Molly's Musings

Too Little Time, Too Little Money, too much of a good thing....

2012-02-13T20:59:00.000-05:00

In years past, I have sometimes managed to see all five films nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences before the Oscar telecast. Sometimes fewer. This year I’ve seen five pictures the Academy nominated as “best,” but there are ten nominations. Really? Ten? The Academy actually thinks ten films are that good? I’ve got my skeptical face on.

While not impossible, it’s unlikely I’ll see five more movies by February 26^th. I’m certain to see at least one more, however. I’m going to see Hugo next and capture all six films in the best direction category.

It’s hardly appropriate or possible for me to pick the Academy’s “best picture” out of their lengthy list. Of course, I’m not a member of said Academy, so I’ll say what I please, and I just can’t hold it all in any longer. In consideration of the 2011 nominated films, I’ve seen

~ Moneyball

~ The Descendants

~ Midnight in Paris

~ The Tree of Life

~ The Artist

I enjoyed all of these movies to varying extents. The only ones I’d consider for such a subjective title as “best picture of the year” are Midnight in Paris and The Artist.

Of the remaining films the Academy nominated, perhaps there should be an award for Worst Advertising. The only one I may see in the theatre instead of waiting for cable/DVD is The Help, and that only because Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer make it sound interesting when they speak about the film. The trailers do not.

Of the movies I’ve seen that the Academy chose to nominate:

Moneyball is a solid story well told, riveting to those of us who enjoy the leisurely sport played by the boys of summer. The film is initially paced rather like the game of baseball, however. While this worked for me (it seemed apt), I believe it would be too slow for most moviegoers to call it “best picture.”

The Descendants is lacking in obstacles the protagonist can overcome. He cannot overcome death. In this sweet family film, existing relationships are strengthened and one’s lost due to an accident, but a movie without surprises is a movie without drama.

Midnight in Paris is a delightful, imaginative, witty and swell film. The characters in all time zones are full of life and zest and literary jokes, the performances are marvelous, and Woody Allen is back on track. Nevertheless, it won’t win because it’s too clever, and too literary.

The Tree of Life is fascinating and magnificent, but it goes into lala-metaphysical-land too many times. As a woman said exiting the theatre when I saw it, “that was gorgeous, but what the f--- was it?” I liked it better than she did, and as I look back on it I can certainly comprehend this nomination. The Tree of Life was a very powerful film. However, it is a rather exclusive one, so it’s only “best” for a few.

The Artist is imaginative even when it’s referential, nostalgic and clever and sweet and dramatic and funny. Maybe all screenwriters should first write a scenario without dialogue so they can learn plotting and pacing and character development; all without words, without voices. Plus, there’s the dog.

Unless my viewing of Hugo this week throws all my figuring awry, I’m going with The Artist for best EVERYTHING because it made me so very happy. (Full review to come.)

~ Molly Matera, signing off, grateful to have a job, but wishing for more awake-time to see everything out there.

Ghosts and Ghouls in the Cold, Dark North

2012-02-09T21:25:00.000-05:00

Ghost stories, on the printed page, on the silver screen, on the tube, I’ve always been drawn to them. I developed a taste early for black-and-white horror films, from The Haunting to The House on Haunted Hill (the original, not the remake, in both cases). You may recall that I have issues with allegedly scary movies that aren’t. (A blog about less than scary stuff I've seen.) I tried again this weekend, viewing a period piece with cinematography that sometimes appeared almost black and white, but wasn’t — cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones’ rich tones made the blacks blacker and the grays deeper, with some luscious browns in addition. Visually, this ghost story was exactly as advertised.

Daniel Radcliffe as Arthur Kipps at the gates of the haunted house.

I’ve enjoyed the build-up and trailers to The Woman In Black. And I’m rather surprised but happy to report I enjoyed the film as well. This is an unambiguous ghost story, sure of itself. Its color scheme lends to a time when Nature ruled us and we had no inkling yet that we might try to rule Her. Candles light houses, headlights are weak, and the amazing combustion engine is something that no one has had before to potentially uncover truths ― and skeletons ― in this mad haunting.

Some thoughts:

First, adults are stupid. That’s not about the movie, but I ask you, if you saw the advertisements for this film, where there’s a scary lady and a number of dead children, would you bring children? A five year old? The woman behind me brought a gaggle between five (at most) and nine. These children may not have gotten this film while they watched it, snuffling and slurping and crunching and whispering that they had to pee. But tonight, or tomorrow night, or the night after? I predict there will be nightmares and the stupid adults won’t understand why.

Second, this film is visually awesome, from the close-ups to the long shots, the darkness that is barely touched with light. Shadows frighten even as they woo us toward their peculiarly warm depths. Director James Watkins and cinematographer Maurice-Jones seduce us with a watercolor palette in a brightly lit opening scene of innocents at play. Then the tones turn to moody oil paints. Kudos to set decoration by Niamh Coulter — the child’s nursery is the creepiest room I’ve ever seen. All those Victorian wind-up toys and gewgaws may seem like mere clutter, but those bulging eyes engender dread and terror. The Woman in Black has fabulous production design (Kave Quinn) and art direction (Paul Ghirardani), as well as brisk film editing (Jon Harris).

Third, the premise works pretty well — most haunted house stories start off at a disadvantage with a ridiculous reason given for staying in the psychologically and physically threatening place. Here the protagonist actually has good cause to determinedly push on to this unpleasant wreck of a house to find all the papers hidden there — and they are indeed hidden without rhyme or reason throughout the house. The death of the last inhabitant was allegedly recent, but the estate has been falling into ruin for a good many years. The rather desperate plight of the protagonist, Arthur Kipps, attorney, is set up well, and, rather like the decrepit house, Kipps has been grieving for his dead wife for four years and probably wouldn’t care at all about his debt and looming job loss but for his four-year-old son. He must do this unpleasant task or face whatever English debtors face in the time between the Boer War and the first world war.

Ciaran Hinds as Mr. Daily

How do we know when this takes place if we’re not experts about the single automobile seen? As Kipps reads The Evening News on the train north (Daniel Radcliffe may never escape long train rides north), we see an ad about spiritualism and a medium endorsed by Arthur Conan Doyle. That would place the story after the Boer War. Everything else (clothing, candles instead of electricity or even gas lights, horse-drawn vehicles) definitively places the story earlier than World War I.

Fourth, the performances in this film across the board are first rate. Really.

Daniel Radcliffe’s first foray into a feature film as an adult tells us that the boy’s still got it. As young attorney and widower Arthur Kipps, his big blue eyes are woeful, his face lights up with amazed joy then crumples in bewildered despair. Arthur is running on fumes, but Radcliffe is not. He took the chance of doing a ghost story and carries it well. He’s not yet a powerful player in the adult arena, but he’ll get there.
The last few times I’ve seen Ciaran Hinds, I considered him miscast. At last, in this film, it’s a fine fit as wealthy landowner Mr. Daily, the only man in the village with an automobile. He is a sturdy, certain, god-fearing and loving man, who has suffered loss but still reaches out to help a stranger.
The great Janet McTeer plays his wife. She’s a little bit off, perhaps way off, but anyone who stays in this god-forsaken village is likely to be. McTeer is delightful and fearless, her Mrs. Daily as loving to her “twins” as she would wish to be to her dead son.

Daniel Radcliffe and Janet McTeer

The people in this town are unpleasant. They lie, they stare, they close doors on poor Arthur, they’re downright mean. Then we remember the opening scene of the film — one of very few in bright daylight, in which three pretty little girls interrupt their tea party. They look in unison toward something we cannot see, then turn to look at the windows. They go to the child-size windows, and….I don’t need to see the result, it’s searingly bright and horrific. It’s an affecting and shocking scene in which there is no blood or gore. Blood and gore aren’t scary, they’re just gross. Director Watkins and screenwriter Jane Goldman (based on Susan Hill’s novel of the same title) get the horror genre better than many. Together they create simple, sharp scenes with multiple characters; then long silent scenes with Arthur alone. Or is he?

The villagers are not caricatures, even though we can think of them as the Innkeeper, the Innkeeper’s wife, the Lawyer, the Lawyer’s wife, the Cart Driver, the Landowner. These may sound like stock characters, but the acting makes these people individuals instead. This is a village of the damned. All the people of the village are extremely well played, from Tim McMullan as the local lawyer Jerome and his wife Cathy Sara, to David Burke as the Constable. Daniel Cerqueira as Keckwick the cart driver is surly and closed off. But he has a name. Later Arthur will call his name in the mist, in the dark. Keckwick is an echo of the whole village. Liz White as Jennet, the Woman in Black, is haunting and haunted as she wreaks havoc and revenge against anyone and everyone. The unfriendly Innkeeper and his wife, the Fishers, are well played by Shaun Dooley and Mary Stockley, each dealing with their losses differently. Not to mention the exceedingly creepy children, particularly Aoife Doherty as Lucy Jerome and the children we meet first, the Fisher girls, Emma Shorey and Molly Harmon. The acting in this film is terrific and that makes it a lot of fun.

All in all, I enjoyed The Woman in Black: It brings Hammer Films into the 21^st Century with a hoot and a holler, and I had a few good frights. I would have enjoyed it more had the children behind me been off watching “Hugo” where they belonged. When The Woman in Black is on DVD and I can control the viewing space — that is, the only juveniles behind me will be cats — I think I’ll enjoy it more despite the smaller screen. After all, my current television screen is much larger than the old TV screens on which I saw many a memorably frightening film.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, but keeping the lights on....

Interval, with cats, without snow

2012-02-08T23:46:00.000-05:00

You know that my spoiled rotten cats are just swell. However, there are times when I head home writing in my head, scribbling on disparate pieces of paper on the bus, knowing what I’ll key into the computer when I arrive at that blessed place, Home, and then I get home and discover the cats have knocked the window seat onto the food tray and scattered water and kibbles and bits and whatever all around the kitchen. Suffice to say, new chores confront me on my return. I suppose I should not feel the need to deal with such mundane matters, and just go write. But no one else is going to deal with anything, so I am pressured into action.

These are the times when I put the lines on the “good” and “naughty” sides of the board in my mind. Left side — good cats. Last night both Chick (a.k.a. Chickabetty) and Wilbur got good cat marks because they noticed me scream and run away (accompanied by Mama Millie, by the way) from the waterbug in the bathroom. Next to the heating unit. Which means it came up — or down — through said heating unit. Great. Subsequently Chick (my little huntress) and Wilbur killed the beast and left it in plain sight in the hallway where I could sweep it out the front door. Good cats. No, I did not take pictures.

Then this morning, the three of them were hovering and sniffing around the floor of the bedroom. I started to panic. Then I saw what they were eating: my lunch. Anything in a plastic bag is fair game, I understand, but it was only there for ten minutes! They couldn’t get into the soup containers, but my sandwich had become theirs. Three marks (Chick, Wilbur, and Millie) in the naughty cat column.

I might not have been as annoyed had I not been awakened at 4:18 a.m. I don’t have to get up at that hour, I just woke up. The cats did not wake up. There were three cats leaning on one side or another of my legs, oblivious. A blistering headache (yes, going to bed with wet hair does have ill effects, no matter what modern science says) and a song woke me. Excedrin eventually knocked out the headache (I believe in NSAIDS no matter what my allergist says), but it took a while for me to hear the song clearly enough to identify it. It was not from a car out on the street. It was not coming from a neighbor upstairs or next door, or some maniac in the basement. It was in my head. I realized it was the Mamas and the Papas and eventually I recognized the song as ”I Call Your Name,” written by Lennon and McCartney. Why was it in my head, and why did it coincide with a blistering headache to waken me? I’ll probably never know. Great song, though. I prefer it wake me around 7, not 4.

Tonight I intended to finish up my review of The Woman in Black (I’m up to version 5), and the kids managed to spill their water around the dinner tray and the kitchen floor. Waterbug in the bathroom last night makes me very sure I don’t want them splashing water in my kitchen! This leads to one more naughty cat mark. (If I don’t know whodunnit, I can hardly blame all three. Which would probably be valid, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.)

On the bus stop tonight I heard a woman (young enough to call a girl, but I don’t want to sound old and crotchety) telling someone on her phone that it was snowing. It was not snowing. I got off a bus in Queens at 8 pm and it wasn’t snowing. It was misting heavily and the air was cold enough for my breath to be frosty, but it wasn’t snowing. It’s not snowing now. And yet when I got off the bus, there seemed to be a soft coating of something whitish on some bushes. Some windshields. Presaging something downright wintery, without actually going there.

I would have taken a photograph when I got home had there been the tiniest bit of frosting on my big blue spruce. But, no. Not a bit. Exhaust fumes from the highway have apparently melted away any hint of frosted windowpanes. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on that review. Just thought the kids needed a little credit for killing the waterbug. If not for munching on my lunch.

~ Molly Matera, signing off. I promise, I’ll finish my review of The Woman in Black and post it tomorrow night! And I do not understand why Microsoft’s spellcheck does not comprehend the word “waterbug.” It’s a waterbug. It exists. Believe me. I don’t examine it minutely to be sure it’s not a cockroach. No, I do not want to know the difference. Microsoft, catch up.

Bridge Project winds down with a drumbeat.

2012-01-24T22:42:00.000-05:00

There was a delightful performance at the BAM Harvey Theatre the other night, when there ought to have been half a dozen. Like the last time I saw a star turn in Shakespeare’s Richard III, the rest of the cast was not at the same level as the title character. One might think Kevin Spacey would have enjoyed better sparring partners, but apparently he and his co-producer of the Bridge Project, director Sam Mendes, preferred safe if disappointing casting.

OK, that’s my grouse. But I do want to be clear here. This is a fine production in more ways than it’s not. I have complaints. I have disappointments. When have I not? But the Bridge Project’s production of Richard III is more than worth seeing. Get thee to the BAM Harvey Theatre between now and March 4th [http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=3692]. But get there on time, because this starts at 7:30 sharp, in Brooklyn, and you will not be allowed to interrupt Mr. Spacey’s first soliloquy. Nor do you want to miss it.

The company is professional. They are all skilled at speaking verse, they’re all playing the appropriate characters in the play (out of its own time and more or less in ours). But they’re not taking that final leap of faith; it’s as if their characters are not in life or death situations. Except they are.

Technically this is a splendid, polished production staged with a cinematographer’s eye. Scenic design by Tom Piper is deceptively simple, a set of dusty walls of doors allowing for the possibility of French farce. In the second act those walls of doors open up, angling toward the infinity in which these characters continue to live on over 500 years after the deaths of their originals. And in case you wonder who those people are, the name of the primary character in a given scene is projected — rather like locations in the television series “Fringe” — on the set. These projections (among others by Jon Driscoll) are particularly pleasing, telling us who Richard will be speaking to, besides the audience: The Council, or The Public, or Lady Anne. Lighting by Paul Pyant is atmospheric. Sound (Gareth Fry) and music (Mark Bennett, with coordination and direction by Curtis Moore) are excellent, with exciting drumming exactly when needed, building, building to an explosive crescendo in some scenes; alternately subtle, frightening undertones in others.

The production is intellectually satisfying, with many good ideas well executed, while some were not. I dreaded most the dream sequence of Richmond (the future Henry VII) and Richard III on Bosworth Field. This was set up to look like an informal dinner party with the present and future kings on opposite ends of the table. Orchestration good, solos not so good.

Kevin Spacey is terrific as Richard, funny, snide, clever, deeply damaged, and over the top (sometimes a bit too far over). His deformed body crabs sideways, a shriveled left arm wrapped in leather, a brace supporting his crooked, in-turned left leg. His movements are astonishing throughout the play. He never loses this physical characterization, which takes extraordinary discipline and is doubtless quite painful. This is a bravura performance before we even talk about his superlative use of language. His phrasing reaches the heights of Frank Sinatra, his feel for the poetry and prose is flawless. His asides to us, his gawping amazement of what he can get over on his relations and fellow peers of the rocky realm, he gleefully shares with us in the audience. He's a hoot and a half.

Three hours and close to a half — with an intermission after the first two hours — is a long time, and it almost worked. However, the unevenness of the casting is the downfall of this, the last of the Bridge Project’s productions. It’s the first production in this three-year experiment that relies on a single high-quality performer; it’s the only season with just one play instead of two in repertory. It seems poor-spirited of Messrs. Spacey and Mendes to not put blockbuster Shakespearean performers opposite Mr. Spacey.

Chuk Iwuji is Buckingham, but is he? Is he a leader of men, a soldier? No, this Buckingham is just a panderer. Lords Hastings (Jack Ellis) and Stanley (Michael Rudko), and the Bishop of Ely (Andrew Long), are these the most powerful men in the land? Do they start in confidence and shrink in fear of the ever-strengthening monster Richard reveals? Alas, no. In Richard’s England, losing your position on the Council means losing your head, but these guys behave as if they are at board meetings they don’t really need to care about.

In this production the women had a lot to say — scenes and monologues that Shakespeare wrote but which are often edited away. It was interesting to see them, well staged, yet somehow unfinished. The ages of women in Richard III are well represented:

- The youngest, Lady Elizabeth, daughter of the late King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth, does not speak and isn’t in the script — some productions include her, some do not. I still recall a (free) production by the erstwhile Riverside Shakespeare Company that included Jacqueline Lucid as a silent but riveting Lady Elizabeth in a production more years ago than I choose to count. This production’s Lady Elizabeth is so far upstage we can barely see her, and yet physically she did the job well.

- Lady Anne, young widow of Prince Edward, is wickedly wooed and won by Richard before he’s king. Annabel Scholey starts off well in the infamous wooing scene, modern, sexy, sassy, but eventually falls a bit short, particularly in her scenes with the other women.

- Queen Elizabeth, King Edward IV’s wife/widow and mother of the princes in the Tower — yes, those Princes — is skillfully played by Haydn Gwynne. She is the most powerful woman on the stage, and gives Spacey a run for his money.

- Duchess of York is the mother of King Edward IV, George Duke of Clarence, and Richard of Gloucester (later Lord Protector, later Richard III). She has no fond feelings for her son and sings the same sour tune throughout the play. Maureen Anderman hits the right notes, yet is uninspired.

