The only thing I have to compare NYCB's The Sleeping Beauty with is Disney's The Sleeping Beauty, which isn't quite fair, especially when taking into account the fact that I haven't seen the Disney movie in over twenty years, and unlike favorites like The Little Mermaid, probably only saw it once. In fact, I think I saw the Joffrey Ballet's The Sleeping Beauty twenty years ago as well; it was my first time going to a performance in New York, and my mom asked me whether I wanted to go to the ballet, or to see something called Cats, which would have tap dancing. (At the time, I took both ballet and tap lessons every Saturday.) I chose the ballet, but changed my mind a few days later. "Mom," I said, "I've decided that actually I would rather see Cats." "Oh, honey," she told me, "It's too late; I've already bought the tickets." We went to see The Sleeping Beauty and I fell asleep. The next year, and the five or six years after that, we went to see Cats. I bought the soundtrack and the book of T. S. Eliot poems it was based on, and after memorizing all the words, I would perform the songs for my mother. Freshman year of high school, I was still shameless enough to perform both songs and dances from Cats with a classmate for a kind of mandatory extra-credit project in our honors English class. Our teacher was disappointed that we didn't discuss any of Eliot's other work. At the time, I didn't know he had any other work to speak of.
The New York City Ballet generally offends my sensibilities. Aside from the fact that all the dancers are very, very white, all the pas-de-deux are for heterosexual couples, and most of the bodies on stage are tasked to stand prettily in a semi-circle while the two principles perform breathtaking feats, there is the repressed airlessness of extreme control that pervades the performance. Never does a dancer test her limit on stage, or even approach the extreme. Everything is measured, perfectly rehearsed, calculated. Modern dancers have more play in their ribcages, and a wider range of expression across their faces, but they also have more flexibility in their technique: every movement is exploration, rather than execution, and a performance is no different, at least in that sense, than a rehearsal. And so, where the NYCB must offer a full orchestra, expensive moving scenery, and heavy costumes with hand-embroidery and rhinestones that can be seen from the highest balcony to impart any drama, real drama reveals itself when all of this is stripped away and the body expands to fill that space.
Then again, the performers in Cats wore some pretty extravagant costumes as well. In fact, there was one enjoyable pas-de-deux in The Sleeping Beauty. In the final Act, when Princess Aurora marries the Prince, a number of couples perform short dances in their honor. One of these couples was a pair of, yes, cats, who had license to jump and frolic and flirt, their exuberance no longer suppressed by their humanity.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Books: Sensing, Feeling, and Action, by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
This collection of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen's articles and interviews serves as a kind of exploratory textbook on Body-Mind Centering (BMC), Bonnie's methodology for increasing proprioception and kinesthetic awareness. Though the chapters are culled from 1980s issues of Contact Quarterly, a small dance magazine that's still around, the book is of interest to movement-curious non-dancers (e.g. yogis, marshal artists, athletes, and physical therapists). Unlike the average western orthopedist, Bonnie understands the body as an integrated (or, when things go awry, dis-integrated) set of systems that support each other, so that the muscular-skeletal system is not only not the initial generator of movement, but it is also not always the root of what seems to be a muscular-skeletal malfunction or discomfort.
Bonnie is very well-attuned to developmental patters, and points out that the neurological pathways that instruct our muscles to generate movement are formed very early in life. Any number of factors can interfere with the development of the ideal, most efficient pathway, which can lead to physical problems later in life. Perhaps the best example is that of the infant transitioning from lying on its stomach, to lifting its head using the muscles along the spinal cord, to propping itself up on its arms and developing those muscles, until it is strong enough to push itself back onto its seat. Now, the baby can sit up straight and strong, because it has spent months exercising its neck and back, and those muscles are fully formed. Parents, though, often overzealous and over-valuing precocity, will sit their babies up prematurely, so that the baby slumps over. This will translate to slouching in later life as well. Similarly, pre-mature walking, encouraged by baby-bouncers and walkers and the like, puts the body in a vertical posture before the core muscles have been properly developed, which happens through crawling. Thus, Bonnie might give an adult with poor posture baby exercises. An adult who slumps over should lie on her stomach and, slowly locating the base of her spine, engage those muscles to gently lift her head and look around, the way an infant would. Bonnie might "wake up" certain ineffective muscles by tickling the back of the neck with a feather, which sensation initiates awareness and then encourages the woman to use the more efficient muscular pathway. Similarly, an adult with a weak abdomen and a collapsed lower back, who walks with his shoulders actually behind his pelvis, would be given crawling exercises, to integrate his core and recover his plumb-line.
But this book is not only about correcting movement deficiency. Bonnie writes about the organs, and how we can generate movement from these places, which each have their own tone. She illustrates this with a series of photographs, analyzing people's postures and explaining which organs dominate their postures. She also writes about the fluid systems, the coursing of blood and lymph through our bodies, and has a detailed chapter on the workings of the voice, along with exercises for opening the voice so that it sounds from deep in the body. The exercises are focused on integrating the different systems, for example sounding through different organs, which seems a little kooky, but actually is both freeing and fascinating, once we have moved past our inhibitions.
