Clouds of Sils Maria

This is a very clever movie. Heartfelt as well. I should also mention honest. Very truthful, right. Also closely observed. It captures the way people talk now, the 21st century's ubiquitous demi-cyberspace of cellphones and tablets, the nuts-and-bolts of an actor's craft, the rarefied world of an A-list actor, and on top of that it's got lots of really nice Swiss scenery. But?

Well, OK.

But ...

Director/screenwriter Olivier Assayas seems to think that entertainment and selling out are the same thing. Let's be clear. Temptations to stoop to entertainment abound in this flick. But he remains pure.

The set-up is a goldmine. Back in 1995, an actress (Juliette Binoche) made a name for herself as a 20-year-old heartless temptress in a play and film adaptation. Flash-forward to 2005, and she's an aging actress. A hot director wants to cast her in a remake. Not the seductress, this time. He asks her to play the older woman that the young sociopath seduced and abandoned.

Good stuff, right? Alfred Hitchcock or Charlie Kaufman would've twisted reality to imitate art and showed the aging actress falling for her brat costar and reprising the fictional plot in real life. Could've been really entertaining, but Assayas is above such temptations.

What he gives us instead is a combo of actor's prep and subtext.

The actor's prep? Hey, you could take this movie and teach a class from it at an actor's conservatory. There's a lot of specific insight into how actors approach their characters and make 'em real. (Or not.) Binoche's character does line readings with her charismatic assistant. Every now and then, there's a frisson of ambiguity -- is this the play, or a real conversation? But there are only mere hints, subtextual winks -- and never to the point of being unsubtle, boorish or entertaining. Most of the time, it's dull actor's process stuff. "An actor prepares." Yeah, yeah. Evidently, they do that a lot. Yep. A lot of boring stuff has to happen before the entertainment begins. Good to know. Do we need two hours of granular detail? It's like a movie about a war where you never actually see the war -- just the hurry up and wait stuff as the army gets ready.

The subtext? That's Binoche's character confronting the aging process, of course. There are a couple of poignant scenes. Most of the time, Assayas sticks with hints and implications -- and never puts something so obvious as actual conflict, drama or character revelation on the screen.

This is not to say there's no drama in the movie. There is.

The plot builds up to the world-premiere of the actual play. The drama we've all been waiting for ...

And that's when the film ends.

ART REVIEW: “SquareRoots: A Quilted Manifesto — A John Sims Project”

Johannes Curtis Schwarzenstein (aka John Sims)[/caption] “SquareRoots: A Quilted Manifesto — A John Sims Project” explores the shared domain of visual art and mathematics through March 27, at the SCF Fine Art Gallery. The exhibition showcases John Sims’ latest math-inspired visual artifacts. These include 13 math/art quilts, nine dresses based on the number Pi; a blues composition based on Pi; and a video installation introducing Johannes Curtis Schwarzenstein, the Afro-German Jewish math-art poet. (And Sims’ alter ego.) As fans of Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land know, the connection between visual art and math is profound. For centuries, artists have been fascinated by (and created fascinating imagery from) such mysteries as the ratio of the Golden Rectangle, the Fibonacci Series behind every spiral form in nature, and, of course, Pi. (The number also known as π.) Strictly speaking, 3.14159… Well, it goes on. Forever actually. An irrational number at the heart of Western rationality. Math/artist John Sims, Pi is more than a fascination — it's close to an obsession. The irrational number pops up throughout this exhibition. The relationship between Pi and visual art is the spark igniting “Civil Pi,” Sims’ textile collaboration with local Amish quilters; it informs Sims’ series of Pi dresses examining and deconstructing the cult of couture; it also underlies the strategies of cultural revolution explained by Sims' Schwartzenstein persona in a multimedia video production. So. Why Pi? As the artist points out, “Pi is one of the few mathematical constants that have successfully entered the pop-culture psyche. It's a number that continues to stimulate and fascinate the human mind.” Pi fans will note that this art show coincides with the release of “31415,” Sims’ and Vi Hart's Pi-themed spoken word and hip-hop single track. The official release date is 3 /14/15. Otherwise known as Pi Day.

Square Roots: A Quilted Manifesto — A John Sims Project. Through March 27 at Fine Art Gallery at SCF Bradenton, 5840 26th St. W.; 752-5225. John Sims dedicates this exhibition to the legacies of Kevin Dean, Kenny Drew Jr., Joanna Weber and Florence Tate.  

A meditation on screenwriting

Just caught the first disc of the first season of Homeland. This meditation is the result.

Smart writing. But it stretches the suspension of disbelief to the point I wanna scream, "Uncle." Stuff happens that wouldn't happens; characters do things they wouldn't do. It bugs me.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not pushing for literal-minded realism. As Anthony Burgess once pointed out, realism is an incredibly slow way of telling a story. Not to mention dull. I get it. He was defending the ridiculous coincidences in A Clockwork Orange -- but I happen to agree with him.

Fiction -- any kind of fiction -- has a certain amount of necessary bullshit. So be it.