- And finally Queen Margaret, intoned by Gemma Jones, is the widow of the late King Henry VI, mother of Prince Edward, and, historically, dead by the time this play takes place. She does, however, perform the function of personifying the past haunting the present. And Shakespeare wasn’t concerned with history, just a good story.

Almost every scene of this Richard III is a well-staged picture: Publicity stills abound. But too many characters spoke from center and out to us instead of to one another. And no one, including the excellent Ms. Gwynne, was at Mr. Spacey’s level. Yes, I realize the play is called Richard III, but he did not exist in a vacuum. Spacey’s Richard had only weak resistance, since none of the actors seemed to understand their own potential power. The danger they were in did not build, it just appeared. This was too easy a ride for Richard.

And yet....the beat goes on. The play still works. And the drums are great.

Let us be clear. This is Theatre. No one should mistake it for history. Time is compressed and characters do what the dramatic structure requires of them. Their motivations are as the playwright imagines them. Plays are plotted, constructed, wrought. Life (and to a lesser extent, history) just happens. It may be that the weakness of Shakespeare’s play is surrounding Richard with too many weak players. There is no need, though, to compound this in productions that use a powerful player as Richard but don’t give him anyone worthwhile to parry with. The Bridge Project, this great experiment of Mr. Spacey and Mr. Mendes over the past three years, deserved a better closing act.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, sighing for a second play in repertory.

The Well-Bred Descendants

2012-01-17T22:08:00.000-05:00

To be up front about it, I disagree with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The Descendants is a nice movie. It has nice people and nice sentiments. It is not, whatever director/co-screenwriter Alexander Payne may hope and opine, destined to be a “classic.” Do you know what’s a classic? It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic. It doesn’t just have nice people. It has mean people. It doesn’t have a metaphorical bump in the road, it has actions with tragic consequences, it has real conflict, decisions made and regretted, decisions made and rejoiced, obstacles to overcome with pain — and a little help from friends. Sorry, Mr. Payne. Pleasant The Descendants is, classic it’s not.

Most of the people in the film are … pleasant. There’s minimal conflict that is readily overcome. Nevertheless, the across-the-board excellent performances, the simple structure, and the ultimate niceness of everybody makes for a nice couple hours at the movies. If you want drama, complications, belly laughs or truly insurmountable odds, this is not the film for you.

In brief, Matt King has two obstacles to living a quiet yet fulfilled life: First, that his wife Liz had an accident that has left her comatose with little likelihood of recovery. This puts him at her hospital bedside trying to do his job (he’s a lawyer) and attempting to take care of their two daughters, teenaged Alexandra and 10 year old Scottie. All the while, of course, imagining how much better he'll make their lives together if only his wife will wake up. Second, he is a descendant and trustee of a family that goes back to mid 19^th century Hawaii when one missionary (a Mr. King) married a Hawaiian princess. This has left “the Descendants” wealthy, although too many cousins have lived off their inheritance, and it dwindles. There’s one pristine piece of land left that the family holds in trust. Most of Matt’s cousins want to sell to developers; a few want to hang on. The family vote will happen in a few days. Matt King (apparently the only responsible adult in the family) as primary trustee has veto power to the vote, so we know how that plot line will turn out from the very beginning.

George Clooney is lovely as Matt. This is a balanced performance of an imperfect (read “normal”) man trying to be moral and fair and good. Matt does well at this, although we wish, for the sake of his future ulcers, he’d let loose a bit more. Initially Matt’s teenaged daughter Alexandra (a gorgeous performance by Shailene Woodley) appears to be a handful, but once the great revelation of the cause of her anger is made, she settles in as helpful, kind, moral, and a good caregiver to her younger sister Scottie (an affectingly true performance by Amara Miller). Alex also has an odd best friend named Sid, played endearingly by Nick Krause.

It’s not very long before we know Matt’s wife Liz won’t be coming out of her coma. Matt doesn’t tell anyone this at first — it’s as if he’s punishing himself by carrying the burden alone. So part of what’s happening here is watching Matt engage in self flagellation as he puts off telling Liz’s many adoring friends and family that she will die soon, and they should go to the hospital to say their goodbyes.

The great revelation, of course, is shown in trailers, so this is hardly a spoiler. Daughter Alexandra tells Matt that his wife was having an affair. This is as destructive to Matt’s world view as his wife’s coma. And he can never mention it to anyone.

Clooney, Woodley, and Miller (a.k.a. Matt, Alex, and Scottie King)

OK that’s all earth shattering for the people involved, of course. But it’s all smoothed out in the filming. Awfully nice people. All neat, clean, and terribly sweet. There’s nothing really to overcome here. Death cannot, after all, be overcome. Telling people that Liz is going to die is hard, and Matt cannot overcome that without his daughters’ support. Matt is so adult and mature that he goes out of his way to tell the man with whom the comatose wife was having an affair that he’d best go to say goodbye. He manages to do this without telling the man’s wife when they all meet, not accidentally. This quest of discovery about the man his wife loved affords Matt — under the guise of full disclosure — and his daughters, and the ubiquitous Sid the opportunity to go to the island where they own land, so we see the unadulterated shorefront acres that may be sacrificed to humans in the next few days.

An annoying coincidence revealed by Matt’s cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges) is that the wife’s lover, Brian Speer, is a realtor who could profit hugely depending on the King family’s choice of what to do with the aforementioned land.

Matthew Lillard is very good in the role of the realtor/adulterous lover, showing fear of discovery and loss of his family, the most emotional depth Speer has.

These are all excellent performances, from Clooney, from Judy Greer as the wronged wife of Brian Speer, from Lillard himself. Robert Forster is smackable as a mean SOB, Matt’s bitterly brutal father-in-law, who is redeemed by his loving treatment of his wife, a gentle woman stricken with Alzheimer’s.

Best of the bunch is the eldest daughter Alexandra — simple, true, smart-alecky and smart. Plus Ms. Woodley has the unneeded bonus of being lithe and lovely.

The film left me grateful that I don’t have children, then sorry. Cue Sondheim. Alexander Payne directs smoothly, and Hawaii needs no assistance in appearing beautiful. The Descendants is polished and shiny. It’s a pleasant way to while away some time, but does not require a big screen or the expenditures attached thereto. Feel free to wait for the DVD or cable.

~ Molly Matera, signing off. I think I’ll watch It’s a Wonderful Life….

Snow Days Ahead -- The MTA Ain't No Post Office

2012-01-06T23:38:00.000-05:00

Rain, sleet, uh oh, snow. You will not believe what I read on the bus tonight. Specifically the Q46 bus in Queens, although I’m sure the notices are on all MTA buses. No one reads these. If you’re in the right spot, at the right time, you might see that there is a notice. It might be six years old. It might be current. If you want to read it you’ll be leaning over someone who doubtless won’t appreciate the attention.

My phone’s camera is insufficient for photos of paper in moving buses at night, so I went to the MTA’s web site to grab another form of this notice, which is nowhere near as effective as the paper one I saw on the Q46, the one with the bus information outlined in magic marker.

I have been riding city buses since 1967. That’s when I started at Robert H. Goddard Junior High School 202 in Ozone Park, Queens. I took the Q41 bus to get there from my home. For years I took the Q41, the Q11, and/or the Q54 (along Metropolitan Avenue) to get to school. Come rain or snow or sleet or whatever else. We had blizzards back then, too.

I have been riding NYC subways since around 1970, when I made friends in high school who didn’t live in my neighborhood but rather rode the M train, the L (then the “double-L”) train, and took the Q55 along Myrtle Avenue. Then there was the A train to college every day, and there’s a Q39 in memory, too. That was the bus I followed — once I learned to drive — along its winding route through Ridgewood and Maspeth and wherever else to get to the 59^th Street Bridge and (then a precious secret) the multi-level parking garage. This was so my friends and I could park, then walk over the bridge to get to Manhattan to get to work during the big MTA transit strike in … 1980? Was that it? You remember, when women started wearing sneakers and socks over their nylons, carrying their pumps in their shoulder bags.

Anyway, suffice to say I have been riding – and have been a fervent advocate of – public transportation for over 40 years. All of a sudden, public transportation can’t handle snow. All of a sudden, if it snows? You’d better bring your yardstick. All of a sudden, the A, E, F, G, etc . (see notice) trains may not run properly, may skip stops, if it snows. BUSES — the magic-marker highlighted section of the poster on my bus tonight implies all caps — BUSES may not function at all if it snows more than 5”. This would mean, of course, that the snowplows aren’t doing their jobs, or why on earth would suddenly buses not be able to function?

Don’t believe me? This is the link: http://mta.info/service/ColdWeather.htm

Does Mayor Bloomberg want us all to drive our own cars around the five boroughs? Into Manhattan? In the snow? Instead of professional drivers? Instead of taking public transportation, which apparently is no longer able to function in the Mid-Atlantic region, despite the fact that it has functioned for half a century that I know of, and a good deal longer before?

Manhattan Island has the smallest land mass of the five boroughs. This is about Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and – goddess help them – Staten Island. We need public transportation. We are so totally screwed.

I read the other day that someone caught MTA bus drivers playing chess. I always knew they were doing something, since it is not a variable that on any given morning, during rush, three buses will arrive at the same bus stop at the same time (which is contrary to the published schedule), and riders will have to wait 20, 25, 30 minutes for another. And then that bus will be so crowded they have to wait for yet one more. Apparently the drivers are playing chess. Today’s notices make me wonder if the MTA put out this news blast so we would blame the unions. Hmm? Or is it solely the MTA’s responsibility to transport (Metropolitan Transit Authority, in case you’ve forgotten the meaning of the acronym) the tax-paying and fare-paying citizens of all five boroughs to work, to home, to hospitals, to school, to life, even if it snows?

May we remind the MTA that children get snow days. Working adults do not.

I ask you.

~ Grumpy Molly Matera, signing off. Mouthing off. Whatever. Too annoyed to be clever.

Tinkering With Cold War Espionage

2012-01-02T21:55:00.000-05:00

In 1979, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was produced as a seven-part miniseries based on the novel by John LeCarré. The story is a tangled web, an intricate tale of spies living compartmentalized lives with interwoven personal histories during the Cold War. A story of this complexity needs that miniseries format. So this year’s two-hour film version, despite its extraordinary cast and style, falls a bit short in this condensed view.

Absurd as this may be, I find myself describing this feeling the way I would describe whole wheat pasta. Apparently whole wheat and multi-grain pastas taste like pasta to those who have never tasted semolina. If you have tasted semolina, you know the taste and texture of whole wheat and multi-grain pasta is just – not wrong, exactly, but not right. It’s not pasta, that noun must be preceded by an adjective that shows it’s not the real thing. That’s how I felt about 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It has strength, suspense, it is skillfully directed and acted and shot. But something’s not quite there there.

Accepting the fact that two hours is too short a period in which to tell this labyrinthine tale, I like this film. It starts slowly — it must be twenty minutes before Smiley even speaks — and shows us 1973 London as a dark and dreary place. This is the Cold War, something that merely influenced life in the far-off U.S., but pervaded every layer of it in Europe.

What I remember of Alec Guinness’ George Smiley was a reptilian quality. I haven’t read a Smiley book in a long time, so I cannot recall if the slightly more human Smiley that Gary Oldman gives us is closer to what LeCarré wrote, or not. Oldman’s Smiley has a great deal going on behind his eyes, already hidden by large eyeglasses. He sees all but doesn’t let anyone see that he sees.

The place and the people of this story are the highest echelons of British intelligence in 1973. These men of MI6 are the spies who survived World War II and decades of the Cold War. They are tired, they are bitter, they are cynical, and they don’t trust one another any farther than they could throw a circus elephant; but they are bound together as inexorably as soldiers who fight a horrendous battle together and survive – at least part of them survives.

The tension in this boys’ club builds slowly, with each main character in some way introduced. To tell a tale of spies betraying one another, let alone their country, one most know who these people are. One of the weaknesses of this short form is that not all the characters of the Circus are clearly drawn. The Circus, by the way, is a term LeCarré made up for the headquarters and personnel of the spy world. There are no acrobats there, no trapeze, and no safety nets. Just secretive, disguised men sporting the costumes of their class and time.

John Hurt losing "Control." 

At the opening of the film, the leader of the group is “Control,” played with surly exhaustion by John Hurt. He sends Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) on a secret trip to Eastern Europe to bring back a defector. Secret even from their colleagues at the Circus because Control is sure there’s a mole in their midst selling them out to the Soviet Union. Already Prideaux’s uncomfortable, and then things go very wrong. We see Prideaux shot, and soon Control is driven out of the Circus, taking George Smiley into retirement with him. The remaining members of the Circus are smug, and all of them are hiding something from their closest colleagues.

Toby Jones plays Percy Alleline, the new leader. He snarls, he’s a ferret of a man, he lashes out fiercely, claws his way to the top of the pile of his erstwhile friends and colleagues. Jones is great at this, portraying the man with supercilious certainty of his superiority. Without knowing why, we know better.

Ciarán Hinds plays Roy Bland, the least talkative and least known of the group. Visually he’s terrific, cold, a British good old boy, and I assume there’s more of him on the cutting room floor. As it is, Bland is an unsatisfying because undefined character.

Colin Firth plays Bill Haydon, cocky, confident, a cuckholding bastard everybody seems to love. I forecast a Best Supporting Actor Oscar or at least nomination for this portrayal. He’s so very affable, so very relaxed, so very cunning.

David Dencik plays the odd man out, Toby Esterhase — a man who presumably changed sides whenever necessary to his survival in the turmoil of European politics of the mid-twentieth century. He is loftily terse with everyone outside the inner circle, yet appears rattled when Control barks at him.

The younger members – not of the inner circle, just the Circus – are Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Giullam in a solid, sweet, and, in one scene, heartbreaking performance. Tom Hardy is marvelous as Ricki Tarr. Tarr is a sleazy guy, with perhaps more heart and honor than anyone gives him credit for, and Hardy is really fabulous in this role, fooling me at every turn.

We see Mark Strong’s Jim Prideaux several times in a charming snapshot of him with Bill Haydon (Firth), a snapshot that seems to give Haydon pain and Smiley ideas.

Into this boys’ club Kathy Burke intruded back in the day, forcefully and cheerfully, as Connie Sachs. She’s been with the boys since the war, and she misses those old days, when, as she saw it, the English had a great deal to be proud of. Clearly she does not think that of England in 1973, and she is “retired” as unceremoniously as Control and Smiley.

Svetlana Khodchenkova is part of Ricki Tarr’s mission, the abused wife, therefore a potential tool for a spy. Ms. Khodchenkova is strong and vulnerable, giving a memorable performance.

The smallest roles are well executed, and the cast was what drew me to this film in the first place. These actors and beautifully framed shots are directed by Tomas Alfredson (who directed Let the Right One In, the original version). Here he directs the screenplay written by the late Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan. I think all three did good work translating this layered story into a form too short to do it justice.

Cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema is dank, dark, and dismal, but gorgeous, and Dino Jonsäter’s film editing builds tension tersely.

What struck me is that spies live lives of lies, and that therefore the spouses of serial killers can hardly be blamed for not knowing they were living with murderers – surely there are more spies than serial killers in the world, and it’s doubtful their spouses know what those people do, either.

Why did this occur to me? I think you’ll know if you see the film, which, despite some flaws, I recommend.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, and putting the 1979 Alec Guinness miniseries into my Netflix queue and LeCarre’s novel onto my library list.

The Boys Are Back

2011-12-28T19:25:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it’s about expectations. The current Sherlock Holmes franchise merely borrows the names and the most readily identifiable characteristics of its famous protagonists and almost-as-famous antagonist. This 21^st century revamping is an action picture with a bit of bromance, inspired by steampunk graphic novels. You know, where there are modern attitudes in the romanticized past with spectacular fireworks, explosions, lots of weapons, and a few attractive women thrown in the mix. Is the plot a bit muddled? Sure. Was a great plot on my list of expectations? No.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is a lot of fun. It moves swiftly, if somewhat jumpily (it is Guy Ritchie directing, after all) into the jumbled plot. There’s some espionage — or is it just business? Or….OK, plot is not the film’s strength.

A Game of Shadows is, more than anything else, a witty and brisk buddy film. Robert Downey Jr.’s brilliant, petulant, slightly mad Sherlock Holmes cannot do without his friend Dr. Watson, and Jude Law plays the long-suffering sidekick with grace, charm, and occasional exasperation. These are Downey’s films, but the pairing with Jude Law is practically genius.

The first film was a typical Ritchie romp in which men dominate and women are neglected at best. It’s happened again here, but at least there’s a new female character, and I don’t mean Downey in drag. Noomi Rapace plays Madame Simza, a gypsy fortune-telling reformed anarchist that Sherlock is determined to save despite herself. That’s all of her, by the way. Ms. Rapace brings nothing more to the role than disheveled hair.

Mind you, I wasn't fond of Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, even though I admire her work greatly elsewhere. Hmmm. Could the women be underwritten in these films? Tosh.

This quest conflicts only slightly with Holmes’ attempt to protect Watson and his new bride-who-almost-wasn’t from the unscrupulous Professor Moriarty and right-hand-man Colonel Moran. Moriarty is more and more interesting as Jared Harris plays him. Understatement is an understatement for what Harris does, and he pulls my attention away from Downey, which is no easy feat. Perhaps it’s those cold eyes that freeze the blood. Or his cold logic, which is difficult to argue with until you remember you’re a human.

While Harris actually gives Downey a run for his money, the main power of these films is the lusciously layered relationship between Downey’s Sherlock (or Sherley, as his brother Mycroft calls him) and Law’s Watson. The two are so in synch, it’s gorgeous. The looks that pass between them, and the eyes that don’t quite meet, speak volumes of their understanding. And the dancing! So don’t go thinking there won’t be a third “Sherlock Holmes and another adventure.” Chemistry like this is priceless, and Messrs. Downey and Law and Ritchie are no fools. Dr. Watson would make book on it.

The perversely delightful Stephen Fry appears in a very strange interpretation of brother Mycroft, sometimes in the nude. Not full frontal as Michael Fassbender is purported to do in Shame, but quite enough to fluster Mrs. Watson and give us a few good laughs.

What with Ritchie’s penchant for replaying, in slow motion and voiceover, his lightning fast action scenes, there’s never a worry in the film. When Sherlock does something absolutely dreadful, that should be shocking, we feel secure that it’s not an ending. Only Moriarty ends things. In lesser hands, this lack of suspense could be seen as a flaw. But Ritchie does it all so skillfully that even knowing exactly where he’s going does not lessen the nail-biting, gasping audience from wondering Oh no, What Next???