Bonnie is very well-attuned to developmental patters, and points out that the neurological pathways that instruct our muscles to generate movement are formed very early in life. Any number of factors can interfere with the development of the ideal, most efficient pathway, which can lead to physical problems later in life. Perhaps the best example is that of the infant transitioning from lying on its stomach, to lifting its head using the muscles along the spinal cord, to propping itself up on its arms and developing those muscles, until it is strong enough to push itself back onto its seat. Now, the baby can sit up straight and strong, because it has spent months exercising its neck and back, and those muscles are fully formed. Parents, though, often overzealous and over-valuing precocity, will sit their babies up prematurely, so that the baby slumps over. This will translate to slouching in later life as well. Similarly, pre-mature walking, encouraged by baby-bouncers and walkers and the like, puts the body in a vertical posture before the core muscles have been properly developed, which happens through crawling. Thus, Bonnie might give an adult with poor posture baby exercises. An adult who slumps over should lie on her stomach and, slowly locating the base of her spine, engage those muscles to gently lift her head and look around, the way an infant would. Bonnie might "wake up" certain ineffective muscles by tickling the back of the neck with a feather, which sensation initiates awareness and then encourages the woman to use the more efficient muscular pathway. Similarly, an adult with a weak abdomen and a collapsed lower back, who walks with his shoulders actually behind his pelvis, would be given crawling exercises, to integrate his core and recover his plumb-line.
But this book is not only about correcting movement deficiency. Bonnie writes about the organs, and how we can generate movement from these places, which each have their own tone. She illustrates this with a series of photographs, analyzing people's postures and explaining which organs dominate their postures. She also writes about the fluid systems, the coursing of blood and lymph through our bodies, and has a detailed chapter on the workings of the voice, along with exercises for opening the voice so that it sounds from deep in the body. The exercises are focused on integrating the different systems, for example sounding through different organs, which seems a little kooky, but actually is both freeing and fascinating, once we have moved past our inhibitions.
Books: The Breathing Book, by Donna Farhi
As a seasoned yogi, many of the exercises suggested by Donna Farhi in The Breathing Book are rather elementary—that is, I've already been doing them for years. The average urban 9-5er non-yogi would certainly benefit from starting the breath practices she outlines, but I wonder whether that person would be able to execute her exercises—and the subtle set-ups, with bolsters and stacks of blankets—in a safe and productive way. I've personally never learned how to do anything from a book, other than read and write. Perhaps there are people who can, but in the constant shifting back to the text, how is one supposed to really lie down, close one's eyes, and imagine breath in the belly and the pelvis, or the outer rib cage and the back? It might work as an audio book.
Farhi's style is also a little folksy, although one can feel immediately that she is well-intentioned and targeting a lay audience. For someone who already has a yoga/meditation/breath practice, but feels the breath sticking in certain spots (this is why I read the book), the final pages, a series of sequenced exercises targeted to various complaints (headaches, depression, sinusitis, etc.) are the most valuable. The beginning pages, too, in which she carefully diagrams the respiratory system and its movement through the muscular-skeletal system, depicting the rocking of of the pelvis with breath, and the movement of the diaphragm and pelvic floor, are helpful , even if you already have a basic kinesthetic knowledge. This is not the kind of book that you check out of the library, read through, absorb, and return. It's a handbook that serves as a decent reference for yoga beginners. Unfortunately, though Farhi clearly hopes to address readers who are stressed out, frazzled, anxious, and harried, it is unlikely that audience will have the patience to do mindful exercises out of a book.
Farhi's style is also a little folksy, although one can feel immediately that she is well-intentioned and targeting a lay audience. For someone who already has a yoga/meditation/breath practice, but feels the breath sticking in certain spots (this is why I read the book), the final pages, a series of sequenced exercises targeted to various complaints (headaches, depression, sinusitis, etc.) are the most valuable. The beginning pages, too, in which she carefully diagrams the respiratory system and its movement through the muscular-skeletal system, depicting the rocking of of the pelvis with breath, and the movement of the diaphragm and pelvic floor, are helpful , even if you already have a basic kinesthetic knowledge. This is not the kind of book that you check out of the library, read through, absorb, and return. It's a handbook that serves as a decent reference for yoga beginners. Unfortunately, though Farhi clearly hopes to address readers who are stressed out, frazzled, anxious, and harried, it is unlikely that audience will have the patience to do mindful exercises out of a book.
