logbook

25 jan '00
19 jan '00
9 jan '00
24 dec '99
8 dec '99

25 jan '00

There is a Bertolucci festival going on at the National Gallery of Art. I saw 1970's The Spider's Strategem. Amazing, menacing pans.

Don't get me wrong: Toy Story 2 is hilarious, especially the "outtakes" that accompany the closing credits. But the movie also seems to be about setting computer animation problems and solving them. Some of the successes: the fabric on Woody's horse, Bullseye; fluttering foliage; an overturned bucket of superballs bouncing away. Some of the failures: skin (no surprise); moving automobiles (surprise). It was a special treat to see the ultra-short Luxo Jr. (1986), Pixar's first film, as a curtain-raiser. What makes both films succeed, at two ends of a 14-year curve of hyper-explosive technological growth, is John Lasseter's wit.

On the other hand, the condition of the screen and sound system in the Worldgate cinemas in Herndon is appalling.

19 jan '00

Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia clocks in at three hours, and not a frame is wasted. After a perplexing introductory framing device (who is the narrator, anyway?), the superlative cinematography and editing are launched by a hurtling expository section. If Anderson's acknowledgement of Kubrick is ironically explicit (Tom Cruise's character appears to the strains of "Thus Spake Zarathustra"), his wink at Robert Altman is more oblique, employing Nashville alums Henry Gibson (as "Thurston Howell"?!) and Michael Murphy.

Within the temporal unity of a 24-hour period in the San Fernando Valley, the movie reveals all sorts of doubles: two child prodigies (maybe three), two suicide attempts, two dying men, even two characters named Jim. There are lots of false trails to the narrative:

• one character is warned not to mix up two prescriptions, while another spills a bottle of pills on the floor, but nothing comes of these (possible) mishaps;
• a murdered man is found in a closet, and although one character identifies the killer, the crime is never solved;
• the final scoring of the game show is not resolved.

There's even a deus ex machina device that accounts for a missing gun, but not even this element settles anything. Anderson seems to be saying that closure comes from within, that even a rain of frogs is no substitute for a deathbed meeting.

Wrapped: An Evening in Three Parts, Inbal Pinto Dance Company, Terrace Theatre, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington

This piece has some interesting bits to offer, but is ultimately unsatisfying. An entertaining opening section suggests Charlie Chaplin getting together with Doris Humphrey for a dirty weekend. Pinto uses unconventional materials in her vocabulary, sneezes and tongue clicks most prominently.

However, the effect of much of her work is to dehumanize her dancers -- they become dwarfs, giants, infantilized children in rain hats, simians, flashers galumphing about in raincoats. The topiaries that comprise the set put one in mind of the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti.

As a wind-up train engine rolls across the floor, we realize that we've seen a Dadaist anti-dance, and not a very successful one at that.

The Sheltering Sky, a novel by Paul Bowles

I must admit that it took Bowles's death last year for him to show up on my radar screen. His 1949 book effectively captures the postwar state of mind, the idea that beyond the heavens lie unspeakable terrors.

His two protagonists, Kit and Port, traveling in French Colonial Africa (Camus country) are slowly divested of all forms of their identities, either by appropriation or surrender. Port's passport is stolen; Kit surrenders her clothing, her gender, control of her body, her command of language. In the end, she has no name, and no grasp of the passage of time, and thus simply disappears.

Bowles's description of Kit's ride in a fourth-class railway carriage is harrowing, as is the picture of squalor in the "hotel" at Aïn Krorfa. There's not much room for hope in Port's worldview:

[Life is] like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste.

Break It Down and Almost No Memory, stories by Lydia Davis

These stories are tasty little bedtime snacks, often no longer than a paragraph. Davis's speakers tie themselves in Laing-like knots -- pieces like "To Reiterate" that acknowledge the nouveau romanciers like Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Consider also the microscopic reflexive analysis of "Story." Her characters assemble hyper-rational lists like those in "Break It Down" or "A Few Things Wrong with Me," or those made by Everyman in "Sketches for a Life of Wassily." Davis enters Ben Katchor territory with "City Employment:"

All over the city there are old black women who been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa.

While the delicate, wry "Cockroaches in Autumn" is inspired by Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." "Wife One in Country" is a three-paragraph titration of emotional pain.

9 jan '00

The Talented Mr. Ripley was rather long, wasn't it? At least Philip Seymour Hoffman was there to portray Freddie Miles, the sultan of smarm. Avoid A Map of the World, a clunky melodrama with leaden dialogue and a movie-of-the-week score. Julianne Moore is much better represented by The End of the Affair, which proves to be just a bit disturbing in its implications. Stephen Rea's sad-sack cuckolded husband seems to be forever standing in the rain, even when he's indoors; and Ian Hart as the gumshoe makes a good report of himself.

Meanwhile Sigourney Weaver has the very well-done Galaxy Quest to her credit.The kids at the 5 PM show loved the explosions, while the adults loved the actor jokes and jibes at Star Trek clichés.

