Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Artist



Like Hugo, another movie about movies, The Artist is also about the fading allure of has-beens in the moving picture business. Unlike Hugo, The Artist not only quotes from silent movies, it is a silent movie shot in black and white, with no dialogue until the very end of the movie.

The themes of silence, and powerlessness in the face of not being heard, make me want to go back and watch those old movies that depended on the power of the scenario, of the actors' ability to express the spirit of what the movie was about through movement, gesture, stillness, silence.

Hugo

Hugo Cabret's father found a discarded automaton in the museum where he was employed and was determined to repair it and make it work again. The automaton was the figure of a man holding a pen poised to write something. What could it be? Would it explain what kind of inventor made it?

When Hugo is orphaned, he continues to repair the automaton while working to maintain the clocks that his uncle abandoned when he disappeared. In a dream like train station in the middle of Paris, Hugo lives within a secret compartment where he can move furtively from one clock to another. The shots of the clocks and the gears, the repetition of the images of keys and locks, lead to a rapturous feeling toward simple mechanics. I will not say technology. That would be putting too extreme an edge on what we are looking at which is the works of things. The metaphor is work. How do things work. What work do we do to give our lives meaning. How do we fix what lies broken? Can a broken man be mended?

Scorsese's movie is a pleasure to watch, and at the end, there is an afterglow of images that stay in the mind's eye.

Margin Call

What a wonderful cast. Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons. To see one at a time in a film is to know the pleasures of fine acting. To see all three working together in a fast paced smartly written film takes away the sour taste that the movie left in my mouth of the plot. I had already seen this plot in a documentary film, Inside Job, from a different point of view, from the point of view of the muckrakers who were pointing the finger at the villains of the economic crisis of 2008.

Margin Call takes us inside the board room where the decision was made to begin unloading the worthless stocks that set off the mortgage crisis. Watching the process of large scale chicanery from the point of view of the villains may humanize them but nobody comes off unscathed.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

American Ballet Theater


Lobby of City Center


Company B, choreography by Paul Taylor


 Besides the visual pleasure of watching the dancers of ABT perform works by Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, and Paul Taylor, going to the City Center today, I could actually see from my seat, which was not always the case in the past when the sight lines were flawed.  The seats themselves were comfortable, and the whole building has been restored to what I imagined the Shriners would see when they convened there, and were inspired by Hollywood and the Arabian Nights simultaneously. 



















Friday, November 11, 2011

Drive

The thing about cars in Los Angeles is that they stand in for much more than transportation. As a New Yorker, I don't think I can understand the deep bond that forms between car and driver.  Drive strips down a character's identity to his action of operating the car. Even though the driver has scenes with human beings, and he looks genuinely fond of a boy and his mother, there is little real communication except for lots of meaningful smiles.

The driver likes LA basketball. He watches it, he listens to it, even when he is eavesdropping on the police radio so that he can tell how close he is to his final escape.The driver's identity in the opening scene when he drives a getaway car for a couple of robbers shifts quickly when the police home in on them and he coolly walks away in a basketball cap and jacket.

Next he wears a police uniform so we think oh a law enforcer escaping the law, but no, he is an actor in a film, no a body double for an actor in a film, no a stunt double for an actor in a film. So he is a character within a character within a character. It would take a lot of digging to find out who he really was.

After just watching Martha Marcy May Marlene, whose main character's identity is sketchy and finally unrevealed, watching this movie, with very slow takes on the actors, and lots of musical exposition, I wondered how much music videos have had an impact on filmmaking.  Screenplays for these two movies were were really stingy with talk for the main characters.

Do modern young directors think that we don't want meaningful dialogue any more? Do they think that music should stand in for words? Have we stopped speaking to each other in absorbing ways? Does language not count? Or is this just the feminist in me wondering what happened to the snappy actresses of old who had plenty of lines to say and said them with aplomb and were the reason to go to the movies.


As it is, we have Ryan Gosling, who is a pleasure to watch, and Carey Mulligan whose hair is always impeccably styled.  Albert Brooks as a singularly bad man has all the good lines.  

Poets Forum

Kay Ryan
Juan Felipe Herrera


Anne Waldman













Three chancellors of the Academy of American Poets had a conversation at the Poets Forum in late October.  The session was entitled  "Humans and Others."  Each poet gave an introductory statement, and then the conversation began.

Waldman has a titanic mind, making connections between protozoa, robotics, and animals of all stripes.  She made me want to read her book, Manatee Humanity.  Just listening to her say it over and over again, she drilled home the connection between the nonhuman and the human, the relationship between the large sea creatures, the sirens who drove men to crash into perilous rocks, and the puny humans who are a cancer on the planet.

Kay Ryan on the other hand is a woman of few words whose remark, "Well I looked at the title, "Humans and Others," and I said, yeah, I fit," made everyone laugh.  Ryan has the wit and charm of a woman comfortable in her own skin.    She seems to be a direct descendant of the sensibility of Emily Dickinson.  She quoted Emily Dickinson's poem number 724.

It's easy to invent a Life —
God does it — every Day —
Creation — but the Gambol
Of His Authority —

It's easy to efface it —
The thrifty Deity
Could scarce afford Eternity
To Spontaneity —

The Perished Patterns murmur —
But His Perturbless Plan
Proceed — inserting Here — a Sun —
There — leaving out a Man —

and number 1746

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
'Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

Juan Felipe Herrera patiently listened to Waldman as she drew connections at breakneck speed, then Kay Ryan's rendition of two of ED.  He was sketching a jeep the whole time, because he had been thinking of buying one.  When he did some research on the car, he learned that it had features like "lock and load," "camouflage" and other phrases that demonstrate the "weaponisation of the language."