Movies: The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 (2009)
While a decent way to pass 106 minutes of an eight hour transatlantic flight in the opposite direction of your fiancé , The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 is little more, and certainly nothing approaching the tightly-orchestrated adagio of Joseph Sargent's 1974 version, in which the hijackers wear trench coats, tortoise-rimmed glasses, and fake moustaches, and call each other Mr. Brown, Mr. Gray, and Mr. Green. Instead, we are given a disgruntled hedge fund manager (John Travolta, who is looking more and more like a trailer park child molester these days) out to get back at New York City by crashing the stock market and making good on gold, and a few not-so-bright Latino henchmen he picked up in prison (where he was sent for some kind of white-collar scheme). Instead of Walter Matthau at headquarters, we are offered Denzel Washington. Ten years ago, Travolta v. Washington could be almost as promising as Pacino v. DeNiro in Heat, but these days, both are pretty washed up.
Washington has some kind of dark secret which comes out during his cat-and-mousing with Travolta. It turns out he accepted a bribe while overseas negotiating a contract for the purchase of new trains—so that he could pay his daughters' college tuition. Luckily, Mayor James Gandolfini is more than willing to erase that from his permanent record after Washington risks his life chasing Travolta through the city, both underground in the subway tunnels, through traffic-filled streets (obligatory car chase!)*, and on foot across the Manhattan bridge, eventually shooting the man dead (somewhat against his will, of course, as he is a good citizen who has never before shot a gun). Gone is the 1974 mayor, who was sick in bed with the flu when the ransom order came in, and his griping about the filth that is (was) New York—which was the funniest part of the movie.
This film could have been so much more than a B-level action flick people watched on the plane, but the screenplay is so lazy (why?! More than half the work was done in '74!) and reliant on stereotypes that the competent cast can't get it off the ground. The original film does typecast the hostages (even in the credits, they are listed as The Mother, The Homosexual, The Hooker, The Pimp), but they are just hostages—the story is not theirs. Tony Scott's version, perhaps stabbing at egalitarianism, lets each hostage shine for a moment—the soldier who dies so that a mother's child can live, the undercover cop who tries to save the day but is shot dead, and the college kid whose girlfriend witnesses the entire takeover via skype on his laptop (ugh). Meanwhile, we never get a clear understanding of our hero.
*The movie also includes an obligatory rat bite.
Washington has some kind of dark secret which comes out during his cat-and-mousing with Travolta. It turns out he accepted a bribe while overseas negotiating a contract for the purchase of new trains—so that he could pay his daughters' college tuition. Luckily, Mayor James Gandolfini is more than willing to erase that from his permanent record after Washington risks his life chasing Travolta through the city, both underground in the subway tunnels, through traffic-filled streets (obligatory car chase!)*, and on foot across the Manhattan bridge, eventually shooting the man dead (somewhat against his will, of course, as he is a good citizen who has never before shot a gun). Gone is the 1974 mayor, who was sick in bed with the flu when the ransom order came in, and his griping about the filth that is (was) New York—which was the funniest part of the movie.
This film could have been so much more than a B-level action flick people watched on the plane, but the screenplay is so lazy (why?! More than half the work was done in '74!) and reliant on stereotypes that the competent cast can't get it off the ground. The original film does typecast the hostages (even in the credits, they are listed as The Mother, The Homosexual, The Hooker, The Pimp), but they are just hostages—the story is not theirs. Tony Scott's version, perhaps stabbing at egalitarianism, lets each hostage shine for a moment—the soldier who dies so that a mother's child can live, the undercover cop who tries to save the day but is shot dead, and the college kid whose girlfriend witnesses the entire takeover via skype on his laptop (ugh). Meanwhile, we never get a clear understanding of our hero.
*The movie also includes an obligatory rat bite.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Movies: A Serious Man
The Coens get back to what works in A Serious Man—a kind of 1960s version of The Big Lebowski, more tightly focused, steeped in Judaism and wreathed in wisps of marijuana smoke. A contemporary Job, small-potatoes physics professor Larry Gopnik finds his orderly word to be suddenly out of order. It begins with a Korean exchange student attempting to bribe him for a passing grade, and swiftly progresses to a proposed incursion on his rancher’s property line by the too-American neighbors, a request for divorce from his wife, a car accident, an urgent call from his doctor to discuss test results, and certain financial ruin, not to mention extreme emotional strain. Swirling around him are other such peripheral troubles as a jobless brother with a gambling problem and a cyst that needs constant draining, the warm-mouthed, paunch-bellied widower who is courting his wife, and a son too busy getting high and running from the neighborhood bully to prepare for his bar mitzvah.
The trajectory of the film is preëstablished by a sepia-toned short in which a 19th century Russian Jewish couple argue in their home in front of a guest as to whether the old man is or is not an evil spirit; the husband, who has befriended the bearded stranger after an accident on the road, thinks his appearance is a blessing, for he is a family friend of his wife’s. The wife, who heard that the man died three years ago of typhus, thinks that his appearance is a curse, and stabs him in the chest with an ice pick. The bright-eyed visitor is slow to show signs of pain, but eventually bleeds, then wanders back out into the snow. The husband cries that they are ruined because of her murder; she closes the door, certain that they are saved because of her vigilance.
