After recently grumbling that the dog days of August have brought with it a semi-drought of interesting events to check out, I suddenly had a deluge over the weekend, which saw me shuttling all over the place (well, actually, mostly around my neighborhood of Lincoln Square as well as New Caledonia, Illinois). Be careful what you wish for, as the wise ones say….
Tags: Angelic Organics Learning Center, Frozen River, GreasyJoan and Co., Neo-Futurists, Sunday Dinner Club
Last Monday, I finally left the ranks of the eight people or so in the whole city that have not yet seen The Dark Knight. I’m normally not a comic book kind of guy, but what with all the hype, hysteria, and never-ending water cooler discussions about the movie, plus my own inherent curiosity about how good Heath Ledger’s last film performance was, I just had to bite the bullet and go. Plus, I did see the original Batman with Michael Keaton, and the super-campy one with the codpieces and the plastic nipples with George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell, and truth be told, enjoyed both of them; and I’m a big fan of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, so this movie couldn’t be all bad. And it wasn’t (although I felt it could have ended at least forty minutes earlier than it did). Two days later, I managed to catch one of the last screenings of Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal 1960s classic, Contempt (Le Mepris), during its limited revival at the Music Box Theater. Many film scholars consider Contempt as an aberration in the Godard oeuvre - it is his one foray into commercial cinema, with a narrative that is somewhat more accessible than his other masterpieces. While The Dark Knight is absolutely not at the cinematic level of Contempt, one of the pinnacles of world cinema, I couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity between Nolan’s and Godard’s ambitions and achievement. The Dark Knight takes the comic book genre and the generic Hollywood blockbuster and both adhered to, and refreshed and re-imagined, their conventions: amidst the multitude of breathtaking, blazing, action movie set pieces is a reflective tale of the inherent fallibility of human nature and the near-impossibility of categorizing who is a hero and who is a villain, who is virtuous and who is weak-willed. Contempt, on the other hand, also takes the conventions of 1960s Cinemascope, “international co-productions”, which it can be initially lumped with, such as panoramic, bright-hued views of Capri, characters who speak in English, Italian, and French, and abundant female pulchritude (in this case Brigitte Bardot’s) and wrapped a compelling story of various levels of breakdowns (marital, artistic, virtue) around them, using risky but innovative directorial techniques such as a 35 minute sequence shot in near real time in the closed quarters of an apartment.
Tags: Christopher Nolan, Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard, The Dark Knight
I am sure many of my avid blog readers will find this hard to believe, but sometimes I just want to be entertained. Yes, there are days when any thoughts of seeing one more obscure foreign-language film, or another experimental, multi-media theater piece, or one more obtuse visual artwork are banished from my hurting brain. Sometimes, even I surrender at the thought of any more Peter Sellars or Eugene Ionesco. I’m sure Meryl Streep also has days when she’s had had enough of mastering difficult, foreign accents, or playing intense, emotional roller-coaster dramatic scenes, days when all she wants to do is sing “Waterloo” and do a split in midair while wearing overalls and a mop of stringy hair. And thank heavens for all of us, she does those, as well as play air guitar, fall through a roof, wear a spandex spacesuit, and lead a conga line for “Dancing Queen” in the absolutely, wonderfully, irresistibly entertaining film version of the stage hit Mamma Mia! The divine Ms. Streep looks like she’s actually having a ball, and that is the one surefire way to get audiences to heartily feel that the nine dollars they paid to see her is worth it. Of course, Mamma Mia! has built in terrific-time-ness: who can resist the superficial yet snappy, infectious musical rhythms and endearing, perplexingly syntaxed Scandinavian-English lyrics of ABBA’s invaluable songbook? Songs like “Take a Chance on Me” and “Chiquitita” are like candybars without the calories, instant gratification without the queasy need to take a shower right after. I’m not really sure what these cranky film reviewers were expecting- have they not seen the play? Mamma Mia! is not about plot, or realism, or nuanced, multi-dimensional characters. It’s about ABBA songs and the pleasures that they give. And the movie makes these pleasures seem even more, uhmmm, pleasurable, by having Christine Baranski redefine what it means to be a trainstopping cougar in “Does Your Mother Know That You’re Out?”; by having Julie Walters knock out both physical comedy and emotive singing in the hilarious “Take a Chance on Me”; by having Colin Firth in paisley pants and Dominic Cooper in almost nothing (love this boy! I saw him in the Broadway production of The History Boys, and everytime he was on stage you really didn’t want to look at Richard Griffiths, the scenery, or anything else, actually, but I digress); and by having Ms. Meryl Streep, greatest living American actress, show she’s having a hell of a time belting the schmaltz and the corn and the quirky grammar of “Winner Takes It All”, and proving to one and all that she can be as riveting as Sophie or Karen Silkwood or Isak Dinesen when playing a role that’s a walk in the park, in a film that’s as glossy and shallow as the Greek ocean that permeates it.