As always, in her all-too-brief appearance Geraldine James is spot on as Mrs. Hudson, and Kelly Reilly has a bit more to do now that she’s married Dr. Watson. More please.

Rachel McAdams makes a brief, nerve-wracking reappearance as Irene Adler. To say more would be a spoiler. Which is, in itself, a spoiler….

Paul Anderson is chillingly efficient and loyal as Colonel Moran, stalwart of Professor Moriarty.

And if all that weren’t enough, there’s a fantastical run through the woods with trees exploding around our heroes, rather like films showing Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. Effects are awe-inspiring and James Herbert’s editing is sharp-edged. All elements of this film are extremely well crafted, like cinematography by Philippe Rousselot and the production design by Sarah Greenwood, which is just gorgeous, and costumes by Jenny Beavan. What the film may lack in plot it has in high production values. Could it have been better? Sure. Will that keep me – or Ritchie, or Downey, or Law – up at night? No.

Just to be clear: You are not required or expected to think during this film. You are not to wonder if it resembles the original stories. Purists beware. This is a new Holmes and Watson, a new way of looking at them, and it’s really all about Robert Downey Jr and the joy of watching him work. So just have fun.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, already looking forward to the next one. I freely admit to greatly enjoying this guiltily pleasurable franchise.

BAM's Last Tape

2011-12-14T21:12:00.000-05:00

Samuel Beckett was a mathematical guy. His plays are concise, his stage directions precise, he doesn’t like anyone taking any liberties with his instructions, and it’s all in the timing. Lighting, settings, and properties are explicitly stated in his scripts. He knows exactly what he wants the audience to see and hear, and how.

The production of Krapp’s Last Tape playing at BAM is from The Gate Theatre (Dublin) directed by Michael Colgan. Lighting is perfect. Setting is excellent. John Hurt is excellent. It is an intellectual exercise, however, not an emotional one. Despite the analysis of the play itself in Gerry Dukes’ program notes, and his assertion that its intent was to show “regret, loss, and self-loathing,” it did not quite succeed for me. It left me sad for the fellow, but more impressed with the technical aspects of the production and the acting than anything else.

So closes (for me at least) the Fall 2011 Next Wave Season at BAM. Happy Holidays to all, and I look forward to Richard III at BAM in 2012.

~ Molly Matera, closing the 2011 book – except for the next few things to squeeze in this December!

The Terrible Three?

2011-12-07T23:20:00.000-05:00

Milo

See Milo, the last of my elderly gentlemen, who was daft, dysfunctional and, in his later years, deaf. See his water bowl. It has sat on that sideboard by the window surrounded by rocks – brought home mostly from Montauk, but some other beaches as well – for more than a decade.

In Milo’s decrepitude, I set up a stepstool so he could more easily reach the window and his water bowl until his death in 2010. Set in my ways, I left it all as he had.

Despite the two small bowls of water I put on their food tray, all three “new” cats prefer Milo’s water bowl. See old shelf bridging the gap between the sideboard and the windowsill. See cat bed I have placed on the cool slate for my kitties’ comfort for the past year.

As they say in episodic television, “four days earlier” (that is, Sunday), I was out back raking leaves. I raked, I swept, I piled, then stuffed them into trash bags. Essentially I was winterizing during the last weekend I expect to have time for such things. This week it’s raining, so I’m glad I raked it all up. Why the delay, you ask, until December? I like the sound of crunchy autumn leaves underfoot. I like the sound when it’s not my foot it’s under, thereby alerting me to any presence out back. Saturday night it was a possum.

I confess it, I find possums butt ugly. Really, that sickly pale long snout, sluggish body, and a rat’s tail the length of three rats… what was Mother Nature thinking? Dozing off into a nightmare, that’s what she was doing, no thinking involved.

Anyway, Millie watched him (her?) carefully from inside the screen door. “Glad you’re inside now, aren’t you?” I asked. She did not respond. She often ignores me, as did Milo, but he had an excuse. He was deaf. Millie’s been a little antsy lately. She meets me most days when I come in the front door — which I love, don’t get me wrong — but sometimes just a little too close to that opening door. I’m keeping as watchful an eye on her as she does the possum.

Millie

Back to Sunday: While I was raking, I heard a clunk. The sound was unfamiliar enough for me to put the rake aside and walk to the window. Crikey. SOMEBODY had knocked over the glass water vase. Spilled maybe 1/3 of it over the sideboard and bridge-to-the-window, and down below onto the baseboard heater. Happily the vase was not broken; it was not even cracked. I yelled anyway. “What were you THINKing?!” Although the cats had been watching me work out back, none were around to answer.

Chick and Wilbur

They gallop, my three kitties. From the bedroom window on the street side, under or over the bed, through the room divider, across the furniture, and onto either the kitchen window perch (remember last week?) or the sideboard, and back. Sometimes they’re chasing one another; sometimes they’re just galloping for the joy of it. Sometimes this results in the window perch crashing to the ground. This time it seemed to have led to SOMEONE knocking over the water vase. The glass water vase. Worrisome.

Tuesday morning I got up as dawn filtered in drearily, dragged myself to the kitchen, and stopped at what I saw on the way.

The water vase was on its side again, leaning against the stones. Water soaked the bridge to the windowsill and the cat bed I’d put there for the silly creatures’ comfort as they keep watch by the window.

I cleared up the mess. I just adore mornings that start with extra chores before I leave for work, don’t you? As I refilled the vase that had survived these many years, but might not survive another day, I recalled a story I heard on NPR during Monday’s commute. It was something about Cup o’Noodles and burns sending people to emergency rooms, all because the base of the Cup o’Noodles container was so much narrower than the top.

This set me to musing….Maybe during my Christmas shopping I’ll find a broad-based bowl (glass preferably, for the play of light through the water; ceramic if necessary; no plastic) that’s almost as tall….

Wednesday morning dawned as dull as Tuesday. It’s a different day, though, so the water vase was tipped in a different direction. Although upheld by stones, its peril was apparent.

Who, me?

Coming home from work Wednesday evening, I was relieved to see the vase in its proper place. The window perch in the kitchen, however, was upended over the food tray.

Every day is an adventure, courtesy Millie, Wilbur, and Chick. After a year of ease, are these the terrible two’s?

~ Molly Matera, signing off – I hear a disturbing sound from the other room…again.

Alkestis Unfettered

2011-12-06T21:59:00.000-05:00

Classics teachers who want their students to understand and enjoy Greek theatre should have brought them to Big Dance Theatre’s production of Supernatural Wife that played BAM’s Harvey Theatre last weekend. This adaptation showed lucky audiences how it should be done.

Anne Carson interpreted Euripides’ Alkestis simply and freely, and the Big Dance Theatre has joined her sparse script to music, dance, silent film, still pictures on television screens, voiceover, dance, drums, song, and just plain acting to tell the story clearly with passion and great humor. Yes, humor. And joy.

Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parsons, co-artistic directors of the Big Dance Theatre and co-directors of Supernatural Wife, do not separate theatre and dance. They know better. Annie-B choreographed the six performers in a modern yet timeless style that sang Zorba the Greek to the uninitiated. Even the costume changes were clever.

The story briefly: King Admetos is scheduled to die and doesn’t want to. He asks many people, including his parents, to die by proxy for him. No takers, except his loyal wife Alkestis. Thanks, honey.

Molly Hickok is a hoot, dancing in the opening, hiding behind a curtain to emerge with a man’s traditional Greek costume. She dips below the curtain again to re-emerge with a long dark moustache to transform herself into King Admetos.

His wife Alkestis is danced and beautifully acted by Tymberly Canale with some languor, then energy, wit, anger, and finally, calm.

Pete Simpson played Apollo as laid back even in anger, then was downright hilarious as Heracles (a.k.a. Hercules) in the second half of the play.

Chris Giarmo’s gorgeous tenor gives us the woeful cries of a traditional mourner (Ai!). The captions for the songs are as funny as the cries are aching.

Elizabeth DeMent is the loyal household servant, providing comfort and commentary, through dance. Her body is a powerful messenger.

Aaron Mattocks is Death. His verbal duel with Apollo at the opening is marvelous, his flippant treatment of Alkestis an introduction to the irreverent style of Anne Carson’s translation,

A Greek chorus is not easy to make palatable to a modern audience, but Giarmo, DeMent, Mattocks, Simpson, and a few televisions screens make it work.

Supernatural Wife is a gorgeous creation, a bold collaboration between Lazar, Parsons, Carson, and the cast, as credited in the program. Pulling it all even more closely together are brilliant design and technical work by Jane Shaw (sound), Joanne Howard (gorgeous set, almost alive), Jeff Larson’s clever videos, and Joe Levasseur’s flowing lighting design. These are complemented by Oana Botez-Ban's perfect costumes (which evoked, for me, the traditionally dressed dolls I was given as a child by family friends who’d visited Greece). Music flows through the piece, challenging, soothing, energizing, particularly Chris Giarmo’s choral music.

The ending was creepily reminiscent not just of Orpheus and Eurydice but of the last act of The Winter’s Tale, with a dead queen standing still as a statue before her bemused king.

Everything about Supernatural Wife is a tour de force, the only shame being its short run. Keep an eye out for another production elsewhere, anywhere.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, her faith in BAM, dance, and theatre renewed.

Kitchen Window Dramedy

2011-12-01T22:35:00.000-05:00

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may recall that when I’m not writing reviews of movies, plays, and other theatre programs, I write about my cats. Last year around this time I was kitten-proofing my apartment. The woman who’d rescued my kitties (whom we consider their foster mother) surveyed my apartment and pointed to potential downfalls. I did my research, and aloe and philodendron are not varieties of plants that poison silly kitties who eat things that are bad for them. So they stayed. Up high. Like this.

They get the morning light, they're happy where they are, and the cats ... well the cats.

The philodendron vine has been growing and growing so I tacked it up along the kitchen’s soffit. Over the last year, it's reached all the way around to the opposite wall. Pretty, no?

The cats love their window perches. Wilbur is particularly fond of this one.

Sometimes he’s displaced by his mother. She likes to sunbathe there too.

It took a year, but the cats — one, or two, or all three — finally decided the hanging plants were going down.

In the wee small hours of Wednesday, I was awakened by a clunk and a clutter and it wasn’t Santa Claus. A bump bump da dump. Nothing high pitched or sharp, no tinkling or crashing of broken glass or china, and I was tired. So I drowsily decided nothing was broken, muttered something like ‘oh what did you guys do now?’ and went back to sleep.

Wednesday morning I woke congested, but that’s too ordinary of late to stop me. I stumbled into the kitchen to start the morning routine when what to my wondering eyes did appear but, instead of two brackets and three plants, a mere one, lonely aloe plant.

As you can see from those snapshots above, both Millie and Wilbur favor this window perch. What you don’t see is that Millie is fascinated by water, and the sink is quite near this perch. Millie is also fascinated when I slightly overwater the hanging philodendron and the excess drips out the bottom onto her perch. Months ago I had to cut off the tassles of the hangers to remove their tempting sway; but even that didn’t stop someone Tuesday night. I don’t know that it was Millie. It might have been Wilbur. It could even have been Chick.

Still believing I’d make it to work, I did not take the time to photograph the philodendron in its plastic pot sitting on the floor, much of its dirt scattered around, and the broken shards of clay that had housed the second aloe plant. Instead I yelled at the cats who were gathering in the kitchen for their breakfast, and bent over to sweep it all up. My sinuses objected strenuously to this position and I almost keeled over. After I held onto the counter for a while, I swept up the mess. Only then did I notice the other mess.

This is everybody’s favorite perch on the other kitchen window. There are squirrels out there, birds, and a black cat who taunts my cats from the other side of the screen. This is a nice little jump up for the cats, but jumping no longer suffices. They like to gallop through the apartment and leap from a dozen feet away. It’s really cool. Alas, that perch has been up there a year and it’s tired. Kaboom, down it came, scattering the cat food below it around the floor. Good morning.

I cleaned, I fed, I called in to work and went back to bed with drugs for my head and my sinuses — they’re all connected.

The philodendron isn’t dead, but its pretty tendrils have been torn from their little hooks, leaving a lone leaf at one end. So sad.

I’ll bring the philodendron back to life, then I'll figure out how to plug the holes in the wall and set up a new bracket. One hanging plant on just one side of the window is too lonely.

Sigh. Life with old farts of cats was easy. Young energetic cats are another story. It’s a good thing they’re cute.

~ Molly Matera, signing off. I’ve got to go see what they’re doing in the other room.

Tower Heist Crumbles at its Foundations

2011-11-28T22:23:00.000-05:00

It’s two days since I saw Tower Heist and I haven’t thought of it once. Not in annoyance, not for a smile. Color me grumpy. Granted, I’ve had a few other things of greater import on my mind, but a remembered smile or chuckle would have been welcome.

Generally speaking, I like Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, and I love Alan Alda. And I like heist films. Therein lies the problem, methinks.

The set up: Alan Alda plays a sleazeball Wall Streeter named Arthur Shaw who rips off friends and foe alike à la Madoff, which is rather the more disturbing because he professes to be a Queens boy who worked his way up. Gives Queens natives a bad name. Shaw is a slimy charmer who lives in the penthouse of the most expensive apartment building in New York City called just “The Tower.” When he is arrested by the FBI for a Ponzi scheme, it comes out that building manager Ben Stiller had asked him to take the “small” account of the Tower’s workers’ pension fund. Everything Shaw “invested” is allegedly gone, even the tiny retirement account of the beloved (of course ready to retire) doorman Lester played winningly by Stephen Henderson. Now it’s personal.

Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the building manager, as an intelligent sad sack with a sad job. He thinks he has a relationship with Shaw, initially believing him to be falsely accused. When he figures it out, he loses his temper and his job, and starts to plot against the white collar criminal. Josh recruits the dull Casey Affleck (sometimes underplaying is too subtle), Matthew Broderick as Mr. Fitzhugh, who’s so bland it’s uncomfortable to watch, and eventually some others. He even calls upon a neighbor from Queens, a petty criminal called “Slide” played superficially by Eddie Murphy. Superficial. That’s a word that describes much of this film.

That’s not always a bad thing, if the film were a fun romp, a mile a minute laugh fest. But it’s not. Some parts are excruciatingly slow, and one thing a heist comedy does not need is breathing room for the audience to wonder anything.

I could go point to point on the plot, and mathematically there’s nothing glaringly wrong with it. Well, don’t think too hard. The thing is, this is a heist film, and heist films require more than a serviceable plot, they need characters, charming oddballs, misfits, not just down-and-out victims. Interesting characters. Tower Heist misses the mark here since most of its characters come out bland, dull, perfectly nice people, one supposes (except for Alda, of course), and it’s not that we don’t sympathize and empathize with their plight, it’s not that we don’t care.

It’s that they’re boring. Even when people are dangling outside of a penthouse apartment window, there’s no tension in this film. It’s clearly a feel good movie, slightly enlivened by Eddie Murphy’s irreverence for anything and anyone.

And Téa Leoni as the Queens-born FBI agent. She is very good, her timing perfect, and she’s wasted here.

Brought up on the likes of the late great Donald Westlake, I know I’m spoiled but I accept that not everybody is him. Not everyone can write a dull dogsbody like Dortmunder and keep the story moving. This film is barely amusing let alone funny, no one’s endearing. Something’s wrong here, and since the actors are mostly competent, something’s crumbling at the very foundations of this tower of fluff.

I suspect the script by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson, with a disappointing job by director Brett Ratner.

For pulling herself above her material, kudos to Téa Leoni. I would like to say Alan Alda, but since he can play this role in this sleep, I’m afraid I’ve seen it before.

~ Molly Matera, signing off and wondering what went wrong.

A Stormy Next Wave

2011-11-22T22:22:00.000-05:00

It’s been a rough season at BAM (a.k.a. Brooklyn Academy of Music). My theatre-going buddies and I expect a dud or two in the course of a good Next Wave festival, but fall 2011 has been different.

It started well in September with an extraordinary performance by Kronos of their show, Awakening. Kronos used found objects to make music the way sculptors use found objects to make visual art. It was an exhilarating evening.

Then the season started its downhill trend. We’d looked forward to something exciting and new from the young Beijing Dance Company in their three-part program called Haze. Alas it was hazy. The first third was almost excellent, young dancers leaping to the floor and springing up, bounding across and around the stage. The energy they created bounced off the walls and enveloped us. Unfortunately the second two pieces were tepid, old-fashioned, and overwrought. Beware of the director/choreographer writing her intentions in the program — if you must explain, it isn’t working.

Then there was the betrayal of 69 Degrees South by Phantom Limb. We were excited for what promised to be an innovative piece, and came away disappointed. The recorded background music was Kronos; live music was by a talented yet often jarring band called “Skeleton Key.” The light show enlivening the still and moving photography on the back wall of the Harvey Theatre was quite beautiful, and sometimes frightening. The miraculous survival of the majority of Ernest Shackleton’s crew after their ship, Endurance, was iced in, crushed, and then sank in Antarctica is a fascinating and heroic story. But if you didn’t already know it, what appeared on the stage was meaningless. There were strange red-clad not-dancers rolling around in the beginning, their existence a mystery, and when the marionettes finally came on, they were slowly manipulated by creepy-looking people on stilts with costumes reminiscent of jellyfish. Shackleton deserved better.

That was the good, the bad, the ugly. Then The Infernal Comedy broke the bad streak as it broke the mold. More on that anon. Last weekend Canyon, a total disaster choreographed by John Jasperse, seemed to revive that nasty streak. Initially the dancers energized me enough to make me want to go home and exercise. Within twelve minutes, they made me just want to go home.

And now for Anon: I am not an opera fan, although I try it out once or twice a year in my ongoing quest to understand the continued survival of the form. The Infernal Comedy is not an opera but it is operatic. That is, three sopranos sing fantastical arias (a little Mozart, a little Beethoven, some Hayden, Vivaldi, and Gluck) most of which appear to be about their poor to atrocious taste in untrustworthy men and subsequent suicidal thoughts.