This picture manages to deliver old-fashioned thrills without taking itself too seriously, unlike most of today's space epics. Every plot point is economically conserved, and the story is driven by one of the simplest devices, getting trapped in a lie. Much of the violence is subdued, in order to retain a kid-friendly PG rating: it happens out of frame, or is seen through a TV monitor.

I must single out the phenomenal vocal and physical performance of Enrico Colantoni, who plays the head Thermian, Mathesar.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, pre-history by Jared Diamond

Though its central thesis, that geography is destiny, is compelling, this book doesn't quite live up to the praise bestowed on it. Diamond's sturdy prose style owes something to the military's three-point system: he over-explains an allusion to Anna Karenina, he covers the same material from different approaches.

The book's explication of biogeography and its effect on human development from 11,000 BCE to 1750 CE is sound, however. In short, Eurasia (along with North Africa), of all the continents, was endowed with the best stock of plant and animal life suitable for domestication by humans. Domestication led to a sedentary, specialized lifestyle of farms and villages; from there, it is a short step to modern technology. Furthermore, Eurasia is both large in area and oriented along an east-west axis. Latitude lines became the lines of diffusion for food sources, ideas, and epidemic diseases. And Eurasian (especially European) societies went on to colonize the rest of the world.

Diamond raises some intriguing questions in a epilogue: perhaps he will go on to answer them in a subsequent book. In the meantime, the present book does little to explain the explosion of population and economies after about 1750.

Remember Me, a novel by Laura Hendrie

A very wise story of people trapped in loneliness and isolation in a highlands town, Queduro, New Mexico. Hendrie shifts her narrative between feisty poor-relation Rose (first-person) and reluctant sheriff Frank (third-person), and this allows the book's mysteries to unfold gradually. This pattern is broken once by the third-person account of practical nurse Mrs. Fleet, who is wound tighter than a pocket watch: her section is comical and scary at the same time.

Abandoned by her lackluster father ("Walter Bean was about as interesting as a can of soup."), Rose comes under the wing of an eccentric uncle, Bob Devonic. Bob bucks the town's tradition of craft embroidery, which has become badly commercialized and mean-spirited. Rose tries to escape the oppressive small town three times, each time to return to camping out in her station wagon or wintering in the far cabin of the town's lone motel. The book is full of themes of dissembling: hiding in an attic, pretending that a runaway wife is still at home.

Rose's redemption is through Alice, an elderly adversary whose grasp on day-to-day reality begins to slip, midway through the book. Hendrie's sharp portrait of Alice's dissolution is funny and chilling.

The Moons of Jupiter, stories by Alice Munro

These stories from the 70's and 80's are not quite a strong as Munro's later work, but are still worthy. The opening of "Bardon Bus" is particularly well-drawn, while "Visitors" is a rare comic turn. Best is the deft "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd," who "have known each other eighty years, ever since Kindergarten, which was not called that then, but Primary." The two old friends, now in a nursing home, squabble over the usual things before achieving a weary reconciliation.

24 dec '99

Cradle Will Rock is an Altmanesque portrait of the collision of art and political economy in the 1930's. Look for the juicy period details and allusions: Marion Davies in a cameo, the source of a chalk drawing featured in a Helen Levitt photo, a lampooned William Randolph Hearst (Davies' lover) at a fancy dress ball, dressed as a cardinal. Try to overlook the over-the-top characterization of Orson Welles. If Marc Blitzstein's 1936 musical The Cradle Will Rock had had stronger music, he might have been remembered. Director Tim Robbins' closing image is stunning.

Pedro Almodóvar's latest enchanting melodrama, All About My Mother, pays some debts to American pop culture: Truman Capote, Bette Davis, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. The new development for him in this film is a stronger cinematic eye: consider the opening titles sequence, or a shot of Manuela standing in front of a oversized poster of Huma, color halftone dots screaming. The tale of Barcelona grotesques (the transgendered, this time around), becomes a big ragged by the end, but it's worth the train ride from Madrid.

Good subtitling work is rarely recognized, so I want to commend Ian Burley for his work on Alan Resnais's On connait la chanson (in English, Same Old Song). In this fizzy, tightly-constructed romantic comedy (think Alan Rudolph), Burley's challenge is to translate the snatches of French popular song that burst from the lips of the film's characters, and he does it so that we read the sense and the rhyme of the song, without necessarily getting a literal translation.

The actors lip-sync to recordings from all over the century (Chevalier, Gainsbourg, a rock group named Téléphone); they do so in character without "selling" the song, and the song advances the scene. Often the recording level or quality of the fragment is at odds with the tone of the scene, and Resnais seems to consider this an advantage, using the tune as both text and subtext. The overall effect is to heighten the drama and comedy of this "old-hat" love story. When a chestnut like Piaf's "Je ne regrette rien" pops up, its power is even stronger for being spoken, not sung.

I liked the subplot of Simon the estate agent and Nicolas the compulsive apartment shopper, who become fast friends. But what's up with the images of jellyfish in the climactic party scene?