During the movie proper, Gopnik’s car wreck is mirrored by another, but fatal car wreck: that of Sy Ableman, the widower-lover of Gopnik’s wife, who is called at his funeral (for which somehow Gopnik finds himself paying) “a serious man,” by the Rabbi Nachtner. After Gopnik has visited the over-zealous Junior Rabbi Scott, and the more senior but equally useless Rabbi Nachtner, asking, as a good Jew must, why it is that God is forsaking him, he tries to see the aged and wise Rabbi Marshak, stammering to his secretary that he is—that he has tried to be—a serious man. Marshak, who is busy thinking, refuses to see him, but towards the end of the film, does see Gopnik’s son, for the only work he still does is converse on the Sabbath wit the boy being bar mitzvahed. To this boy, he slowly and sagely says, “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies,” and then pulls from his drawer the boy’s transistor radio, confiscated from him at Hebrew school at the film’s start.
He is quoting, of course, the Jefferson Airplane song that has become the film’s theme, and this is the film’s most brilliant and hysterical moments. Gopnik senior so desperately wants the old man’s wisdom, but it’s given instead to his jejune boy. And yet, it promises to address the man’s crisis—his job, his marriage, and his entire reality are not what he thought they were. But just as that song asks questions without offering answers, the Rabbi Marshak offers no actual answers (“be a good boy,” he says)—and neither does the film. Though the bar mitzvah goes off without a hitch and husband and wife are brought closer by their child’s achievement, and though a colleague from the tenure committee drops by Gopnik’s office to tell him that the news will likely be good, the film ends before we’re given confirmation, before the divorce is called off, and while a tornado is visible on the horizon, and the doctor’s office is on the phone. We are a little disgruntled, but what else could we expect? The film is about uncertainty itself, so cannot offer any certain conclusion.
*Even if everyone else liked No Country For Old Men, I considered it a failure.
The trajectory of the film is preëstablished by a sepia-toned short in which a 19th century Russian Jewish couple argue in their home in front of a guest as to whether the old man is or is not an evil spirit; the husband, who has befriended the bearded stranger after an accident on the road, thinks his appearance is a blessing, for he is a family friend of his wife’s. The wife, who heard that the man died three years ago of typhus, thinks that his appearance is a curse, and stabs him in the chest with an ice pick. The bright-eyed visitor is slow to show signs of pain, but eventually bleeds, then wanders back out into the snow. The husband cries that they are ruined because of her murder; she closes the door, certain that they are saved because of her vigilance.
During the movie proper, Gopnik’s car wreck is mirrored by another, but fatal car wreck: that of Sy Ableman, the widower-lover of Gopnik’s wife, who is called at his funeral (for which somehow Gopnik finds himself paying) “a serious man,” by the Rabbi Nachtner. After Gopnik has visited the over-zealous Junior Rabbi Scott, and the more senior but equally useless Rabbi Nachtner, asking, as a good Jew must, why it is that God is forsaking him, he tries to see the aged and wise Rabbi Marshak, stammering to his secretary that he is—that he has tried to be—a serious man. Marshak, who is busy thinking, refuses to see him, but towards the end of the film, does see Gopnik’s son, for the only work he still does is converse on the Sabbath wit the boy being bar mitzvahed. To this boy, he slowly and sagely says, “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies,” and then pulls from his drawer the boy’s transistor radio, confiscated from him at Hebrew school at the film’s start.
He is quoting, of course, the Jefferson Airplane song that has become the film’s theme, and this is the film’s most brilliant and hysterical moments. Gopnik senior so desperately wants the old man’s wisdom, but it’s given instead to his jejune boy. And yet, it promises to address the man’s crisis—his job, his marriage, and his entire reality are not what he thought they were. But just as that song asks questions without offering answers, the Rabbi Marshak offers no actual answers (“be a good boy,” he says)—and neither does the film. Though the bar mitzvah goes off without a hitch and husband and wife are brought closer by their child’s achievement, and though a colleague from the tenure committee drops by Gopnik’s office to tell him that the news will likely be good, the film ends before we’re given confirmation, before the divorce is called off, and while a tornado is visible on the horizon, and the doctor’s office is on the phone. We are a little disgruntled, but what else could we expect? The film is about uncertainty itself, so cannot offer any certain conclusion.
*Even if everyone else liked No Country For Old Men, I considered it a failure.
Movies: Up in the Air
There is something disconcerting about George Clooney, and Up in the Air crystallizes this thing. The ideal icon of contemporary consumer culture, Clooney is a very fine product. He is well-cut, of a nice weight with double-stitched seams. He has fruit in the nose, spicy overtones, and a balanced structure. He presents well, and he has a smooth finish. He is casually warm, and happy to appear at your benefit for Cause X and be photographed. But what does he actually stand for? What are his passions? What is under the worsted wool, the Egyptian cotton, the clean linens, and the sun-toasted, precor-toned skin? Brad Pitt undoubtedly poops. George Clooney? I’m not as certain. He may not have any viscera.