These women — Marie Arnert, Kirsten Blaise, and Louise Fribo — are brilliant sopranos, but they don’t just stand there singing opera. They created characters who feel, react, throw themselves to the floor and roll around, one crouches under a table. These women were alive, full of emotion, needs, responding to their surroundings as well as their memories. This was exciting theatre.

The 32-piece Orchester Wiener Akademie was onstage and the conductor Martin Haselböck played along with the evening’s conceit, that Jack Unterweger, a dead Austrian serial killer, was on a posthumous book tour. Stage director Michael Sturminger wrote the libretto based on an idea developed by Haselböck and Birgit Hutter, the insightful costume designer.

John Malkovich as Jack Unterweger oozes onto the stage, uncomfortable with the formal proceedings. Everything is apparently the idea of his editor or his publisher. He is beguiling in a creepy way, talks directly to people in the orchestra section of the BAM Opera House. He engages us in his afterlife on his final book tour. Only after life, he pronounces, might the truth be told, since certainly none was told in his lifetime by him or journalists or anyone else. This the lying serial killer himself tells us. What should we believe?

A tall woman with short blonde hair in a bright blue strapless dress sings of her child. Malkovich’s Unterweger is mesmerized and ever so slowly approaches her. He embraces her on his knees, his lost mother, and then he reaches up to fondle her breast. OK. All three women (who are legion) are angry with Unterweger and yet drawn to him, as if he exudes pheromones. The real women in Unterweger’s life after his first stay in prison found it hard to believe this charming man was a serial killer even after the evidence was laid out and he was convicted of eleven more killings. He had that kind of unctuous savoir-faire. He tells the audience what a man must do with a woman, for a woman: Listen to her. And he does listen to each of the three women, intermittently hawking his book to us, returning to his enthralled women, then slyly acknowledging his audience. It’s an audacious bit of theatre.

So apparently opera works in snippets in a dramatic production that’s not an opera. Alas for audiences, this show was three nights only (four sopranos switching some of the roles over the three nights), so I can’t tell you "run to see this show, take standing room, anything," although I really would. The Infernal Comedy was imaginative, quirky, and on top of all that, brilliantly executed, so that I have forgotten my disappointment with the rest of the season and am once again filled with hope and anticipation for the remaining productions of the Next Wave in December.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, relishing the memory of operatic highlights, even though she still doesn’t like opera.

An Incomplete Title for an Incomplete Film

2011-11-15T22:12:00.000-05:00

J. Edgar was disappointing. I had no expectation of any revelations that might make the title character sympathetic: He was a disturbing and disturbingly powerful man. I had no particular expectation of DiCaprio in the role, largely because my image of Hoover was always in his later years, not in his youth. I suppose what I wanted was a good story well told, and from director Clint Eastwood I had cause to expect that. Unfortunately, the chronologically challenged script by Dustin Lance Black did not cast light on the muddled mystery that was John Edgar Hoover, and Mr. Eastwood didn’t enlighten us either.

There is a poorly constructed and pedestrian framework of a memoir being dictated by an aged Hoover to a series of young FBI agents over the course of…what? A year, a decade? The young men all look alike. Hair short, suits undistinguished, they personified the meaning of the word “Suit” when applied to a Fed. Even the fact that the last one was an unfriendly young black man didn’t inform.

Were these the memoirs of a man or an agency? Was J. Edgar Hoover always bonkers, or only in his later years? Clearly he should have been made to retire at the mandatory age, but the filmmakers wished to imply that all presidents feared Hoover’s secret files and kept him on, when in fact LBJ and Hoover were friends. (By the way, some of us would have considered Hoover opening a secret file on us to be a great honor.)

The film opens in 1919 during the Palmer Raids. These bombings inside the United States by home-grown Bolsheviks clearly show the formation of Hoover’s views. The film moves backwards and forwards, the Twenties, the Thirties, the Sixties and finally 1972. In all this bouncing about, the film clarifies nothing later than the Twenties. It explicates nothing beyond Hoover’s beginnings. Although we see where he came from and where he went, nothing about the main character grabs us.

The actors did good work, including those who don’t get top billing (for instance, Denis O’Hare and Stephen Root as intense scientists taking baby steps to create the first scientific laboratory of the Bureau; Ken Howard as the Attorney General who made J. Edgar the director of the DoJ’s bureau of investigation). As for the more famous characters:

- Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover did fine work as the earnest, righteous young man. As he aged, DiCaprio’s body language was fine, but the excessive makeup was distracting and he occasionally veered toward caricature – or, of course, Hoover could really have been an incoherent hysteric.

- Armie Hammer as Edgar’s lifelong friend/colleague/partner Clyde Tolson had some effective scenes, but much of his performance was marred by even more age makeup than DiCaprio wore, and since Mr. Hammer’s primary charm is in his boyish good looks, this was a shame.

- Naomi Watts as lifelong private secretary Helen Gandy was as detached as Hoover himself. I wondered what went on with Helen (who aged better than her boss), but apparently no one writing or directing the film knew either.

- The great Dame Judi Dench as Annie Hoover, J. Edgar’s mother, was thoroughly dislikeable but even she didn’t stand out from the dark dullness of this film. A cold-hearted woman who doted on and emotionally crippled her son, I should have hated her, but did not. Detachment was the order of the day, it seems. Hoover’s rumored cross-dressing and vaguely homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson was obliquely referenced more as something to show how mean Mrs. Hoover was than to show any depth of emotion in Edgar or Clyde. Certainly neither showed anything resembling courage.

- Jeffrey Donovan as Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was, unusually both for the actor and the character, a bit of a cipher.

- Josh Lucas was not Charles Lindbergh but he looked good in the role.

- Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon was merely profane and had way too much hair.

To sum it up, the film is disjointed, it’s not emotionally involving, and it doesn’t seem to have a point. I’ve even caught myself wondering if the filmmakers didn’t deliberately confound us with switching time frames so we wouldn’t see Nixon come onscreen and say, “Oh thank goodness, it’s almost over.”

~ Molly Matera, signing off before someone opens a file on me.

Scary Stuff

2011-11-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

A few weeks back, I wrote about a television series I’d just seen. It was scary and potentially profound, as many horror or science fiction stories can be, could be if they tried. It’s The Walking Dead and it’s about zombies. Or perhaps it’s about zombies the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer was about vampires. For the uninitiated, that would be “not.”

I like science fiction, some fantasy (think Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth), for the story underneath the story of aliens or futuristic societies or past societies if things had gone differently — the way those stories reflect upon our own society, asking questions we too often do not ask in life, obliquely urging us to step back, have a look, maybe even a think. Or a ponder. I like horror when it’s really scary, which is not synonymous with gory, as most horror films are. I grew to like these separate genres in the days of black-and-white television, so blood is not of interest to me. I am not, after all, a vampire.

Continuing in the vein of horror and/or science fiction films/stories/television programs, which often overlap, it’s that time of year when scary movies abound. For Halloween, sure, but perhaps it’s just a chilly weather thing. A scary movie lets us snuggle with our honeys even more on cold evenings than warm.

Are film or TV studios trying to make us ponder? I think not. They just want us to jump and scream and clutch at one another — and pay admission. Recently I tried to oblige. Last week I saw Paranormal Activity 3. At home I watched a DVD of the first film in that series. Why? They both have their startling moments and frights, sure. Is that enough? Paranormal Activity 3 makes a big mistake by explaining the paranormal activity with witches. Really? Give me Poltergeist, where the explanations do not lessen the fear.

The other day I read that William Peter Blatty had been invited to revise and expand his hastily written novel, The Exorcist. Back then he was invited to write the screenplay for the very scary film version before he’d even finished his draft of the novel, so he welcomed the opportunity to refine the book. I cannot say that I remember it well enough to recognize what he changed, but I walked briskly to a bookstore the day I read about the 40th anniversary revised edition, and finished it in three commutes. I’m a slow reader but it’s a fast read. Alas, sad as I was for the fortunes and fates of the characters, I was not afraid.

I watched scads of movies Halloween weekend, looking for something truly scary. Why? I’ve been trying to write a scary story myself, and it’s like the exceedingly unpleasant idea of pounding my head against the wall. What’s scary? I tried making a list of what frightens me, and my rational mind was certainly able to do that. But nothing I wrote was coming out scary. Nothing I see comes out scary. Nothing I read comes out scary.

Decades ago I can remember being unable to sleep as I read through Stephen King’s book of short stories, Night Shift (“The Boogeyman” particularly got me). And the original William Castle film, The House on Haunted Hill — not the remake, the remake’s not scary at all, it’s just gross. But in the original, black-and-white, when that old lady with the crazy hair and the clawed fingers glided across the room into the glow of the candle light, I screamed. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, that’s one scary book, as was the original 1960 William Wise film version, The Haunting — although, as usual, not the remake.

So I racked my brain trying to figure it out. I found no answers, but recalled that some years back, an actor friend proposed that his — and my — dislike of improvisation was merely a mask to hide our fear of the paucity of our own imaginations. Is that what it is? Has my imagination dwindled down so far as to disallow the conjuring part of my mind to believe? Would I now let Tinker Bell die? Surely not. That would be scary stuff indeed. In these unsatisfactory stories and films, there are moments that are startling, moments that are creepy, but are we really afraid of what’s next? Of what’s behind the curtain, beyond the door, inside the darkness?

Ah, the darkness.

The scariest movie I’ve seen of late was Mr. Klein. A 1976 French film (actually titled Monsieur Klein) directed by Joseph Losey and produced by and starring Alain Delon, my introduction to it was when I was reading posts about the film Sarah's Key and the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up. Some posters (that is, people who post comments on web sites, as opposed to advertisements plastered around town — some of which are works of art, but that's another subject entirely) applauded Sarah’s Key as the first depiction of Vel’ d’Hiv onscreen, while others offered Mr. Klein as proof that it was already out there.

In Mr. Klein, Alain Delon plays Robert Klein, an art dealer, a businessman. He buys art, he sells art, he advises people at auctions. He’s a member of Society. In 1942, we meet him buying things at obscene discounts from Jews trying to gather cash to leave Vichy France. They are forced to sell at low prices; he is not forced to buy at the prices the articles are worth. [Potential spoiler: Actually, I felt the film’s only flaw was the repetition of some lines from the opening scene at the end. They were already echoing in my mind.] Mr. Klein receives some mail that is not his. It is addressed to his name at his well-appointed home, but it’s a newspaper printed for and by Jews — to tell them what rights they have lost, to tell them what they must do, where they must go. Mr. Klein tries to get his name off this distribution list (and we all know how impossible that is), and complains to the police, which of course puts him on their radar where he had not been before. The film tracks Mr. Klein’s attempts to find the other Mr. Klein, who is a Jew in hiding. Delon’s Mr. Klein has to deal with French bureaucracy and find official paperwork proving that his grandparents and their parents were Christian. Eventually he must sell his belongings and his home, for less than they are worth, but of course, while he is forced to sell, no one is forced to buy.

By the end of the film, that paperwork is gathered, but Delon’s Mr. Klein has already been shoved into a bus with people wearing yellow stars on their clothing, herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where he hears someone else respond to his name. He feverishly pushes his way through the crowd to accost that man, then finds himself shoved onto the train with the other Mr. Klein, the train heading east out of France to the camps.

Throughout the film we root for Alain Delon (but of course). We root for him to get this all sorted out, because we know how dangerous it is to be a Jew in 1942. He tries to save himself by proving he is not a Jew, and cannot. Until finally he, and we, wonder what we were thinking.

That’s scary. Human activity, not paranormal. Not things that go bump in the night. What ordinary people do to one another, and sometimes what they do not do — now that is terrifying.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, watching the cat watch the wall, which is also a bit unnerving.

Upstairs Downstairs in French, Spanish, and Polka Dot Bikinis

2011-10-25T22:11:00.000-04:00

“The Women on the Sixth Floor” is a delight. It’s sweet, it’s funny, it’s light and fluffy. It takes place in 1962, and you know early on how much fun this is going to be when the women on the sixth floor (who are all Spanish) sing along with the radio that’s playing a French cover of "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini."

The fabulous Fabrice Luchini is Monsieur Jean-Louis Joubert and Sandrine Kiberlain is his taut wife Suzanne. These well to do, too comfortable people lead dull lives, their adolescent sons dispatched to boarding school much of the time. He goes off daily to work in the family brokerage house, she engages in social events, charitable events, visits to the dressmaker, just exhausting stuff. One day the Jouberts’ long-time family maid Germaine leaves in a huff when Madame Joubert chooses to change a few things her deceased mother-in-law had done in the household. Michèle Gleizer is pouty and put-upon but still amusing as Germaine, especially when her neighbors upstairs on the chilly sixth floor treat her to a good time and cheap wine.

The Jouberts are utterly incompetent — she cannot wash a dish or iron a shirt, he doesn’t know how to function without someone taking care of him. It’s an emergency, and there are plenty of Spanish women in town to work as maids from early in the morning until late at night for the bourgeoisie. El patron. The boss.

Mr. Joubert is introduced to life on the 6th floor, where all the maids for the wealthy families in the building live. His “exhausted” wife sends him upstairs on an errand, and it’s as if he’s gone through a forbidden door. The 6^th floor has small rooms for the maids to live in, a stopped-up toilet, a communal sink that has only cold water, and no heat. The world of the 6^th floor is alien to Mr. Joubert, and consequently fascinating. He spends more and more time with these women, and begins to discover unknown aspects of real life and of himself. And, of course, he falls in love with Maria.

Natalie Verbeke is the new maid, Maria Gonzalez, who gives as good as she gets with courtesy and grace. She has a calm and restful face, and then breaks into a breathtaking smile.

Carmen Maura is her aunt, Concepión, full of love for family, sending her money home to her husband, who’s building a house for her, which will have a grand bathtub. She also has more than a smattering of good sense.

Berta Ojea is Dolores, stout and simple, devout and sweet-natured.

Concha Galán is Pilar, abused by her husband, leading M. Joubert to take extraordinary steps.

Lola Dueñas is Carmen, an angry yet warm Communist — and you can’t blame her for the latter.

Annie Mercier is dour and rather scary as the deep-voiced, mean-spirited landlady, Mme. Triboulet.

These actresses are scrumptious, simple, clear, inhabiting their characters with a lust for life, embodying women who are forthright while they appear submissive. They’re alive, and glad of it. So are we.

Natalie Verbekeas Maria. (C) Vendome Production

A delightful aspect of this story is that not only is Mr. Joubert transformed by these 6^th floor friends — and love. His wife Suzanne is as well, once she realizes he’s not having an affair with the man-eating widow client, but rather living a different sort of life with these new friends. She recognizes the warmth he’s drawn to and tries to find it in herself. It’s almost conceivable that the two obnoxious Joubert sons might eventually learn something from their parents’ discoveries.

Writer/Director Philippe Le Guay does not make the smallest misstep. His script with Jérôme Tonnerre is lively and good-hearted. In another film, the rich widow in the red dress would be a black widow, having had three husbands and not missing a one. Here Audrey Fleurot gives a brash performance that somehow makes us believe the widow’s a person, not a caricature at all.

Suzanne and Jean-Louis Joubert and the Man-Eating Widow.

Cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu provides soft lighting, keeping the frames warm even when some of Jean-Louis’ behavior might make us uneasy. Between Mr. Larrieu, though, and the innocent and beneficent Monsieur Joubert created by Mr. Luchini, what would be creepy from another actor is almost cute and certainly harmless here.

This film does not try to break ground, to change minds, to do anything more than perhaps encourage some reflection on the world, on ourselves. With a glass of wine and a nice biscuit. Or maybe some paella. In a traditional romantic comedy, a man rescues a woman. “The Women on the Sixth Floor” together save the man. This film is a latté, it’s rich and frothy and light as a feather. It’s a guiltless pleasure, so go indulge.

~ Molly Matera, signing off but not logging off – I must download “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

Fiasco Theatre’s Tuneful "Cymbeline" at the Barrow Street Theatre

2011-10-18T23:38:00.000-04:00

“Cymbeline” is a very strange play. It’s Shakespeare’s most bizarre kaleidoscope of styles and periods. Not that he didn’t mix it up on occasion, but this one’s a doozy. It’s part romance, part mythology, part bad history, part theatre of the absurd. It’s set in Roman-occupied Britain and Rome occupied by cosmopolitan courtiers of another millennium. Rather than attempt to make rational sense of the piece, the Fiasco Theatre has sensibly embraced its irrationality and created an imaginative one-set wonder performed in under 2.5 hours.

Productions of “Cymbeline” over the years have generally disappointed — sometimes awful with one shining moment (think Joan Cusack’s Imogen slugging Posthumous in the final act), or pleasant and fun until a disastrous choice decimates it, then decimates it again and again until nothing’s left. In that part of the play where each absurd revelation comes hard upon the last, this production just keeps getting more frenetic. Funnier and faster. Faster and funnier. The more ridiculous the plot point, jab, and stab, the more ridiculous the performers recognize it to be and just have a jolly old time. And so do we.

The company of players here numbers six. The characters in this play (as they’ve edited it) number 15. There are no puppets, no supernumeraries. These fantabulous six actors make short work of the overlapping plotlines, multiple roles, nationalities, and voices, not to mention multiple musical instruments.

These actors are highly skilled, the verse work is very fine, and vocally the players are multi-faceted, sometimes mellow, sometimes ringing, always distinct to the characters. Their talent and innate gifts were apparently augmented by the coaching of Cicely Berry, the renowned voice and text coach. Clarity of voice, clarity of vision, clarity of silly storylines. The Fiasco Theatre makes it all work.

The Company: Jessie Austrian played Imogen with sweetness, anger, innocence, and strength.

Noah Brody played Posthumus staunchly, a Roman Captain, choreographed the fights (consulting with J. Allen Suddeth), and co-directed with Ben Steinfeld.

Paul L. Coffey was Pisanio, Philario, Caius Lucius, and Guiderius, turning on a dime from a put-upon servant to a Roman statesman.

Andy Grotelueschen played Cymbeline callously, Cloten cloddishly, and Cornelius cleverly.

Ben Steinfeld co-directed, played Iachimo wickedly and Ariragus innocently, and was musical director — the music wooed the audience into joy.

Sweet-voiced Emily Young played the mean Queen wittily, and aged herself into Belaria.