Dance Theatre of Harlem, Opera House, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington

Two pieces that were new to me and "Firebird," which I know from last season. Billy Wilson's "Ginastera" (1991) is troubled by muddy work from the corps and awkward-looking lifts. Much sharper is "Twist," one of the company's most gymnastic dances, choreographed by Dwight Rhoden and premiering this season. Alas, much of the stuffy Kennedy Center audience was put off by the classical/industrial score by Antonio Carlos Scott. The lighting, consisting almost entirely of clean-edged squares and oblongs of light, designed by Michael Korsch, is also noteworthy.

"Firebird" suffers from intrusive stage machinery. In the opening moments, before the Young Man appears, a scrim painted with oversize flowers is dropped across the stage, and a technician draws figures among the flowers with a laser pointer. It's a cheesy effect that looks like an ill-mannered high school kid playing with a laser pointer.

Nevertheless, if I ever marry again, I want Stravinsky's soaring theme for the closing scene to be played at my wedding.

Birds of America, stories by Lorrie Moore

A collection that showcases Moore's wrinkled wit. "Community Life" finds a good story in the life of a small-town librarian; "Terrific Mother" is almost vicious in its satires of academicians; "What You Want to Do Fine" is a movie-script-friendly road trip story. Aphoristic goodies like the following from "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens" are worth the entrance fee:

Life is a long journey across a wide country.... Sometimes the weather's good. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's so bad, your car goes off the road.

8 dec '99

The Descent Beckons, Susan Marshall & Company, George Mason University Center for the Arts, Fairfax, Virginia

This brand-new hour-long performance piece, sort of an assemblage of dance and spoken word, suggests the inventive zaniness of Being John Malkovich paired with the looming darkness of Cabaret.

The dance company of six, along with speaker Lisa Kron, is "augmented" by a corps of life-size inflatable dolls. The dancers do all sorts of comical, unspeakable things to the dolls:

• they swing them about in precarious lifts, and twirl their weightless bodies into June Taylor pinwheels;
• the dancers form a bawdy kick line to an old Jacques Brel standard and use the dolls' legs as enormous phalluses;
• they use the dolls as body pillows, they club the dolls' bodies together, they mop the deck with them;
• as the comic atrocities turn ugly, most of the dolls are deflated;
• in a coda, Kron cradles one of the dying dolls in her arms.

What's so thrilling about the dancing is that the humans are just as nimble as the airy dolls. Just after you've seen a passage and thought, "they couldn't possibly do that with a person," Marshall's dancers show that they can.

The dancers wear glittery Tom Ford-inspired clothes, bare feet, and knee pads. The pads are essential in passages like the one set to "Tico Tico," as the troupe skids about the floor in a barely-controlled mayhem that suggests teen night at the ice rink.

Kristen Hollinsworth has a duet with one of the dolls, a brutal , poignant dance of obsessive love. Another section locks a dancer in laundry hamper, in sort of a David Copperfield routine gone horribly wrong.

Kron serves as sort of an emcee/lounge singer character, but one that's never in the right place. She tells tasteless, pointless jokes, she gushes over the beautiful passages. She serves to bring us into the piece, and to distance ourselves from it, too.

And as a final device, the passing of the millennium is suggested by a huge digital clock hung from the flies, which counts out the elapsed minutes of the piece.

There's a lot to appreciate in this piece.

Marshall is still developing the piece, so she conducted a post-performance discussion. Audience participation was surprisingly thoughtful.

Turn, Magic Wheel, a novel by Dawn Powell

Powell's novel from 1936 is foremost a withering satire of the New York publishing scene of the times. A particularly strong passage is told from the point of view of a junior partner in a publishing house, who is usually known as And Company, who desperately wants to non-conform and is incessantly copied by every other And Company in town.

Powell's two protagonists are the young writer Dennis Orphen and his friend, aging society woman Effie Thorne (the first Mrs. Andrew Callingham). Dennis has just published a roman à clef about Effie, and sometimes Dennis can't distinguish the fictional Effie from the real one. Paragraphs slide fluidly, sometimes bewilderingly, from Dennis's POV to Effie's and back again. The effect (and the theme) is something like that of Tom Wolfe's reportage.

The book is weaker when it deals with Effie's pathetic attempt to regain her Maileresque husband. He has already abandoned his second wife, now dying in the hospital.

Fortunately for this work, Powell has limited her use of the ellipsis mark to section headings.

Each character joins the fugal dance of interlocking triangles -- Dennis is in love with Corinne, who is married to Phil but is probably cheating on Dennis, who also has an ambiguous relationship with Effie, who wants Andy back but took up with Tony for a while -- and the wheel turns.

Scott Hicks and his DP, Robert Richardson, saturate Snow Falling on Cedars with lush images. The picture tries to escape the courtroom-drama box by extended overlapping flashbacks, but it is undone by a bombastic score and an affectless Ethan Hawke. The end result is just plain overwrought.

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