And Up in the Air embraces, however ironically, that hollow Clooneyan panache. Here is the American dream gone wrong, where corporations are our closest friends, and we are more loyal to them than our lovers. As Ryan Bingham, Clooney flies American Airlines between the country’s armpit outposts—Omaha to Houston to Detroit—laying people off (imagine a fin de siecle capitalist structure so bloated and necrotic that it outsources its termination processes). The tragedy of the working American is his boon; the worse the country’s economy get, the more miles he accrues. This is not-so-subtle social criticism from writer/director Jason Reitman, also responsible for Thank You For Smoking and the less-toothy Juno, but in our irony-saturated state, we need a stronger shake, a sharper stick in the eye, than this cotton-swabbed swipe.
Bingham’s stint in the sky isn’t unlike Ed Norton’s character’s at the beginning of Fight Club—single-serving coffee, single-serving cream, single-serving friend. But Fight Club rages against this empty husk of a life, and tears shit up. Tyler Durden’s disorder is a direct and violent engagement with his depression and disconnection. That was 10 years ago. Up in the Air, however ironic or sly, never breaks the circuit of escape. When the taste of what Bingham thought he wanted sticks in his throat, he runs. When the human connection he thinks he’s found turns out to be false, he runs. And as the film concludes, he’s on the plane again, going we don’t know where.
And Up in the Air embraces, however ironically, that hollow Clooneyan panache. Here is the American dream gone wrong, where corporations are our closest friends, and we are more loyal to them than our lovers. As Ryan Bingham, Clooney flies American Airlines between the country’s armpit outposts—Omaha to Houston to Detroit—laying people off (imagine a fin de siecle capitalist structure so bloated and necrotic that it outsources its termination processes). The tragedy of the working American is his boon; the worse the country’s economy get, the more miles he accrues. This is not-so-subtle social criticism from writer/director Jason Reitman, also responsible for Thank You For Smoking and the less-toothy Juno, but in our irony-saturated state, we need a stronger shake, a sharper stick in the eye, than this cotton-swabbed swipe.
Bingham’s stint in the sky isn’t unlike Ed Norton’s character’s at the beginning of Fight Club—single-serving coffee, single-serving cream, single-serving friend. But Fight Club rages against this empty husk of a life, and tears shit up. Tyler Durden’s disorder is a direct and violent engagement with his depression and disconnection. That was 10 years ago. Up in the Air, however ironic or sly, never breaks the circuit of escape. When the taste of what Bingham thought he wanted sticks in his throat, he runs. When the human connection he thinks he’s found turns out to be false, he runs. And as the film concludes, he’s on the plane again, going we don’t know where.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Movies: Road House
Because I watched this movie on VH1 on the plane, missing the first five minutes, the last ten minutes, and all the good parts in between that were replaced by commercials, I’m not sure that I should be reviewing it here. But I’m so fascinated by its extreme 80s-ness that I can’t help it. Everyone fell in love with Patrick Swayze’s moves in Dirty Dancing, but it’s in Road House that he shows his real moves, doing shirtless tai chi in front of his rented bungalow (no phone, no tv, no air conditioning—my kind of man!) while the next door neighbors—an all-male family of rich boors who, it turns out, have garnished their wealth by terrorizing the town’s small business owners—drive by in helicopters and monster-trucks. At one point, papa rich boor insists to Swayze that he’s done the town good—it’s because of him that they have a JC Penney. Oh, the 80s!
Only in the 80s could a movie with a plot this thin even be made—Swayze’s Dalton is the best cooler in the business (except for his gray-haired mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott in a fit of casting brilliance)), and he’s paid a pretty sum to leave his big-city digs and help revamp a rowdy roadhouse where brawls rage every night, so violent that the band—led by a blind blues guitar player—plays inside a chicken-wire cage. Dalton cleans up not only the bar, but the whole town, taking out the rich bad guys, and hooks up with a babelicious nerdy girl-doctor along the way (she staples shut a huge knife wound in his torso after he refuses any anesthetic, drives a red jeep, and looks ultra-hot when she takes off her glasses and unbraids her hair). I don’t know what happens in the end, but I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing through again to find out.
Only in the 80s could a movie with a plot this thin even be made—Swayze’s Dalton is the best cooler in the business (except for his gray-haired mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott in a fit of casting brilliance)), and he’s paid a pretty sum to leave his big-city digs and help revamp a rowdy roadhouse where brawls rage every night, so violent that the band—led by a blind blues guitar player—plays inside a chicken-wire cage. Dalton cleans up not only the bar, but the whole town, taking out the rich bad guys, and hooks up with a babelicious nerdy girl-doctor along the way (she staples shut a huge knife wound in his torso after he refuses any anesthetic, drives a red jeep, and looks ultra-hot when she takes off her glasses and unbraids her hair). I don’t know what happens in the end, but I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing through again to find out.