Tags: Mamma Mia!
The long Fourth of July weekend has a way of sneaking up on you and making the week before seem hazy and lethargic. So I’m just catching up on the arts news from last week, which had quite a number of sizzlers! Hottest theater news - Chicago version: The Hypocrites, one of the Chicago arts groups that really matter, announced their 2008-2009 season last week. Someone douse me with a firehose, quick, since, from the email release, this Hypocrites season looks to be one of the hottest, and promises to be one of the most-talked about, seasons of any Chicago theater in the coming year. The season-opener is Brecht and Weill’s masterpiece, The Threepenny Opera, to be directed by Sean Graney, one of Chicago’s most risk-taking and wildly inventive directors, at the Steppenwolf Garage. Graney doing Brecht and a musical? Stick me with a defillibrator right now (or better yet, have Christian Bale give me 10 minutes of CPR), my heart is uncontrallably pounding with excitement! The season also includes a production of The Hairy Ape which will be part of the Goodman’s O’Neill festival (with the Wooster Group and the Netherland’s theatrical enfant terrible Ivo von Hove also participating, this festival will definitely not be O’Neill as read in college sophomore English classes); Graney’s three-person Oedipus Rex to be staged promenade style; and the remount of the magnificent David Cromer-helmed Our Town which I raved about here. Hottest theater news - New York version: Broadway will be seeing this fall the acclaimed Royal Court production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with most of its London cast intact, including the fabulously incandescent Kristin Scott-Thomas of The English Patient fame, who won an Olivier Award for her performance as Arkadina. The one big casting change from the London production, though, which has sent various Francis biological and genetic processes into nuclear overdrive is Peter Sarsgaard, brilliant actor/thinking (gay) man’s sex symbol/the-one-guy-I-would-shapeshift-into-Maggie-Gyllenhaal-for, playing Trigorin in lieu of Chiwetel Ejiofor. Just thinking how marvelous (and how hot and sexy) Sarsgaard would be performing Chekhov is enough for a flame-retardant blanket to be thrown over me! I can’t wait to see this production, and I’m booking my flight and buying my ticket soon! Hottest art and culture-related news of the week: Fritz Lang’s hypnotic Metropolis, one of the most influential films of all time, and one of the two German expressionism films that I really admire (the other one being Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is also famously one of the most incomplete masterpieces of all time. Paramount Pictures, its US distributor, cut out key scenes and characters in order to make it more palatable for the American mass market. A complete version of the film had been thought lost for the past eighty years, until a small Argentinian film museum discovered a copy in its archives. Movie fans have been rejoicing and drinking themselves silly over this news- finally, there will be an opportunity very soon for everyone to see the movie as Lang envisioned it to be. And if the mutilated film version is a classic, everyone’s holding their breath on how masterful the complete version will turn out to be. I first read about the Metropolis discovery on Rob Kozlowski’s blog last week, which had a, ahem, pretty vivid description of its impact on film preservationists.
Tags: Fritz Lang, Hypocrites Theatre, Metropolis, Peter Sarsgaard, The Seagull
After working almost nonstop for the past month, including most weekends, I needed some decompression time last weekend. Many people would have decompressed by reading a book by the pool, or by cycling along the lakeshore bike path for many hours, or even by walking around in a cocktail-induced haze during last weekend’s Gay Pride festivities. Since I’m battier than a New Mexico rock cave, my formula for stress relief, however, involved seeing Steven Adly Gurgis’s long (two and a half hours) metaphysical discourse on the nature of guilt and forgiveness, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, being given an energetic production by the Gift Theater, and attending the Luchino Visconti retrospective at the Siskel Film Center for the long (two and a half hours too!), over-the-top, insanely mesmerizing Visconti masterpiece, The Damned. Paraphrasing the even battier Col. Kilgore of Apocalypse Now, (sigh deeply) I love the smell of extremely provocative art in the morning!
Tags: Gift Theater, Siskel Film Center
Whew! It’s the last full week of June and the long fourth of July weekend will soon be upon us. Where was I during this month? Oh right, working on a couple of big deals, and shuttling between New York and Chicago (not to mention having to go out to Schaumburg for a couple of days and getting stuck in notorious, nefarious I-90 traffic). This month felt like I was on a bullet train to nowhere; which is not good for an arts and culture blogger. I can’t believe I haven’t been in a theater since June 1 when I was underwhelmed by Mary-Arrchie’s Beggars in the House of Plenty. Well, the deals have been put to bed and hopefully the next couple of weeks will be a little bit quieter, with more time and focus to savor Chicago’s thriving summer cultural life. Who wants to work like an ox plowing a muddy field during the heightened heat and humidity of July?
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