There can be no spoilers in a Shakespeare play, except for the personal touches an inspired company can make. For the uninitiated, Cymbeline is a doddering old fool who has fallen for a nasty woman, so naturally he’s the king. He had three children by his first queen — two boys who disappeared twenty years before the story starts, and his daughter Imogen. The mean queen (Cymbeline’s second) has an oafish son, Cloten, whom she wants to inherit the crown, by marriage to Imogen … or however.

Imogen has fallen in love with and married a penniless young man named Posthumus — although he is of good birth, he carelessly lost his parents. He has a loyal and highly moral servant named Pisanio, whom he orders to stay behind to protect Imogen when the king banishes Posthumous from England. Cymbeline likes to banish people who annoy him.

In Rome, Posthumous hangs out with a slug named Iachimo and not surprisingly becomes a slug himself, after Iachimo betrays his tenuous friendship with Posthumous by telling him that Imogen betrayed their marriage bed. Then Posthumous betrays Imogen by ordering Pisanio to kill what he considers his inconstant wife. Follow so far? Meanwhile … oh, there’s just too much. But it’s important to know that the mean queen without a name gives gullible Pisanio a “healing” potion that isn’t really. He gives it to Imogen, she appears dead, wakes to find a headless dead body and mistakes it for her husband… Again, too much.

Eventually there’s war, atonement, revenge, reunited families, and along the way there’s some charming foot-tapping bluegrass.

Suffice to say, this company of players really knows its stuff. The threesome who came up with the notion of this production — Jessie Austrian, Noah Brody, and Ben Steinfeld — have given us a great gift of a damned good “Cymbeline.” Staging is terribly clever, the ubiquitous trunk used exceptionally well throughout the play. Jacques Roy created the Fabulous Trunk that is the centerpiece of the action, along with scenic designer Jean-Guy Lecat.

'Tis a frabjous day when such people come together, take mad risks with an impossible play, and make a theatreful of people happy for an evening. Get thee to the Barrow Street Theatre for this delightful funny tuneful production of “Cymbeline.” You won’t regret it and you won’t forget it.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, listening to a bluegrass lullaby.

Re-setting my clock

2011-10-16T21:50:00.000-04:00

This is the end of my first weekend following a full five-day work week in over a year. Five days of normal hours, with a bit of a cold coming on, and I accomplished only what was absolutely necessary these past two days. Must learn to manage my time better. Note, I was doing some things on my weekend that could have been accomplished, piece by piece, weeknights after work. Really must learn to manage my time better.

Today, while I was working on some things around the house (and "house" is a misnomer -- it's a just a 1-bedroom apartment; how anyone maintains a whole house while working full time is beyond my ken), I had the television on, tuned to AMC. I don't know why. It just happened that way. Perhaps it was fate. So I saw today most of the first season of the series "The Walking Dead."

It's violent. It's distressing. It's depressing. It's exciting. It's thrilling. It's damned riveting. The series is well written, really well structured, spiffy cliffhangers that don't let you down at the opening of the next episode, and the casting and acting are terrific. This is a horror series that's scary as all get out. Watching the Season 1 Marathon forced me into lots of gasps, lots of covering of my eyes, clutching my kitties to me until they squirmed away.

When I went outside -- outside! -- to the store in the twilight (I know, what was I thinking!), I wondered if people in Queens had always walked slightly off kilter, with that shuffle. To and from the store I kept my eyes open, and my walk brisk.

I'm at the beginning of Season Two and I'm gasping and jumping and talking to and gesticulating at the characters onscreen. Oh yes. I'm scared. And I'm hooked.

~ Molly Matera, thinking I'll keep some lights on tonight.....

"Moneyball" is a Story of Faith

2011-10-03T22:09:00.000-04:00

During the first half of the first decade of the 21^st century, I watched a lot of baseball, mostly Yankees, mostly -- OK, practically all -- in bars, and once or twice at the old Yankee Stadium. There was even a point when, after working late every night (at some point, of course, one must acknowledge that those are the hours, it’s no longer “working late” if you do it every day), I would walk into a bar where far too many people knew my name, and if the Yankees were losing, they’d turn it around and win. If I went home and didn’t watch the game, the Yankees would lose. Clearly the deciding factor was me-- if the Yankees lost, it was my fault. Just ask my friend Dave.

Baseball can do that to you. It’s a very superstitious game. Ask Billy Beane.

The second post-season game between the New York Yankees and the Detroit Tigers crackled on my car radio Sunday, the Connecticut station’s signal straining to reach the south shore of Long Island. When I arrived at my destination, I searched for the game on television. I was on vacation, and I needed a walk along the shore I’d driven more than two hours to reach. But it’s impossible to turn away, since the Yankees might do what they indeed did: They galvanized, too late, in the 9^th, so we believed we could win it.

Here in the post-season, “Moneyball” tackles difficult questions about the game of baseball. Is the way to pick your team to go one by one and find the best individuals out there, potential stars; or is it the time of the computer and math nerds who will use statistical analysis to pick a group of players who will function as a quirky sort of whole, without stars? I am not an aficionado of baseball (or any other sport), so I’ll not pontificate on that subject.

However, “Moneyball” is a movie, a sports movie, an end-of summer movie. Like the game of baseball itself, the film moves along at a leisurely pace in its beginning — in 2001, the rich teams poach the stars from the poor Oakland Athletics (NY took Giambi, Boston Johnny Damon, St. Louis took Isringhausen) and we watch General Manager Billy Beane, a former player himself, try to rebuild a new team. Like this hot-weather game, the film’s rhythms start off lazy, gradually warm, and move forward in the summer breeze, speeding up until the audience is ready to leap out of their seats, as if they were at a neck-and-neck play-off game. Rather like the last inning of the Yankees/Detroit post-season game 2.

Brad Pitt eases into the role of Billy Beane, his fit body showing an athlete’s grace despite Billy’s 44 years -- that’s practically proof that his time as a professional athlete was limited. He appears in no way crippled. One of Billy's stops looking for new blood for his depleted team is Cleveland, where Reed Diamond plays some guy who mispronounces Shapiro (his name is pronounced with a long I unlike any Shapiro I've ever known). Diamond is smug as the mean-spirited alpha guy in a roomful of mean-spirited man-boy sports types. It looks rather like the Sopranos in pinstripes. The roomful of aging jocks are as one in their deprecation of Billy, who handles it all with aplomb.

The most important thing that happened in Cleveland was that Billy was smart enough to spot an anomaly, a young guy in his father’s suit that all those ex-jocks -- guys who would have pushed that math nerd fat boy's head into the toilet in high school -- actually listen to the young man’s whispered counsel. This is Yale-educated economics geek Peter Brand, quietly played by Jonah Hill. This is the subtlest performance I’ve seen Hill give, and I like it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is slow, pugnacious, and really obnoxious as Coach Art Howe, who ignores and belittles Billy’s plans for his odd new hires, until his hand is forced. I assume Howe happily took the credit for the wins generated by Billy and Pete’s non-traditional, outlandish team-building plan. Hoffman is brilliant as Howe without pulling focus from the story.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Coach Howe

Women don’t play much of a role in this world. The traditional scouts judged a ball player not only on his own prowess and appearance, but on the prettiness of his wife. If she’s merely average or less, they say, the player lacks confidence, so he’s in the discard pile. I’m stating this politely, which they did not.

In terms of this story, Robin Wright is on the mark yet wasted as Sharon, Billy’s ex-wife; Kerry Dorsey is sweet as his daughter Casey, with an even sweeter singing voice and a 21^st century style. A female sports reporter is a total bitch when she’s in the enemy territory of the clubhouse -- the testosterone presumably nauseated her. Yes, it’s a boys’ club. Nevertheless, though Billy’s secretary has little to do, Takayo Fischer does it with the fullness of a life story behind her character.

Does anyone care about the rotten attitude toward women in this story, or do we just expect and accept this petrified belief system from jocks? Does high school never end?

Not that this antipathy toward the female of the species diverts from the story. It sneaks up on you, “Moneyball” does, just like baseball. I had the advantage of not remembering the 2001-2002 baseball season. For me, the suspense and excitement of “Moneyball” built as the crew of guys without star power but rather oddball qualities, metamorphosed into the amazing team that won twenty games in a row. Cheers of joy flutter through the NY audience at the magical possibilities of baseball. Who could ask for more? Billy Beane, that’s who, because he knows that, no matter how brilliant the season, if you lose the last game, the season is forgotten.

Luckily for baseball fans and moviegoers, Michael Lewis didn’t let that happen when he wrote his book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin translated into a screenplay (based on a story idea by Stan Ghervin) for a very satisfying baseball film. The underdog wins, at least for a while. That’s baseball. That’s America. Creating a team of oddball castoff players, using math and computers and modern economic theories was an incredibly ballsy move — if you’ll forgive the pun — for Billy Beane and Peter Brand (that’s the character name, not the real guy’s name) that should keep them in the record books for a good long time.

Director Bennett Miller does a fine job, keeping even the leisurely parts of the story moving swiftly. Attention never flags. Pitt’s Billy Beane is cute and charming and passionate and superstitious and totally believable. We are with him all the way as he drives this film, and Jonah Hill is a quiet but rock-solid co-pilot.

Pitt and Hill

Stephen Bishop gives a standout performance as David Justice, an angry 30-something traded from the Yankees to the badlands of Oakland. Chris Pratt does sensitive work as Scott Hatteburg, a young yet washed-up catcher Billy wants on first base.

Arliss Howard gives a quirky performance as John Henry, the new owner of the 2002 Boston Red Sox. His is one of two particularly odd but utterly believable performances in this film — Howard as a part of baseball, and Spike Jonze as the rather effete current husband of Billy’s ex-wife, whose tentative kindness shows a complete lack of understanding of baseball, or any other sport.

“Moneyball” is a film that makes people applaud. Baseball is still the great American pastime, and early autumn does not diminish our love for the boys of summer.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to go watch some kids play -- I hear the crack of a ball on a wooden bat…

Debt Paid

2011-09-20T16:23:00.000-04:00

“The Debt” is an unglamorous thriller that’s not about car chases or gunfights, or unlikely leaps from one building to another. There are guns, there’s a van, and there’s an attempt to escape from East Berlin, but “The Debt” goes deeper into its characters, imprisoning the four main characters inside an East Berlin apartment and inside their own tortured lives.

The prey: In the winter of 1965-66, three Mossad agents are under cover in East Berlin to extract a Nazi war criminal, the “Surgeon of Birkenau,” and return him to Israel for trial. The Nazi doctor is now “Dr. Bernhardt,” a kindly old obstetrician with a practice in East Berlin. Jesper Christensen gives a chilling performance as the Nazi monster who can appear benevolent, charming, and lethal inside seconds.

Jesper Christensen as the Surgeon of Birkenau

The searchers:

Stephan Gold (played by Marton Csokas in 1966, then Tom Wilkinson in 1997), to put it very simply, wants revenge and glory. He is a political animal, and an angry one. His rage is barely contained in his younger days, and well-directed by experience as he ages. Stephan’s furious piano playing in the East Berlin apartment was particularly frightening. Csokas is the only one of the primary actors with whom I’m unfamiliar, and while I cannot yet pronounce his name, I won’t forget it.
David Peretz (Sam Worthington in 1966, Ciaran Hinds in 1997) wants justice, and he wants it publicly: The world must know. His sole purpose is the mission. He seems to live on despair as if he was doomed from birth just for surviving. Worthington’s face is bland, childlike, often immobile. David keeps a mask in place as long as he can. Only two things break through his discipline — the Surgeon of Birkenau and Rachel Singer.
Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain in 1966, Helen Mirren in 1997) may just want to be worthy of having survived. She had been a translator, and the East Berlin mission is her first time in the field. She is determined, but not yet as hardened as Stephan and not as fiercely stoic as David. Soon after the mission, her life revolves around keeping the truth of the mission a secret, perhaps to protect herself, Stephan, and David as much as daughter Sara.

Chastain, Csokas, Worthington as Rachel, Stephan, and David in 1966.

The film goes back and forth between the mission in 1965-66 and its aftermath thirty years later. The symmetries between Tom Wilkinson and Martin Csokas as Stephan as well as Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain as Rachel are remarkable.

The older Stephan is as well written and acted as the younger — an angry young man grown up, ambitious, arrogant, manipulative, not one to deny himself the objects of his lust or to restrain his fury. Mirren’s Rachel is Chastain grown much stronger after thirty years of building a persona for the world to see. Accustomed to being in the public eye, only David can force Rachel to reflect. Worthington’s David is less clear, and Ciaran Hinds as David thirty years later seems to be out of sync with the other actors. He has enormous sad eyes, but his character’s actions speak much louder than his words. The character David travels far in his quest for redemption, leaving Rachel to follow his path to its end. I know this, yet it seems to me David was more effective offscreen than either Worthington or Hinds were onscreen. In the 1997 story, David reappears like a revenant, unfulfilled in his mission for the world to know the truth, both about the Surgeon of Birkenau, and about 1966.

Excellent lighting helps to differentiate the locations and times of the film: 1966 East Berlin was dingy, wet and cold. More rain entered the apartment than light. Once back in Israel, Tel Aviv was bright, wide open, hot with a fresh wind. The film makes powerful use of repetition in small details of scenes; in its lighting design ranging from grays to blacks to bright whites; in sudden changes from what we’d seen before and therefore anticipated.

Helen Mirren as Rachel in 1997.

“The Debt” is based on an Israeli film, “Ha-Hov” written by Assaf Bernstein and Ido Rosenblum, directed by the former.

Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan have crafted a screenplay for “The Debt” that is taut and disturbing. Director John Madden does a fabulous job, filling the film with strained nerves, gasps, sharp turns, yet still providing food for thought. Thomas Newman’s score adds to the suspense, as does Alexander Berner’s editing and Ben Davis’ cinematography. Excellent fight choreography by Peter Pedrero presents very real people sweating, grunting, panting with the extraordinary effort to kill, capture, or just survive.

“The Debt” has many white-knuckle scenes which do not dissipate like mist after the movie ends. This is an intelligent thriller, its violence intimate and terrifying, its humanity sadly fragile.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, but not shutting off the light. The world is far too scary for that.

No need to be afraid of the dark

2011-09-04T20:03:00.001-04:00

The theatre was so dark that prior to start time we could barely see to find our seats. There was nothing on the screen — no commercials, no trailers. The theatre seemed almost foggy. I took off my glasses and cleaned them.

I was there to see “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” because I’ve enjoyed the frisson of fear Guillermo del Toro knows how to provide. He’s not the director, but he’s a producer and a screenwriter for this outing. Alas, the director Troy Nixey, and screenwriters Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins thwarted my anticipation.

Some opening scenes in the past (a time of buggies) tell too much. Then, a child intensely draws rings on a paper as she travels alone on an airplane. Her father picks her up at the airport, and the lack of familiarity between them is apparent. Just as clear is the child’s knowledge that her mother has sent her packing not for a vacation, but for good. You don’t pack all a child’s belongings if she’s coming back.

The father is bringing an old house back to life. The wood is dark, as are the wallpaper and upholstery. The paneling is opulently sculpted, the hallways are confusing, the beds are overly ornate with carving that would scare anyone in dim light, whether the house is haunted or not. The head- and footboard designs of twisted curlicues create imaginary monsters in filtered light. The set-up is in place for a lonely child to fantasize inhabitants the adults cannot see.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens in this movie.

It starts early, the too-much-showing. Guillermo del Toro is generally good at creating genuinely creepy critters, but the main problem with this film is that we see the critters. Early on. There’s no mystery or suspense, except which of these people (meaning, the actors we recognize) is going to die. In my mind, with del Toro in the mix, everyone’s fair game for death and dismemberment, including the child.

Our choices for sacrifice to the evil primordial creatures sort of “haunting” this beautiful old Rhode Island mansion are:

- Alex, played by Guy Pearce. He’s the divorced dad, architect or some such refurbishing the neglected ruin to its former splendor and opulence. He’s put every penny he’s got into this house. Of course. Apparently he never looked at blueprints which might have shown him there’s a basement.

- Kim, played by Katie Holmes, is his design partner and girlfriend, forced into the uncomfortable position of wicked stepmother without benefit of marriage. Kim, though, is not wicked; she shares artistic talent with her boyfriend’s daughter and pays more beneficent attention to her than either of her real parents.

- Sally, Alex’s daughter, is played by Bailee Madison. Her mother Joanne has shipped her east from L.A., where apparently Sally is interfering in her mother’s lifestyle. Sally seems well behaved, a pretty ordinary kid considering her circumstances, and yet her mother has her on Adderall, which I looked up. There’s no evidence whatsoever that this kid has any ADHD issues. She focuses just fine when drawing, she is capable of analysis and conversation, she occupies herself, and if anything is too quiet for her age. She’s been made to grow up too fast, and the administration of Adderall makes her parents culpable for anything that ever goes wrong with this kid.

- Mr. Harris, played by Jack Thompson, is the grizzled old local guy who’s the contractor working on the house and grounds. Mr. Harris’ father worked at the house before him, and told him a few things those city slickers would never believe or understand. His father was right.

- Finally there’s the kindly housekeeper, Mrs.Underhill, very well played by Julia Blake. We really hope she isn’t taken.

- The Critters. Do we really care who they are? The screenplay gives us information about old pre-Christian faeries, but not the pretty kind. They don’t like the light, which is supposedly why a Polaroid flash camera is used throughout. A digital camera would have served as well, since you can see the pix immediately and the cameras do flash. I have to believe this is a hangover from the 1970s teleplay on which the screenplay was based. This viewer saw way too much of the creepy critters in light and dark.

Nasty-looking little beasties do nasty things, for which the child Sally is blamed. The beasties talk to her, trying to make friends. Sally is so miserable, unloved, and lonely, that she’s ready to accept the whispering things if they hadn’t been so danged destructive and mean.

The standard character list in place, the locale, the monsters, everything’s ready. So, scary movie? No. While it tries for atmospheric yet realistic lighting, it succeeds at neither. It was creepier in the theatre before the film came on, what with some of the house lights not working. “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” is predictable, it lingers over shots of clattering little feet, on bright eyes in the corners, nooks, and crannies. For suspense to be accomplished, we ought not see these things, until very near the end, so the camera’s supposed to cut away from them. Put together all the elements and what the filmmakers wrought was an hour-and-a-half-long movie that felt like it ran over two hours.