Books: Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
Once I left school, I started reading the introductions to novels, when they had them, since no one was around to spoon feed me context (which in the past I disdained to consider relevant, but I come to appreciate more and more as I create my own contextual database, reading more and more). Unfortunately, reading introductions first often colors one’s reading of the novel, such that during my reading of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, I was constantly seeking the development of the early image of the “nihilist”—a figure with which I’ve been long fascinated, and which the introduction of my moldy, hardcover copy of this book (left, now, in some airplane’s seat-pocket) posits was first established in this very book. I’d always considered nihilism a particularly French sensation, and known the Russians to be Francophiles (if not Francofetishists), so was somewhat surprised that the concept might have Russian origin (for I expect communist Russians to be nihilists, of course, but Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in 1862).
But to be honest, I found Bazarov a rather disappointing nihilist—rather a romantic, in fact—and his compatriot (and the novel’s true hero) Arcadii a rather dry, typical hero of the Russian gentry, sweetly naïve and achieving fulfillment only in finding a woman even more sweetly naïve to marry and set up farm (Arcadii and Katya reappear almost in carbon copy in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as Levin and Kitty, except that each is a bit older and more tired—though no less naïve and traditional). Bazarov, a naturalist with little patience for the affection of his parents, falls hopelessly in love with the widow Odintsova. When she rejects him, he (arguably purposely) contracts the quick-killing typhus (by touching an infected person’s wound with his own open wound—an experiment someone with his scientific knowledge would know would lead to infection).
As also discovered in reading the introduction, Turgenev lost most of his readership with the publication of this novel; older readers were offended, as they thought he was siding with the young nihilists, and younger readers thought that he was caricaturizing them, and siding with the “Fathers.” Having only read one other of Turgenev’s works, I would posit that he sides with no one, only observing people and the silly games they play with their minds, with a fascination much more pure than that of those who would follow—those writers like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who had much clearer agendas. Turgenev, rather than trying to alight on the ideal way to live, simply sees the way we do live, a bemused smile on his face and a poignant chuckle in his throat.
But to be honest, I found Bazarov a rather disappointing nihilist—rather a romantic, in fact—and his compatriot (and the novel’s true hero) Arcadii a rather dry, typical hero of the Russian gentry, sweetly naïve and achieving fulfillment only in finding a woman even more sweetly naïve to marry and set up farm (Arcadii and Katya reappear almost in carbon copy in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as Levin and Kitty, except that each is a bit older and more tired—though no less naïve and traditional). Bazarov, a naturalist with little patience for the affection of his parents, falls hopelessly in love with the widow Odintsova. When she rejects him, he (arguably purposely) contracts the quick-killing typhus (by touching an infected person’s wound with his own open wound—an experiment someone with his scientific knowledge would know would lead to infection).
As also discovered in reading the introduction, Turgenev lost most of his readership with the publication of this novel; older readers were offended, as they thought he was siding with the young nihilists, and younger readers thought that he was caricaturizing them, and siding with the “Fathers.” Having only read one other of Turgenev’s works, I would posit that he sides with no one, only observing people and the silly games they play with their minds, with a fascination much more pure than that of those who would follow—those writers like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who had much clearer agendas. Turgenev, rather than trying to alight on the ideal way to live, simply sees the way we do live, a bemused smile on his face and a poignant chuckle in his throat.
Movies: The Bad Lieutenant
I walked into Werner Herzog’s new movie knowing nothing else about it—not that it was a “remake” of a 1992 Ferrara film, not that it starred Nick Cage, not that it would be filled with pulpy drug use, sex, and violence. Each of those facts may have turned me away from the theater (isn’t it a bit soon to be remaking a film from the 90s?), but Herzog’s directorship turned out to be the only essential fact. For while this is an obscenely over-the-top, Tarantino-meets-Lynch parade of human filth—the waxy-faced crooked cop, the soft-focus prostitute with two black eyes, the bombastic black drug king—the irony is constantly interrupted by Herzog’s tenderness for the true human types that circulate in that world—the African family shot dead in their home, the beer-soaked skin of a sad country girl who can’t understand why her lover goes to AA, the bone-thin black teenage mothers who come to the door when Cage’s McDonagh comes knocking at their shack looking for drug-dealing boyfriends hiding in the chiffarobe.
But aside from the constant play between pulp’s crass, cold hyperbole and documentary’s careful, compassionate honesty, there is the Herzog wildcard: a sudden shift out of plot and into a strange existential meditation on the beautiful absurdity and madness of life. In Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about a scientific encampment in the Arctic, this meant following a suicidal penguin as he scuttled away from the flock and into the frame’s vanishing point, inland, away from the shore’s feeding grounds. In Lieutenant, breaks in McDonagh’s consciousness come with shots of iguanas that no one else sees. Herzog films these strange, scaly creatures with his National Geographic-style love of the wild; surrounded by prismatic light, their bulging eyes pulse, their horny skin still. Herzog uses a kind of lizard-cam so that we see the room from the iguana’s eyes, or, once, from the eyes of a crocodile slithering away from the site of a car wreck on the side of the road (where another croc’s insides are strewn across the street).
