on the CIA's use of regimes that torture to question suspects; Redacted told a story of American soldiers' crimes in Iraq and Lions for Lambs had some fierce debate about a less controversial operation, the one in Afghanistan.
However, it's probably its promise of action something those other movies were rather short on that put The Kingdom on top. I suspect many viewers were disappointed on that score, though...