I’m proclaiming bad writing and bad directing. The actors all do their jobs reasonably well. Mrs. Underhill was my favorite, but I also liked the librarian’s brief appearance (James Mackay) and the always reliable Alan Dale as the prospective purchaser of the overdone house.

~ Molly Matera, signing off with a sigh of disappointment. Thinking I’ll watch Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” from 1960 for some intelligent frights. Or maybe I'll just read.

Ghostly Follies

2011-08-31T21:48:00.000-04:00

After years of listening to the extraordinary score of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on various albums and PBS programs, I have finally seen a full production. This production of “Follies” directed by Eric Schaeffer was presented earlier this year at Kennedy Center and is now running at the Marriott Marquis on Broadway.

All that listening, and certain songs never seemed to fit. Now at last I’ve seen the flow of the story, in the present, in the past, and in the actual “Follies” sections of the second act, and I get it.

Mind you, that second act was theoretical the night I saw it. On entering the theatre we were told that, despite the printed program proclaiming one fifteen-minute intermission, the play would run two hours and twenty minutes with no intermission. Artistically this is a valid choice. However, it does make concentration on the second half of the show more difficult for many people in the audience. Producers will have to weigh their choices — if they continue the run without intermission, send a forewarning: "At your pre-theatre dinner, eat light, drink less!"

The story — this old theatre, the Weismann, is being torn down to make way for a parking lot, its former showgirl stars are coming together for a reunion, and among them are Sally and Phyllis, who were wooed, bedded, and wedded, in various orders, by Buddy and Ben. In the intervening thirty years, these couples, like the other former “Weismann Girls,” have had full lives, but reunions have been known to shatter the status quo. What memories are accurate, which romanticized, who were they then, who are they now? One might expect a different story from book writer James Goldman and Sondheim, and yet…. many a simple, if tangled, storyline of primary romance, secondary romance, and comedic romance have occasioned some great, great show tunes in the past. The “Follies” score does not disappoint.

The show is a bit too long, but most of the performances are top notch. The house is hung in a funereal manner and blends into the stage set by Derek McLane. “Follies girls” from 30, 40, and 50 years before return in 1971, dressed to the nines (mostly) with their spouses (mostly). The women, ranging in age from 49 to 79, make their entrances down a staircase wearing beauty pageant banners proclaiming the year of their reign: 1919, 1926, 1931, all the way into the early 1940s. They are shadowed by their ghosts…. beautiful young women dressed as “Ziegfeld girls” (or in this case, “Weismann”) moving as they did in the past, accompanying the women’s entrances, songs, dances….The present day women are aging, but clearly some still dance, as evidenced in my favorite song-and-dance number, “Who’s That Woman” (which I think of as “Mirror, Mirror”) led by a joyously boisterous Terri White as Stella.

A stunning use of the ghost girls was “One More Kiss,” a very old-fashioned operetta number sung by Heidi (opera singer Rosalind Elias) and the ghost of the girl she was (Leah Horowitz) in an absolutely fabulous dress (one of many perfect outfits by costume designer Gregg Barnes). It was a beautiful duet from another time, or two.

One of the most famous songs from the show, “Broadway Baby,” sung elsewhere by everyone from Betty Garrett to Elaine Stritch, is here sung by Jayne Houdyshell. Ms. Houdyshell doesn’t quite have the pipes for it, but she’s got the acting chops, so it works.

“Could I Leave You” is a show stopper in this show full of numbers that can bring down any house. I’ve heard it sung by men and by women, and Jan Maxwell wins.

Jan Maxwell as Phyllis Rogers Stone owns this show. It’s not just that she’s tall and sleek and has a fabulous dress. She is a goddess, she sings, she dances, and her acting notes are perfection. She has emotional responses to people, she’s relating to them while she’s singing and dancing. And she’s having a helluva good time.

Elaine Paige is just fabulous as Carlotta — having listened to her for years, I’m happy to finally see her in action. She most certainly is “still here,” as she sells “I’m Still Here” with emotion, cynicism, and a still solid voice breaking through any limitations of time and space.

Alas, Bernadette Peters is not at the top of her game as Sally. She’s overacting here and there, and her upper register was not serving her in the performance I saw. Bernadette was too turned into herself, her Sally. She telegraphed her frantic emotions from the moment Sally entered. I was in the back of the house, how false must that have appeared to those in the front? Then in her most important song, “Losing My Mind” in Sally’s Folly, she internalized too much. She not only didn’t move left or right, she didn’t move us, either.

I’ve barely mentioned the men. Well, while the women performed functions of plot, they were also fully fleshed out. This is not just the actors, this is Sondheim and Goldman. The men, on the other hand, could be traded in for other men in similar stories — the sincere second choice guy, the one you rely upon but don’t love; the ambitious insincere guy that women fall for blindly or with clear vision. While Danny Burstein as Buddy Plummer (the sincere guy, Sally’s husband) and Ron Raines (the insincere guy, Phyllis’s husband Benjamin Stone) did their jobs more than adequately, still those guys are not memorable or distinct from characters in countless black-and-white movies seen in my (and probably Sondheim’s and Goldman’s!) youth.

The section of the show I least understood aurally was delightful onstage, the outlandish Follies. Throughout the play, the younger versions of Ben (Nick Verina), Sally (Lora Lee Gayer), Phyllis (Kirsten Scott), and Buddy (Christian Delcroix) had shown us what really happened in the past. Finally they have their own folly, “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow.” As the “Folly of Youth,” it’s sweet and hopeful, leading in to the Follies of the same people thirty years later, which are neither.

I particularly enjoyed Buddy’s Folly (“The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues”), which was much better than his earlier number (“The Right Girl,” which was one long note no matter how athletic the choreography), and Phyllis’ Folly, the quirky “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” These numbers were significant to the characters’ problems, but neither self-indulgent nor maudlin. On the other hand, Sally’s number was dull and Ben’s went on much too long.

James Moore’s musical direction of the show is just marvelous, the music gorgeously grand and lush with a full orchestra in the pit. It’s one of the traditions of Broadway musicals that should be revived more often. Visually the show gave us the remains of old show business, including those gorgeous ghosts …. showgirls dressed in impossibly high headdresses, high heels and scanties, moved slowly along the catwalks, steep staircases, sometimes in tandem with the modern women, sometimes drawing attention from the center stage action. This production is very well done, just not perfect. But what is? The play’s last moments were lovely — a lone “ghost” reaches toward the last living beings to leave the theatre, leaving us to wonder what happens to all those graceful ghosts when the parking lot paves over the theatre.

And then I start thinking of Joni Mitchell…..

~ Molly Matera, signing off to sing and dance to an old recording…..

He Protects and Defends

2011-08-28T23:11:00.000-04:00

“The Guard” stars three of my favorite modern actors: Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, and Mark Strong. Imagine my dismay, then, when the first six or seven minutes of the film left me uninspired by the initial actions of the odd character Gleeson plays. It’s only later that the reasoning behind them — and there is reasoning — becomes clear. By fifteen minutes in, the language and attitudes that are initially so appalling become funnier and funnier as we get to know Sergeant Gerry Boyle of the Garda, a.k.a. the police force of western Ireland.

“The Guard” is an odd mix of cops and drug traffickers, social drama, and a little family drama that cooks up to a hilarious and filling brew. It’s quirky, it’s crass, and it’s a blast.

The acting is just terrific throughout, so the best way to tell you a little something about the film is to tell you about the characters these wonderful actors play:

Brendan Gleeson as Sergeant Gerry Boyle uses his sad-sack face to hide all the emotions roiling inside, his humor and caustic comments a guard in themselves. Gleeson’s Boyle is an endearing everyman, tired, disappointed, but unswervingly honest — perhaps too much so for his own good. Don Cheadle as visiting FBI agent Wendell Everett does fine work as Gleeson’s straight man, shocked by the blatant racism and cynicism, yet alert enough to what lies beneath the surface to find some connection. He has some hilarious scenes with Gaelic speaking natives, and sweet scenes of doing what comes naturally in Ireland — drinking with Sergeant Boyle.

The trio of criminals, two Irish and one English, are sharp and stupid at the same time, international drug dealers, looking for an easy life, and failing miserably. Liam Cunningham plays the seeming leader, Francis Sheehy, who is snarky, funny, and thinks he’s smart. Cunningham gives a wonderfully sleazy performance. David Wilmot plays Liam O'Leary, who understands he’s a sociopath, not a psychopath, but can’t quite recall the difference. As the unwelcome Englishman of the team, Mark Strong is tough and witty as Clive Cornell, his distaste for his colleagues displayed by his acid comments. He is also, as usual, luscious. There’s terrific chemistry between these three, with a healthy mix of animosity and rapport.

There’s also a pair of call girls come to town for Sergeant Boyle’s rare day off, dressed as police women in a hooker kind of way. This Mutt and Jeff team are sassy and very funny. Dominique McElligott is charming and disarming as the tall blonde hooker, Aoife, in a witty visual contrast to Sarah Green, who is adorable as the smaller and softer Sinead.

Rory Keenan is intense and sincere as Garda Aidan McBride. He’s as appalled as I was at Sergeant Boyle’s cavalier attitudes toward police work. He’s right and wrong, smart and naïve. He's got the disadvantage, of course, of being a newbie in town -- a "foreigner" from Dublin.

Fionnula Flanagan’s Eileen. Boyle gives us our first intimate look at Gerry, showing his softer side. As Gerry's ailing mother, she reveals a relationship that makes us even more curious about him. Their scenes together are just delightful. As the wife of the rookie Garda Aidan McBride, Katarina Cas does deep quiet work. Her Gabriela McBride is sensitive and interesting, and we, along with Gerry, would like to know her better.

There are good cops and there are bad cops, and a totally realistic, seemingly inept, Garda Inspector Gerry Stanton is well played by Gary Lydon.

Quirky characters of the neighborhood include the town chronicler, a young man who shows up and photographs crime scenes and everything else. Laurence Kinlan is eager and enthusiastic as the photographer who appears to like gore, but also shows us that he knows the people of his town quite well. And of course, there’s a boy and his dog (and bicycle) who’s everywhere he oughtn’t be. Eugene Moloney is a cheeky child with very odd speech patterns, and is delightfully portrayed by Michael Og Lane.

John Michael McDonagh directed his own script, in which inconsequential bits and pieces eventually gel subtly into plot points. The criminal plot is interwoven with personal plots and attempts at relationships in a sadly amusing manner. In addition to the humor and human connections, he even throws in some gunplay and explosions exactly where they belong. There’s also a sweet scene between Cheadle and a white horse that made me think of “Into the West,” doubtless as intended. I like this movie quite a lot, and will keep an eye and ear out for other work by this McDonagh.

“The Guard” catches you off guard, goes where you don’t expect, and leaves you wondering — in a good way. Recommended at a theatre near you. It’s a limited release so far, but look out for it.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer but not the light. So much reading to do….

Go Ape for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"

2011-08-21T02:03:00.001-04:00

Before I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” I thought its problem was that the entire plot of the movie was told in the trailers. And of course, our collective memory knows all the earlier movies from 1968 on, so why go see this prequel when we know how it ends?

I was so wrong. Director Rupert Wyatt keeps this story running and bouncing and leaping, and we eagerly follow along. The incredible visual effects team made a lot of actors into apes, chimps, orangutans — they are real. Of course, the visual effects team has already won Oscars for creating the extraordinary worlds of Avatar and Lord of the Rings. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is filled with terrific stunts and effects by a very long list of people, as well as moving music by Patrick Doyle.

The film opens on an idyllic scene, mountains, forests, green everywhere. Chimps and apes travel through the tall trees, perfectly happy as they were, where they were. Once rounded up by humans, they become prisoners and victims. We see the frightened eyes of one peering through a hole in a crate as she looks back at her friends and family in the forest. Thus the film begins, from the apes’ point of view.

These particular humans were so irresponsible and inept that they didn’t know “Bright Eyes” was pregnant and proceeded to do drug experimentation on her. Her brown eyes take on green specks as the miracle drug, ALZ112, is administered to her. Everything goes from sparkling success to woefully wrong, and Bright Eyes is killed just as the board of the evil pharmaceutical company was being convinced by the passionate young scientist Will Rodman that ALZ112 is the cure for Alzheimer’s. The murder of the chimp leaves her baby an orphan, and Will Rodman (James Franco) brings the baby home where he and his father, an Alzheimer's victim, care for it and teach it as they would a human child. While not Rodman’s first mistake, this is a big one. This is Caesar.

John Lithgow and baby Caesar

Caesar is a brilliant invention of screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, brought to magical life by Andy Serkis (previously not-exactly-seen as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy) and top-notch makeup and CGI artists. This is what all that special effects technology is for, to aid in the story-telling so as to become inseparable from the narrative of an exciting and terribly sad tale of how human kind sets itself up for destruction. Even the seemingly nice human, Franco’s Will Rodman, is a monster. Those arrogant humans keep trying to excuse animal experimentation by making it about curing something terrifying like Alzheimer’s (think “Deep Blue Sea” with its super smart sharks), as if that far-off dream makes the torture of blatantly sentient beings acceptable. There is an overwhelming sadness in this film, some of it quite unexpected. Eventually betrayal and broken hearts make for the inevitable rebellion that arrogant humans do not expect. Humankind’s hubris will be our own destruction.

I won’t spell out the plot points because I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of this ride. Despite my assumption from the trailers that I knew everything that would happen in the film, I did not. This was much more fun than I expected since all I really “knew” was quite a long way into the future of our planet and species. Our stupid species. It seems that the moral of the story is, “What god hath wrought, let no man screw around with.”

While I liked all the actors playing humans, the real kudos go to the hidden actors: those playing apes in jumpsuits, the actors’ body language, eyes, facial expressions somehow magically transformed by make-up and CGI artists into totally real apes, orangutans, and chimpanzees.

Andy Serkis is deep inside there as Caesar.

Andy Serkis is nothing short of brilliant as Caesar, from adolescent to adult, from adored to abandoned. He is so hurt at his treatment by humans, even the man who called himself his “father,” that he must, when finally surrounded by his own kind, become the Alpha that the humans made him. Karin Konoval becomes Maurice, the retired circus orangutan (perhaps named for Maurice Evans in the original film) who signs with Caesar in ape prison and has a funny “line” that gives Caesar, the son of Bright Eyes, a bright idea. Terry Notary creates two separate chimps, Rocket and Bright Eyes; Richard Ridings plays the great ape Buck with fury and sensitivity; and Christopher Gordon is achingly menacing as Koba, a much abused and scarred lab ape who’s way smarter than humans can comprehend even before he’s given any drugs.

As for those pesky humans,

John Lithgow is wonderful as Will Rodman’s father, an Alzheimer victim. Clearly once a fine pianist, the disease stole that from him, until his son experiments on him. Then the music pours out of him, for a while. Lithgow does beautiful work with Franco and Serkis.

James Franco’s Will Rodman is sweet and loving, but ultimately Rodman does not take responsibility for his actions, and thus begins a series of events that leads to disaster. It’s impossible to not like Will, especially with Franco’s warm eyes, filled with pain, longing, and love. But even at the end, he has no idea what he’s done, nor does he regret it.

Caesar with James Franco as Will Rodman in the Redwoods.

Freida Pinto is very good as the intelligent, compassionate, practical, realistic veterinarian Caroline Aran. Too bad Will doesn’t learn from her.

David Oyelowo seemed a bit young for his role as Steven Jacobs, CEO of the evil pharmaceuticals company, Gen-Sys, but he was suitably charming, smarmy, and cold-hearted.

Tyler Labine does good work as the primate handler in the Gen-Sys labs who becomes the accidental human experiment of the next generation of Will Rodman’s potential cure for Alzheimer’s — and then Patient Zero.

David Hewlett, an actor who plays whiny roles very well, is the Rodman’s neighbor Hunsiker, an airline pilot. It’s not that he’s a bad man, he responds to his unconventional neighbors in a quite understandable manner throughout the film. It’s just that he’s not a very good neighbor, and whatever he does turns out wrong.

Brian Cox runs a prison deceptively called a “primate center” and hires rotten people to look after the apes, including his own nasty son. Cox gives the easily caricatured John Landon dimensions, creating a less than conventional “villain” in this minor role.

Bad boy Tom.

And who do we get to hate as the lowest lowlife of the humans? While there’s more than one qualified candidate for that status, a standout is Dodge Landon as played by Tom Felton, formerly that bad boy Draco Malfoy. Landon is a grown-up scumbag we can only hope is torn to pieces by apes. That was not a spoiler, not to worry. Sweet revenge on Landon is much cleverer than such crude violence.

Some things never change: We always root for the apes. Who wasn’t on the side of King Kong or Mighty Joe Young, huge apes abused by humans while fighting for their loves and their lives? It was only in the original “Planet of the Apes,” where the apes, orangutans and chimpanzees all behaved like nasty humans, that we could fear or despise them as the villains of a story. The apes are only just beginning to rise here, and we’re still on their side. Go Apes!

For its entire two hours, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is engrossing, then thrilling, filling viewers like me with dread. The ending leaves us with hope for some characters, despair for others, and a really nice-set up of spreading a virus in a visually clever way that is also believable in terms of plot. Fans of the original 1968 film, fear not — it is referenced with reverence.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer to hang out among some trees.

Sarah's Key

2011-08-18T22:11:00.000-04:00

“Sarah’s Key,” a starkly photographed French film (subtitled in English), is compelling for most of its 111 minutes running time. Each of its two storylines is a microcosm focusing on individuals living through their time: Paris, summer 1942, the Vel’ d’Hiv Round-up and its victims; Paris sixty years later when the French must live with that ugly bit of history and its consequences. While the screenplay by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and Serge Joncour is probably faithful to the novel on which it is based (by Tatiana De Rosnay), half its story (that set in the present day) is just not as engaging as the other half.

A little history: One year into the Nazi occupation of France, the Nazis pushed forward their “Operation Spring Wind,” in which they instructed the French to round up adult, foreign-born Jews and deport them. The conquered French were overly enthusiastic in their implementation, and dragged men, women, and children, including French-born Jews, first to the Vélodrome d’Hiver (an indoor cycle track and stadium with no water, no functioning toilets, insufficient medical personnel and supplies, and far too many people), thence to transit camps and finally to the concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Julia Jarmond in present-day Paris.