And the film’s “happy ending,” which sees the murder of the African family solved, the drug king pinned to the crime thanks to a (planted) DNA-kissed “lucky crack pipe”, the prostitute clean, married, and pregnant with McDonagh’s child, and the bad Lieutenant promoted to Corporal, doesn’t leave us with the couple kissing at the door (too soft and bright), or McDonaugh then snorting a pile of cocaine in a hotel room immediately after (too dark and harsh), but with another curious, elegiac interlude: McDonagh sitting on the floor in the dim blue of an aquarium, next to the Hispanic thug he saved from a Katrina-flooded prison at the film’s start, who has since changed his life and been clean a whole year—the entire year McDonagh slipped into deeper and deeper drug abuse, initially because of back pain caused by a disc injury sustained in saving this man. This Herzog moment is gratifying for almost no one—not the filmgoer who’s never heard of Herzog and came to see a Nick Cage action flick, not the romantic who wants to see every film tied up with the red ribbon of resurrection and resolution—but for the director’s humanist-compatriots, it is the ideal finish: open, quiet, unresolved, without judgment, without promise, without despair.
But aside from the constant play between pulp’s crass, cold hyperbole and documentary’s careful, compassionate honesty, there is the Herzog wildcard: a sudden shift out of plot and into a strange existential meditation on the beautiful absurdity and madness of life. In Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about a scientific encampment in the Arctic, this meant following a suicidal penguin as he scuttled away from the flock and into the frame’s vanishing point, inland, away from the shore’s feeding grounds. In Lieutenant, breaks in McDonagh’s consciousness come with shots of iguanas that no one else sees. Herzog films these strange, scaly creatures with his National Geographic-style love of the wild; surrounded by prismatic light, their bulging eyes pulse, their horny skin still. Herzog uses a kind of lizard-cam so that we see the room from the iguana’s eyes, or, once, from the eyes of a crocodile slithering away from the site of a car wreck on the side of the road (where another croc’s insides are strewn across the street).
And the film’s “happy ending,” which sees the murder of the African family solved, the drug king pinned to the crime thanks to a (planted) DNA-kissed “lucky crack pipe”, the prostitute clean, married, and pregnant with McDonagh’s child, and the bad Lieutenant promoted to Corporal, doesn’t leave us with the couple kissing at the door (too soft and bright), or McDonaugh then snorting a pile of cocaine in a hotel room immediately after (too dark and harsh), but with another curious, elegiac interlude: McDonagh sitting on the floor in the dim blue of an aquarium, next to the Hispanic thug he saved from a Katrina-flooded prison at the film’s start, who has since changed his life and been clean a whole year—the entire year McDonagh slipped into deeper and deeper drug abuse, initially because of back pain caused by a disc injury sustained in saving this man. This Herzog moment is gratifying for almost no one—not the filmgoer who’s never heard of Herzog and came to see a Nick Cage action flick, not the romantic who wants to see every film tied up with the red ribbon of resurrection and resolution—but for the director’s humanist-compatriots, it is the ideal finish: open, quiet, unresolved, without judgment, without promise, without despair.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Movies: Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are is my favorite children’s book. I love it so much that, not only do I have the tale committed to memory (“That night, Max wore his wolf suit, and made mischief. . . of one kind and another; his mother called him Wild Thing, and Max said, “I’ll eat you up!” so he was sent to bed, without eating anything. . .”), but I consider it one of my favorite books period, placing Sendak in the pantheon with Foster Wallace and Barthes, who write for adults (very smart adults, at that). As a child, I didn’t like monsters or adventure stories, and I didn’t identify with Max the way most children probably do; my attachment to the book was perhaps precocious—I loved it for its poetry—it’s tempo and its tone.
Generally, movies made about our favorite childhood things are destructive forces—nothing so materially realized can compete with the melting edges of our nostalgic dreamscape. But Jonze and Eggers nailed it, fleshing out the story only as much as needed to make a 101-minute movie out of a book comprising less than ten sentences. And by some trick of masterful art direction, watching a handful of giant, live-action furry monsters tenderly hugging a little boy seemed perfectly real and natural; not once did I feel that spark of critical distance that so often strikes me at the movies—even when watching actual actors not dressed as giant, furry monsters.
Max of the movie is a bit more sensitive (dare I say “twee”?) than Max of the book; his anger is grounded in frustration, with an older sister who ignores him for her friends, and a mother (the sweet, scratchy-voiced Catherine Keenar, who appears in the top-five of every hipster’s MILFs list) who ignores him (briefly) for a wine-swilling Mark Ruffalo-as-boyfriend. The Wild Things, rather than simply “rolling their terrible eyes and gnashing their terrible teeth and showing their terrible claws” also express a fully human range of emotions, with particular attention to the darker feelings of loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, and anger. They are, thus, able to move us as much as Max does, often bringing us to tears.