The film opens delightfully. Warm white light, children playing, their laughter is the film’s soundtrack. The end of the film showing a silent child is devastating. The present day section is brilliantly led by Kristin Scott Thomas, but even she cannot make journalist Julia Jarmond and her family as engrossing as Sarah Starzynski and her family. What’s interesting is the history Julia’s researching, in which she discovers that the former residents of her in-laws’ apartment were a Jewish family deported during the Vel’ d’Hiv Round-up in the summer of 1942. She learns about the Starzynskis and becomes obsessed with little Sarah.

There are several fine performances in this film, but three are exceptional:

- The radiant Ms. Scott Thomas as Julia Jarmond, an American in Paris for two decades, she is a journalist married to a Frenchman, with an adolescent daughter. Her research for an article on the Vel’ d’Hiv leads to a quest to find, or at least find out what happened to the child Sarah.

- Mélusine Mayance is splendid as 10-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a French Jew living in Paris with her parents and younger brother Michel. She’s a terrific kid, strong and brave and resolute in her own quest to return to her brother.

- Natasha Mashkevich is just superb as Sarah’s mother. She’s heard the rumors that the French police plan a mass arrest of Jews, so the moment that pounding on the door begins, she starts a freefall into panic. She acquiesces to her daughter’s calm plan, gathers most of her family to her, and slowly shatters as the French police -- not the Nazis -- tear husbands from wives and mothers from children. Beautiful, heart-wrenching work.

Mélusine Mayance as Sarah Starzynski in 1942.

This is not to say these are the only ones, but they stand out in a good cast. The farm couple who aid Sarah are just wonderful. The set of their shoulders tells all about the year of Nazi occupation and collaborators among their neighbors. Dominique Frot as Mme Dufaure has a wonderful face, careworn and warm. I’ll be interested in seeing her other side in another role. Niels Arestrup as Jules Dufaure is gruff and grandfatherly and quietly heroic. It was also a pleasant surprise to see Aidan Quinn as an American living in Italy. I'll say no more than that.

English speaking sections seem stilted, as if director Gilles Paquet-Brenner didn’t quite get what the actors were saying. I imagine that the NY and Italy sections read better than they play here. As the film switches back and forth between Sarah’s story in the past and the secondary one having to do with Julia’s own life and family, I kept yearning to go back to Sarah’s as, I suspect, did Julia.

While the particular story of Sarah Starzynski is fiction, the Vel’ d’Hiv Round-up of July 1942 was real. The French police overzealously complied with the instructions of their Nazi occupiers. “Sarah’s Key” is worth your time, so I’m not going to tell the whole plot here. Suffice it to say Sarah’s story is riveting and representative of the horrors of that time, when the human face of France looked in a mirror and saw monsters in addition to the better-known heroes of the Resistance.

~ Molly Matera, signing off. Think I’ll go read a book.

Sagebrush, Horses, and a Dog Are Not Enough

2011-08-08T21:44:00.000-04:00

“Cowboys & Aliens” was fast-moving, fun, and sometimes funny, and as long as that’s all anyone expects, fine. Not all films based on comic books, though, feel as emotionally empty as this one.

A pathetic but accurate description of human behavior is that for us to all get along and work together, we need an external enemy. Here they’re buggy and reptile-like aliens with flying machines and stuff that doesn’t belong in New Mexico desert canyons. And what do they want? Not to experiment with us, and certainly not to learn from or about us. They just want what countless humans have wanted before them: filthy lucre.

It’s a clever idea with seemingly lots of potential: Take your standard western elements (like big rancher, bad son, pacifistic storekeeper, preacher, sheriff, boy, dog, horses and sagebrush), add aliens, mix well. So what went wrong? I haven’t read the original comic book, and its writer isn’t credited…. So did someone like the idea and the artwork and ditch the rest but never quite finish? Director Jon Favreau is, of course, the director of “Iron Man,” which is a splendid example of an excellent film adaptation of a comic book series. There are five quite competent screenwriters credited and all of them — generally working in pairs — know what they’re doing: Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby. Is five the magic number that equals too many cooks?

The film opens with a guy in the middle of nowhere. He wakes up without knowing who or where he is, with an odd metal bracelet locked on his wrist and a bloody wound in his side. Since it’s Daniel Craig, this could be a James Bond movie. Three guys on horseback are somehow silent until they’re right on top of him. Craig as the man without a memory is stoic and quiet — not a stretch for him. When asked his name, he doesn’t know. When asked what he does know, his answer is “English.” Whatever he may not recall, he remembers how to be a smartass.

Soon we meet Clancy Brown as Preacher Meacham, who has some of the best lines, but there are a lot of snappy one-liners in the film. Brown brings to Meacham a depth of humanity that’s barely written. Sam Rockwell does his usual good work as Doc, the saloonkeeper who is simply a decent man trying to live non-violently with his neighbors.

Once in town, the man without a memory is discovered to be Jake Lonergan, a stagecoach robber and possibly murderer. This saddens some people, since he did stop the bullying of Doc by Percy Dolarhyde. Paul Dano is that arrogant and incompetent son of the rich and powerful man of the territory. One could either say he serves no useful purpose on the planet or that “he’s young, he’ll grow out of it.” Under normal circumstances, no he wouldn’t.

Adam Beach does good work as Nat Colorado, the sometime babysitter of Percy, and the guy who would have been a better son of the same powerful man — but he’s an Indian and it’s not as if he could really be treated decently by the rancher Harrison Ford plays, Woodrow Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde, rich rancher, is no Ben Cartwright. He’s a bad man, in fact, and leverages his wealth against his neighbors and protects instead of teaching his son.

When Lonergan and Percy are cuffed into the same tiny wagon to be handed over to the federal marshal in Santa Fe, Dolarhyde and his men, as well as the townspeople, are on hand and so view the attack by alien flying machines, which shoot out explosions as well as hinged metal lasso-things that grab up captives. A couple nice people and some not so nice are swiped up in a way that would probably shatter their spines. (Please note, I did suspend my disbelief.) These flying machines and lassoings look swell yet somehow do not terrorize the populace as they ought.

Attacks by night by unknown enemies create allies of all humans. Colonel Dolarhyde rounds up a few people to go after the strange attackers who grabbed his son, including his ranch hands and cowboys; Nat Colorado; Emmett Taggert, the required boy (well played by Noah Ringer), whose grandfather the Sheriff (Keith Carradine) was also taken; Doc (Sam Rockwell), whose wife Maria was taken (very nice characterization by Ana de la Reguera); the Preacher, of course; the dog; and Ella (Olivia Wilde), a rail-thin woman who keeps trying to talk to Lonergan. She wears a holster slung across her poplin dress, rides a horse as well as any man (as all Western heroines must), and doesn’t quite seem to belong.

Ella is one thing that went very right in this film. She’s called “whore” more than once (by criminals), but otherwise the women aren’t treated badly here. Doc loves his wife, Black Knife, the chief of the Apaches (Raoul Trujillo), loves his, and Jake Lonergan loved his Alice (Abigail Spencer). With a common enemy, there’s lots of heroism on the part of people who didn’t know they had it in them, but no one holds a candle to Ella. She was the one character who was truly more than she seemed, not to mention she performed the most heroic action. (Unfortunately Mr. Favreau et.al. didn’t get this moment quite right. He needs to read more comics.)

Cowboys, rustlers, ranchers and Apache warriors join forces, people who hated each other save each other, big fight scenes have dynamite, bows and arrows, and Harrison Ford gets to hold a spear like a lance as if he were a knight of olde. Good people die, as do bad people. So how come there’s no emotional resonance?

I like Daniel Craig, and I’m perfectly pleased to watch his neat butt running up a craggy hill, swimming, whatever. But somehow those pale blue eyes aren’t as sharp — or squinty — as Clint Eastwood’s would have been….And much as I like Harrison Ford, if I could have had Eastwood as Jake and Robert Ryan as Dolarhyde, well, then, what sparks might have flown….

See what I mean?

The film offers a nifty production design by Scott Chambliss and fine art direction by Christopher Burian-Mohr and Daniel T. Dorrance, as well as fitting set decoration by Karen Manthey. Visually the film is swell. The actors are fine, the pace excellent. The script offers some snarky lines for everybody, and I particularly enjoyed the upside down riverboat in the middle of the plains of New Mexico.

“C&A” is a good ride, it’s got its gasps and jumps and guns and explosions plus a boy and a dog. Is everybody who survives the better for the experience? Well, yes. Story-wise it appears to have hit the right notes. Guys who weren’t particularly good or brave do the right thing when it’s time. Guys who were downright bad do the same. So what went wrong here? Can you tell I'm frustrated?

Is it that the aliens are not interesting? Even when we meet one in Lonergan’s memory and again at the climax (or one of them, there are several climaxes), we get it — the big ugly dude Lonergan scarred in his escape remembers Lonergan’s actions and he’s pissed off, etc. This should personalize it as a sentient being and all that. Somehow it’s just not effective.

If you expect no more than a traditional Saturday afternoon “B” western with added weaponry and explosives, you’ll be fine. If, however, you’re looking for characters who are known by more than their function in the plot, this isn’t the movie for you.

Note to Society: Remember, visually the film works. Characters are appropriately dressed (by Mary Zophres), the town, the horses, everything looks right. And lots of cowboys smoked. The apology for smoking at the end of the film was offensively funny.

~ Molly Matera, signing off. Almost – but not quite – wishing I still smoked, just for spite.

The End of an Era

2011-08-05T21:15:00.000-04:00

Fans of Harry Potter books and films will see “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 2)” no matter what reviewers say, as they should. Nevertheless, I must grouse a smidgen. There are good things and bad things about this, the eighth and last of the series of films based on the seven Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling. One of the delightful things about those novels for the readers was observing the children grow up as they struggled through each year at Hogwarts. The movies gave us the extra pleasure of watching the child actors playing them grow into adults. That’s been so much fun that no matter how annoyed I may be at aspects of any of the films — including this one — I cannot say I didn’t have a good time. I did.

The thing is, “…Deathly Hallows (Part 2)” is not part of a miniseries. Its previous episode did not air last Monday night on television. It should be a standalone movie, but it is not. While understandable — this was an exceedingly difficult task to master — I’m afraid Steve Kloves’ script directed by David Yates just didn’t quite do it. They dropped us into the middle of the action, picking up where we left off at the end of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1),” which, however seemingly logical, leaves many viewers confounded. The last of Rowling’s Potter books pulled together elements, themes, and people from the previous six books. That’s a lot of characters, places, and history that the audience is expected to remember. The first film devoted to telling the story of the last book was very well done, with a cliffhanger ending leading to anticipation for this year’s finale. However, no one viewing a movie should be required to re-view the previous film or to reread the book to understand what’s going on in the beginning. I doubt anyone without a solid grasp of the stories will ever find their way past the confusion of the first fifteen minutes of this final film. Of course, once the action starts, most will not care.

The opening of the film is stark and jumps right into the story, scenes all bleak and gray and shadowed. John Hurt reflects everyone’s feelings of sadness with a touch of despair as Ollivander, providing some much needed reminders of the story so far. He looks haunted, perhaps foreshadowing the ghosts to come. Soon Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) lead us to explosive action at the famous goblin bank, Gringott’s, affording Helena Bonham Carter the fun of playing her mad character Bellatrix as if Hermione were impersonating her. With magical manipulation, goblins and heroes make their way into the catacombs of the bank, through twisting turning rail rides down to the vaults. This is all enough fun to make you forget you may not quite recall why you’re here. (It’s about the Horcruxes.) And then comes the dragon. A most fabulous dragon in a rip-roaringly good series of shadowy scenes bursting into light and flame.

“Deathly Hallows Part 2” brings us to the final battle between the remaining stalwarts at Hogwarts (now under the rule of the deceptively wicked Severus Snape) against evil personified (snakefied?) by Lord Voldemort. Hogwarts as we’ve known it is defended but destroyed, our beloved Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) gets his due at last, Harry and Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) fight it out a couple times, and the long-suffering Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) is finally vindicated. Unfortunately that exposition of Snape’s hidden history — in which Harry, Ron, and Hermione finally see the truth behind Snape’s extraordinarily brave actions while they misjudged his every move — was just plain long. However valuable the information, you can’t, in one segment of the last movie, go back and retell an entire story that took seven films to tell in the first place. Well, they did, but it certainly stopped the flow.

Matthew Lewis, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Daniel Radcliffe.

The huge cast of well defined characters makes performance analysis beyond the scope of this review, however: Helen McCrory shows us the human face of the wrong side; Jason Isaac is unusually subdued as the broken Lucius Malfoy; and Draco, well Tom Fenton does a fine job of making us feel sorry for the bully we’ve hated all these years. All three of our usual suspects are as much fun as ever, lovely looney Luna Lovegood is again personified simply and truly by Evanna Lynch, while Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagal put me in mind of Miss Jean Brodie — another film to see again. Ciaran Hinds snuck in as testy Albeforth Dumbledore in a heartwarming scene. Seeing (almost) everybody one last time was bittersweet as they fought for their shattered world. I could natter on about everybody, but a reasonably complete list to remind you of the actors playing these well-known characters is on IMDB .

There’s fun to be had in this movie, as well as disappointment in two flavors. One: that the last film does not live up to the expectations of the second to last. Two (and more importantly): that it’s the last film. Alas and sigh. The epilogue of J.K. Rowling’s final book on Harry Potter, his friends, enemies, and their adventures, was a tad tedious, obviously written so it would be clear she wasn’t writing any more of them. It’s a bit tedious here, too, but it does tie everything up with hope, more than real life can guarantee. Now I want to go back and read the entire series of books all over again, then watch all eight movies.

In the future when we have Harry Potter DVD nights and watch Parts 1 and 2 back to back, none of my niggling will matter. This one’s mighty dark, but it’s still fun.

~ Molly Matera, signing off and moving on. Sigh.

He Sings, He Dances, He Punches Out Hitler!

2011-08-01T23:55:00.000-04:00

“Captain America: The First Avenger.” The very title implies this is the precursor for next summer’s Marvel film, “The Avengers,” but “Captain America” is a terrific ride all by itself, with laughs, friendship, thrills and chills. And look at that cool poster!

The opening and closing scenes are in the present, with most of the story taking place during an artfully depicted World War II, starting in Norway: night, a church. Outside: Snow, Nazi storm troopers, tanks and the head of Hitler’s weapons division (HYDRA), Johann Schmidt, malevolently and joyfully played by Hugo Weaving. Inside the church is David Bradley (Filch from Harry Potter films) as the towerkeeper trying to protect a magical glowing thing of legend. Is it a spoiler to say the bad guys win this battle?

In New York City, the runt of the litter, Steve Rogers, is trying to enlist in the US Army — again. He’s like that guy in the old Charles Atlas ads — the skinny youth getting sand kicked in his face by the thick-necked pea-brained strongman. Young Steve is not merely scrawny, he’s got all sorts of ailments that make him 4F. His buddy Buck drags him to a double date at the World’s Fair, at which Howard Stark is demonstrating some magical machine of the future that doesn’t quite work yet. Dominic Cooper as Stark is suave yet courageous, a bit sleazier than slick, a genius nonetheless.

Stanley Tucci as Dr. Erskine

Stanley Tucci is wonderful, warm, and wounded as Dr. Abraham Erskine, the immigrant scientist who lives in Queens and commutes to his Brooklyn lab. It is he who perceives the inner hero in Steve Rogers. Erskine’s serum may give Steve the physique to enable him to fight the good fight and beat down the Nazi bullies. That Steve is the opposite of the megalomaniacal man on whom an earlier version of the serum has worked but failed — that would be Johann Schmidt, a.k.a. Red Skull — might even the odds between Allied and Axis powers.

Chris Evans does a sterling job in this film, ranging from computer enhanced (diminished?) “before” pictures pre-injections and “vita-rays” to a helluva specimen, retaining his sweetness, his simplicity, his straightforwardness. Steve Rogers is the boy next door, and his alter ego Captain America the least vainglorious of the comic book superheroes. It will be fun to see him counter the behavior of the other Avengers next summer.

As Colonel Chester Phillips, Tommy Lee Jones is at the top of his form with a script that gives him full rein. Every team of scientists needs a growling military type, and Jones’ Colonel Phillips is bullheaded but resigned to being proven wrong on occasion. Jones is wry, sarcastic, sincere, aw he’s just swell.

Colonel Phillips and Private Lorraine

As that most unusual heroine, Agent Peggy Carter, Hayley Atwell plays it totally straight and it works. Carter’s strong, skilled, susceptible to a true hero, not just the he-men flexing muscles (like the hilarious Gilmore Hodge played by an actor with a 1940s Hollywood-style name, Lex Shrapnel). Atwell looks like a British soldier/scientist from the 1940s (kudos to the designers for everyone’s clothing and hair). No damsel in distress, this is one superhero’s almost-girlfriend you want fighting at your side.

Hugo Weaving is a swell villain as both the mad Nazi Johann Schmidt and the failed experiment and supervillain Red Skull. He is menacing, he’s witty, he is scarily logical, and he’s pure evil. Fabulous work with or without the mask.

Hugo Weaving as Johann Schmidt

The deft Toby Jones plays creepy Nazi doctor Arnim Zola, who probably thought he was pretty nasty stuff until he started working with Johann Schmidt and his “tesseract.” Jones oozes contempt, fear, avarice, and ambition as Zola, and I anticipate more fun stuff in future outings.

German and Brooklyn laboratories make for fun with knobs and meters and needles and cranks and levers and all sorts of things more visually entertaining than modern computers. But what really makes “Captain America” magical is the actors. The entire production is taken seriously, from director to make-up, and every actor plays it straight. In one scene, a portrait painter cringes between Dr. Zola and Red Skull as they argue. His subject’s a mad monster, the scientist not much better, and the portrait painter knows it — his fear is silently and perfectly played by David McKail.

The terrific cast includes Sebastian Stan as Steve’s best buddy Bucky Barnes, Michael Brandon as Senator Brandt, Neal McDonough as ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan, Derek Luke as Gabe Jones, Kenneth Choi as Jim Morita, JJ Field as James Montgomery Falsworth, Natalie Dormer as Private Lorraine, and (spoiler!) Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

Director Joe Johnston has done an outstanding job bringing to vibrant life the script by writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (based on the comic books by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby).