Characters aside, where the magic of the book lies in the pacing of the page turn (during the wild rumpus, there is no text at all, but the swinging bodies of the wild things propel the story forward nonetheless), the magic of the movie resides in the art direction. This begins when Max climbs into his private boat, something just tattered enough to belie the dreamscape, but solid enough to carry a small boy in and out of a day, and a week, and a year. The sloshing sea, the driving rain, and the huddled boy in his filthy, bedraggled wolf suit set us up for the craggy cliffs, endless dunes, and enchanted caves that Max discovers in the land where the wild things are. The Andy Goldsworthy-like palaces of twigs—huge, swooping organic gestures tumbled across a clearing in the wood and surrounded by a network of tunnels, a fort “to keep the sadness out,”—add another element to the movie—the human compulsion to build—not actually in the book, but in perfect keeping with Max’s psyche (for the land where the wild things are is, of course, something that Max has built in the first place, even if it is fully natural and uncontrolled, without technical structure).
And so, even if detractors will say that this is another hipster puff-piece (the Karen O. soundtrack is neither for children nor adults, for example) made by and for overgrown children, its values (creativity and friendship) are valid. Rarely does movie by the hipsters for the hipsters wear its heart so openly on its sleeve; there is nothing here that is coy or disaffected or too-cool-for-school. Jonze proved himself as tender as he is clever ten years ago with Being John Malkovich, probably one of the smartest and saddest movies ever made, and it’s a bit shocking that he hasn’t done a feature other than Adaptation since then. The man is a genius of humanity and should be making a movie every year, like Steven Soderbergh or the Coen machine. Eggers, further, has proven that he is a worthy screenwriter, and that the travesty that was Away We Go can be blamed fully on wife and co-writer Vendela Vida.
Generally, movies made about our favorite childhood things are destructive forces—nothing so materially realized can compete with the melting edges of our nostalgic dreamscape. But Jonze and Eggers nailed it, fleshing out the story only as much as needed to make a 101-minute movie out of a book comprising less than ten sentences. And by some trick of masterful art direction, watching a handful of giant, live-action furry monsters tenderly hugging a little boy seemed perfectly real and natural; not once did I feel that spark of critical distance that so often strikes me at the movies—even when watching actual actors not dressed as giant, furry monsters.
Max of the movie is a bit more sensitive (dare I say “twee”?) than Max of the book; his anger is grounded in frustration, with an older sister who ignores him for her friends, and a mother (the sweet, scratchy-voiced Catherine Keenar, who appears in the top-five of every hipster’s MILFs list) who ignores him (briefly) for a wine-swilling Mark Ruffalo-as-boyfriend. The Wild Things, rather than simply “rolling their terrible eyes and gnashing their terrible teeth and showing their terrible claws” also express a fully human range of emotions, with particular attention to the darker feelings of loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, and anger. They are, thus, able to move us as much as Max does, often bringing us to tears.
Characters aside, where the magic of the book lies in the pacing of the page turn (during the wild rumpus, there is no text at all, but the swinging bodies of the wild things propel the story forward nonetheless), the magic of the movie resides in the art direction. This begins when Max climbs into his private boat, something just tattered enough to belie the dreamscape, but solid enough to carry a small boy in and out of a day, and a week, and a year. The sloshing sea, the driving rain, and the huddled boy in his filthy, bedraggled wolf suit set us up for the craggy cliffs, endless dunes, and enchanted caves that Max discovers in the land where the wild things are. The Andy Goldsworthy-like palaces of twigs—huge, swooping organic gestures tumbled across a clearing in the wood and surrounded by a network of tunnels, a fort “to keep the sadness out,”—add another element to the movie—the human compulsion to build—not actually in the book, but in perfect keeping with Max’s psyche (for the land where the wild things are is, of course, something that Max has built in the first place, even if it is fully natural and uncontrolled, without technical structure).
And so, even if detractors will say that this is another hipster puff-piece (the Karen O. soundtrack is neither for children nor adults, for example) made by and for overgrown children, its values (creativity and friendship) are valid. Rarely does movie by the hipsters for the hipsters wear its heart so openly on its sleeve; there is nothing here that is coy or disaffected or too-cool-for-school. Jonze proved himself as tender as he is clever ten years ago with Being John Malkovich, probably one of the smartest and saddest movies ever made, and it’s a bit shocking that he hasn’t done a feature other than Adaptation since then. The man is a genius of humanity and should be making a movie every year, like Steven Soderbergh or the Coen machine. Eggers, further, has proven that he is a worthy screenwriter, and that the travesty that was Away We Go can be blamed fully on wife and co-writer Vendela Vida.
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