This let’s-get-together-and-beat-the-Nazi-bullies film is polished to a high gloss with a vibrant and uplifting score by Alan Silvestri. There are also some hilarious USO numbers with Captain America and the “Star-Spangled Singers” doing a pitch perfect patriotic song written by Alan Menken with terrific lyrics by David Zippel.

“Captain America” is fun from first to last, and that includes the Easter egg with trailer scenes for next summer’s “The Avengers.” The film’s final sequence (pre Easter egg) might leave you with the feeling that this movie is just one huge teaser for the next Marvel studio blockbuster, but that would mean you were thinking way too much. Not to mention, would that all teasers were half as good as this movie.

~ Molly Matera, urging you to do yourself and the movie houses a favor by using their air conditioning -- they’re running on high with or without you!

Missing Theatre

2011-07-25T11:56:00.000-04:00

I feel like I haven’t been to the theatre in months, and I miss it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the movies. But seeing something live onstage is a different experience, a different vibration, and one of the things that has kept me sane (as well as can be expected) all these years.

So while I peruse the papers (and the discount emails that I require to fit my budget) as to which theatre to visit very, very soon, have a look at this article by Deborah Magid. What Deborah writes about the role of theatre in society has long been my belief, and she says it well while introducing her readers to a new project, “America: Now and Here.”

Deborah’s article is in the online magazine, JUiCYHEADS at:
http://juicyheads.com/link.php?PLHFKWIH

"America, Now and Here,” in which visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, playwrights, and poets will attempt to “use art to have a dialogue about America,” is an interesting concept, and like all theatre, cannot exist without its audience. Theatre, after all, is a communal art.

Is the tour coming near you?

~ Until next time, Molly Matera signing off to get some newsprint on my fingers.

“X-Men: First Class” Brings the Story Back to the Beginning

2011-07-19T16:01:00.000-04:00

There are a number of memorable characters in director Matthew Vaughn’s “X-Men: First Class,” but I won’t be mentioning them all. You can and should meet them for yourselves.

Full disclosure: I have missed several films in this franchise, and I don’t recall the comics at all. This stood me in good stead to thoroughly enjoy “X-Men: First Class,” for in addition to the film’s own merits (which are many), the story held more suspense and uncertainties for me than for avid fans and aficionados. Not quite recalling, I could wonder, “Was not she with Magneto in the first film? What’s she doing here? Who’s this dude? And what’s Kevin Bacon got to do with it all?”

The film opens as “X-Men” did, in 1944, at the separation of young Erik Lehnsherr from his parents entering the concentration camp. Some go left, some go right. Erik’s anger and despair manifest in the shaking and bending and rending of the metal gates — with his mind. Dr. Schmidt (the fun-loving Kevin Bacon) teaches him control through torture as if he were a lab animal.

Meanwhile, in Westchester, we meet 12-year-old Charles Xavier coming upon someone disguised as his neglectful mother in the kitchen. This is young Raven, disguised from her true blue form, which she will later call “Mystique.” Charles takes her in, despite the fact that he’s a child himself. Neglectful parents can be useful that way.

World War II chills into the Cold War. James McAvoy as the grown-up Charles Xavier is having fun at university and making his adoptive sister Raven (the wonderful Jennifer Lawrence) quite jealous. As we pull up to 1962, Erik Lehnsherr, too, is quite grown up. This tortured soul is now played by Michael Fassbender, describing himself as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in a search of the Nazi doctor. Following the money, Erik travels to Switzerland, then to South America, then to the United States to find his “creator,” who now goes by the name Sebastian Shaw.

Some things Kevin Bacon said as Dr. Schmidt (and his other persona, Sebastian Shaw) nagged at me, a little bitty niggling in one part of my brain, while the rest had a fine time. He kept talking about the Atomic Age, which started in the 1940s, so why would it have affected him, already a middle-aged man in 1944? Mind you, I enjoyed him. Bacon does a jolly Nazi doctor, megalomaniac, egomaniac, and accomplished all that was required of a dastardly villain with relish. A little chewy, but fun.

Ah, that danged split atom. So many complications it spawned. Rushing the natural selection of evolution into high gear. Although I don’t quite understand why or how Shaw came to be a mutant, he has some nifty powers that make him tough to kill and allow him to retain his youthful appearance 15 years after we first see him. Bacon’s big grin dominates his manipulation of the American and Russian military, and throughout his evil is gleeful. He also has a nifty helmet his Nazi buddies designed for him that blocks psychic intrusions. More on that anon.

Erik and Charles first meet because of Shaw, and because of Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) — Moira saw the impossible, accepted it, then sought out Professor Xavier. Even more difficult, she convinced the CIA and the military to include Xavier in their search for a missing general. What they found and lost was Sebastian Shaw and his entourage. What they found and kept was Erik Lehnsherr in a fantastic display of his control of metal and magnetic fields, and his utter lack of control over himself.

From here the story moves along briskly, Charles and Erik displaying their mutant abilities to one another and discovering those of Shaw and his minions, while searching out mutants to join the good guy fold. These two actors are splendid, vying with one another for intensity. Friendship and trust develop between the two men without slowing the action. It’s fun, it’s fast, it’s far sadder than one might expect.

The learned Horvendile in his blog about this film writes an intriguing analysis of styles in Marvel and DC Comics, in which he explains that in the early years of the comic book series, the paths of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr (later “Magneto”) did not cross in their youths. Happily the comic book series rewrote history twenty years into the run, and had them meet as young men, thus inspiring a great story of friends turning against one another — like two brothers in a civil war; or the Virginian and Trampas (that’s American literature, Owen Wister’s stories of two boisterous and virtuous young men who make different moral choices that make them enemies). This historic friendship between Charles and Erik makes their enmity as they lead their people on opposite sides of the struggle all the more poignant. Instead of merely showing a right-minded hero and an ornery villain, the heartbreak is built in.

Erik cannot give up the search for “Schmidt,” who brought out his anger and despair and thereby his power to move and manipulate metals. How ironic that Erik’s worst enemies, the Nazis, made the helmet that will eventually protect him from the probing mind of his only friend, Charles Xavier. Michael Fassbender is a many-layered actor as he becomes the Magneto we recognize. He sees a world that forces him to the outside because of his mutation, just as in his youth the world forced him to the outside because he was a Jew. What he doesn’t see is hope.

James McAvoy as Charles Xavier (Marvel)

What Charles Xavier — whether played by James McAvoy or Patrick Stewart — sees everywhere is hope. Not so tough since he came from a privileged background. He is a mutant due to his psychic abilities, but not only are these capabilities invisible, they afford him great power. Yes, this young man, never tortured, never without, never ashamed, uses his power for good. Erik speaks for the cynical among us when he remarks sarcastically upon what a “difficult” environment of luxury Charles was brought up in. An argument for nurture over nature in a film about mutants?

Matthew Vaughn’s direction is brisk even while it gives loving attention to the main characters, their relationships, their powers, and the booms and crashes and light shows those powers create in play and in battle.

Government folk: Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert believes what she sees and becomes a staunch supporter of the (not yet named) X-Men. Ms. Byrne’s style is simple and true, and I readily believed she was Moira. Oliver Platt made an all-too-brief appearance as the Man in Black. Likewise Ray Wise as the Secretary of State stating dreadful things. Let’s hope he reappears. And the under-sung Matt Craven as CIA Director McCone was governmental, annoying, predictable, and then human, in the best sense.

The mutants on either side of the battle don’t stand out so much individually but work very well together: Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy (later Beast), Caleb Landry Jones as Sean Cassidy (Banshee), Edi Gathegi as Armando Munox (Darwin), Lucas Till as Alex Summers (Havoc), Alex Gonzalez as Janus Quested (Riptide), and Jason Flemyng as Azazel. While Zoë Kravitz looked good as Angel Salvadore, she was lusterless.

Eva Magyar’s brief appearance as Erik’s mother was raw and heart wrenching. Charles’ and Erik’s lack of mothers in opposite ways gave opposite effects.

As for Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, how brilliant is this young woman. In the 2010 release “Winter’s Bone” she gave a gritty performance as the unglamorous Ree Dolly, then follows it up in 2011 with the young Mystique in this healthy Marvel franchise. She and/or her agent are geniuses. And then of course, there’s her phenomenal acting. She embodies this child — for really, Raven, her name in her “disguise” of a non-mutant, is just a teenager, a pouting adolescent, jealous of her adoptive brother Charles, who comes to soar with joy at her new found fellow-mutant friends, finally finding herself torn between two points of view, two modes of behavior, more than two identities, and two men.

Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique (Credit: Marvel)

The funniest scene is the one out of time, in which the two mutant buddies approach Hugh Jackman’s surly Wolverine in a bar, and back away at his foul-mouthed response to their civil greeting. (This gives Jackman the questionable honor of being the only actor to play the same comic book superhero in five movies.) Another nod for fans of the earlier films is a very brief appearance by Rebecca Romijn. Look for it.

Vaughn and screenwriters Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman (based on a story by Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer, who is also a producer of the film and director of the first two “X-Men” films) go back to the beginning of Bryan Singer’s vision of this Marvel comics tale and do it more than justice. They’ve revived the saga with characters and actors as powerful and engrossing as their predecessors. James McAvoy boldly steps into the footsteps of young Charles Xavier, allowing us glimpses of Patrick Stewart’s future Professor X; and Michael Fassbender introduces us to the Erik who will become Ian McKellan’s Magneto.

There are some drab bits. January Jones looks good for Emma Frost but does nothing. Everyone else stood up from those comic book pages, but she might still have been frozen there. Someone should have told her that even mutants have emotions and humor.

All in all, this is an excellent addition to the “X-Men” series of films, with a fast-moving storyline, plenty of action (all of it visually comprehensible, unlike some other “action” films I could name), humor, deep characterizations, and proof that the “Others” among us are as human as we are.

The good guys...... (Credit: Marvel)

How do I know this film gets it right? It makes me want to go back to the “beginning” of the film series to see what happens next.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer but not the light. I have stacks of comic books to go through.

Hanks and Roberts Do Not Do It Again

2011-07-11T00:25:00.000-04:00

Tom Hanks’ latest foray into the hearts of America is “Larry Crowne.” There’s no resemblance to Thomas Crown. There’s no affair. There’s no heist. There’s no heat. There’s no excitement, no anticipation, no worries.

Hanks plays Larry Crowne, a popular and jolly team-leader type in a familiar chain store called “U-Mart.” He walks into a meeting with management expecting to be named Employee of the Month again, only to be fired. The excuse for downsizing this 50-something guy is that he can’t go any higher in the company because he never went to college (having spent twenty years in the Navy prior to his years serving this employer). I don’t believe that for a moment, it’s clearly ageism, and this film just as clearly wants to show that anyone practicing ageism is a fool. Larry Crowne will reinvent himself. He looks unsuccessfully for a new job. He does get unemployment insurance, but that’s not enough to pay the second mortgage he took on his house in order to buy out his ex-wife. Things are not going well for Larry, a swell guy who’s having a mid-life crisis not of his own devising. The world is sticking it to him.

But Larry doesn’t take things lying down. He chats with his yard-sale addicted neighbor Lamar played boisterously yet sincerely by Cedric the Entertainer. Lamar and his wife (Taraji P. Henson) are sweet and supportive of Larry, but have no more depth than any other character in the film. Larry goes to the local community college and is encouraged to take a public speaking class, and he goes for it. He pumps endless gallons of gasoline into his gas-guzzling SUV until he sees someone else putting a pop bottle worth of gasoline into a cute little motor scooter, so he adventurously buys one second hand. He scoots into a parking place at school and meets a pretty girl young enough to be his daughter, who clearly thinks he’s cute – for an old coot – and befriends him, teaching him to dress, among other things. Don’t worry, she’s got a boyfriend.

Valderrama and Mbatha-Raw (Universal Pictures)

Feel like you’ve already heard this story? You have, it’s in the television commercials and the trailers. And like many a perfectly pleasant film, everything you ever needed to know about it is in the commercials, so when you come out of the theatre, you’re still hungry. It’s nice. Hanks is nice. Julia Roberts is nice -- she has some fun playing a grumpy gus, Mercedes the cynical, disillusioned, college professor, married to a pretty skeavy guy played sleazily by Bryan Cranston, before she slowly grows into her usual gorgeous grinning self when she finds the hope of happiness. In Larry Crowne, of course.

Wilmer Valderrama reverts to the 1950s as Dell Gordo, the leader of the motorscooter ‘gang,’ Rita Wilson is barely amusing as a caricature of a bank loan officer; Pam Grier is sultry yet oddly believable as Mercedes’ buddy and co-worker, Frances. In fact, Grier and Roberts have the most believable relationship in the film. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is cute and sassy as “Talia,” who takes Larry Crowne under her cool wing. Particularly sweet is George Takei as Dr. Matsutani, apparently a terrific economics teacher.

Do I sound grumpy? It’s a sweet movie, really. But there’s no suspense. There’s no drama. The comedy is slight. The ending is precisely obvious from about 12 minutes in. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy myself for 98 minutes. It’s just that there’s not much of a there there.

I feel bad not liking this feel-good film. It’s just bland. Mr. Hanks directs his actors well enough. It’s the script by Hanks and Nia Vardalos (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) that, while well structured, relies too heavily on the actors to create characters from the lifeless forms on the page. Every character performs a purpose to further the plot – the development of Larry Crowne just when he thought he was done – but none of them are particularly real or interesting, despite the charm of the actors. So if you want a few giggles, some smiles along with your air conditioning, and an assured (I mean, really, have you seen the poster?) happy, hopeful ending, go ahead, see Larry Crowne. But eat beforehand and make reservations for afterward.

~ Molly Matera, craving a fulfilling film.

We are all "Beginners"

2011-06-28T22:42:00.000-04:00

Writer/director Mike Mills charms us with the tale of two people who don’t know how to have a relationship, but are loved by a wise dog who knows better than both of them. “Beginners” is a sweetly sad romantic comedy.

The premise: Oliver is a graphic artist, played by Ewan McGregor. He draws cartoons, and he will do portraits if his business partner Shauna (China Shavers) twists his arm. Oliver’s parents were married in 1955. After 45 years of marriage, Oliver’s mother Georgia died, at which time his father Hal came out of the closet. This was quite a surprise to Oliver, but he accepted it and saw his father fall in love for the first time, proving that one can be a beginner at age 75. Hal lived his new life to the fullest, showing us all what consummate joy looks like.

Then Hal (a subtle, broad, outrageous, lovely performance by Christopher Plummer) gets cancer, lives happily in denial, then dies, leaving Oliver alone again, except for Arthur, who is a Jack Russell with a far more outgoing personality than Oliver. Arthur (brilliantly played by Cosmo) is part of the family, gazing lovingly at Hal, expectantly at Oliver.

“Beginners” goes back and forth in time, with illustrations of what the world looked like in these various eras to Oliver’s artistic eye: pictures of the sun, the stars, the sky, the President of the United States, regular people, including his parents. We see Oliver’s own time (the “present” of 2003), we see his parents’ time (a little 1938, a little late 1960s, early 1970s), and we see Oliver himself as a hardy young boy looking after his mother while the pair are neglected by his museum director father.

Oliver’s mother Georgia is a little prickly, a little sad, and very funny as played by Mary Page Keller. She’s artistic and outrageous, loves her husband and her son, and is unbound by convention. Young Oliver is well played by Keegan Boos. This sophisticated young fellow is one of those children who are often the most responsible member of a household.

Goran Visnjic is sweet and gentle, irresponsible and irrepressible as Andy, Hal’s younger lover. We see this fascinating relationship in flashbacks, always through Oliver’s eyes. The buoyant spontaneity of Andy and Hal dancing together, laughing, loving, is enough to spread happiness throughout the theatre.

Oliver’s sadness after his father’s death affects his work and his friendships. His mother’s gone, his father’s gone, and Arthur is a non-verbal conversationalist. Oliver draws a cartoon about his sadness, which becomes the saddest running gag I’ve ever seen, and yet it’s funny. No one but Oliver gets it, because no one is sad in just the same way that he is. Yes, our hero is having a hard time getting over not only his father’s death, but his own complicated life.

Oliver’s friend Elliot (Kai Lennox) drags him to a masquerade party, where he meets Anna, who is dressed as Charlie Chaplin and writes questions on a pad since she has laryngitis. Anna is a French actress who lives in hotels except when in New York, where she has a realistically small apartment. She is delightfully, naturalistically, sensuously yet simply played by Mélanie Laurent. Arthur immediately approves, but the road to romance is rockier for humans than for canines.

I’m not giving away any spoilers here because I think everyone should see this film. The chemistry between Laurent and McGregor is not the stuff of torn clothing and scenes of slick sensuality. These people are having fun, they’re children exploring and discovering, they’re frightened, and they’re exhilarated, all at the same time. They’re beginners.

The film shows us old and new Los Angeles, alternately spare and lush. Oliver draws cartoons illustrating his state of mind. We see his dark little house, which is sparsely furnished and not visually interesting. This is in direct contrast to his father’s lush home with pieces of art and vegetation everywhere, radiant light streaming through wide windows. Mr. Mills showed us a good deal about his characters by letting us see them in real places instead of sets.

The soundtrack is wonderful, lighting evocative, settings just right. An excellent production with the right people doing the right jobs — film editor was Olivier Bugge Coutté, production design was by Shane Valentino. Kasper Tuxen was Director of Photography, and of course the film was written and directed by Mike Mills. Oh, and Cosmo was trained by Mathilde de Cagny.

“Beginners” is the inventive, funny, original, unexpected story of Oliver’s quest for life and the pursuit of happiness. To achieve a new beginning, he looks at his past to see how he got here. Happily, we get to go along for the ride. The night I saw the film (which was the very night the New York State Senate approved the same-sex marriage bill, but before any of us knew that), some young members of the audience broke out in spontaneous applause at the end, a joyous sound I haven’t heard in quite some time. "Beginners" is a charming romantic comedy with a neat twist and an irresistible Jack Russell. As Arthur would say if he could talk: Look up its showtimes and go see it.

~ Molly Matera, who usually hates romantic comedies but loved this one, signing off. Sweet dreams.