But Homeland is full of unnecessary bullshit.

For example?

Uh, let's start with the basic core premise. Nicholas Brody, a Special Forces sniper, has been an AQ POW for eight years and is miraculously rescued. Homeland teases us with a Manchurian Candidate possibility. AQ may have brainwashed Nick and turned him into a sleeper terrorist. That'd be bad, but let's back up a second.

Nick's been beaten and tortured and held in a freaking hole for eight years. If that happens to anybody in the 21st-century United States military, it's SOP to give them a psychological evaluation these days. Forget the Manchurian Candidate angle. Such a POW -- whatever their strength of character -- is likely to suffer PTSD, survivor's guilt, and a range of other inner torments. The American military's smart enough to know that now. In real life, Nick would be tested, Nick would be evaluated, Nick would be plugged into a support system of counseling.

But that would interfere with the story points in the outline.

The writers wanna get from A to B.

That's what it says on the 3x5 cards, right?

A: Nick is rescued. The brass wants to make him a hero. They ignore his possible compromise.
B: Our plucky female protagonist is left on her own to prove Nick might be a sleeper terrorist.

Psychological counseling sessions would get in the way.

So they just don't happen.

This is gratuitous bullshit, because the possibility of counseling doesn't have to kill the premise of this show. In fact, it would've made it more interesting. AQ would have anticipated the military shrinks. They would have given Nick the appropriate responses to show he was legitimately damaged -- but still trustworthy. AQ would have coached him. He'd have answers to the counselors' questions. Heart-rending answers that made Nick sympathetic to the infidel shrinks.

An interesting layer, no?

But it slows the domino's fall from A to B.

So they skipped it. It's not bad writing. It's lazy writing.

It's fiction. Fine. I understand that. Lie to me. Fine. But make an effort. Try to fool me.

And there the unnecessary bullshit lies.

That's my gut reaction. But it's not good enough. Necessary, unnecessary. Come on. Where do I draw the line? On what basis? How can I swallow The Bride taking her samurai sword on a plane in Kill Bill -- but get bent out of shape at trivial stuff like the lack of psychological counseling sessions in Homeland?

I think it's like this ...

Film is artifice. I get it. But some movies are tall tales.

Kill Bill, for example. A million plot holes. Obviously not a documentary. But great fun.

Others movies are like good lies.

Good lies feel like truth -- which is what makes them good. So, all film is artifice. But some artifice pretends not to be artifice. I gravitate towards movies like that.

So, I can watch Moulin Rouge maybe once. But I can watch Scorsese's Mean Streets again and again. I believe in those characters, believe in their world. The movie feels real, like a voyeuristic glimpse of real life. That makes me feel for the character inside that reality. I believe, therefore I feel.

Any obvious cheat kills that identification.

Homeland isn't a tall tale. It's a gritty story that could really happen, yattayatta.

Thus, I hold it to a higher bullshit standard.

OSS: Nest of Spies.

Attention auteurs! You want to make a spoof? Watch OSS #117. It’s like a film school course in cinematic satire. Watch it, see what it does, and don’t do it. It breaks all the rules of satire. I never knew satire had rules, until I saw this movie. Now I know. Here they are:

Rule #1. Know what you’re making fun of. If you draw a caricature of Jimmy Durante, it should look like Jimmy Durante. You have to know how his skull works before you distort it and make fun of it. This flick riffs on the surface elements of the Cold War spy genre -- and gets it all wrong.

Rule #2. Love what you’re making fun of. Check out Young Frankenstein. Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder clearly love old horror movies. Michel Hazanavicius, the politically correct director of this flick, clearly hates old spy movies.

Rule #3. An imitation of bad art, if it’s bad, is just bad art. The stuff you’re making fun of may be bad. Your stuff must be good. You can’t say, “Well, the scenes went on too long and the acting was bad in the original movies. Mine are too. It’s a satire.” No. You're just pretending to be bad. Your scenes have to work; your acting must be good.

Corollary to Rule #3: Art direction isn't comedy. Your sets and lighting may look exactly like what you're mocking. That doesn't make it funny.

Rule #4. Your story – even if it’s making fun of another story or genre – still has to work as a story. Consider Blazing Saddles. Mel Brooks is, basically, taking a dump on the Western genre. Even so, his movie has dramatic tension. Joke or not, it grips you. When the Cisco Kid is facing off against six dudes with revolvers trained on him; when Black Bart is about to drown in quicksand or get lynched. You give a shit. OSS #117 is 99.44% suspense-free. You don't give a shit.

Rule #5. For your story to work, we have to understand what’s at stake. I have no !@#$ idea why OSS #117 is in Cairo.

Rule #6. Your characters have to be real. They have to have an inner life. They have to make sense. The spy in this flick grins like an idiot. (OSS #117--aka Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath--if you want a name.) He does stuff that doesn't make sense. Maxwell Smart really was an idiot. He survived, thanks to the luck of fools. This spy knows too much to be an idiot but he acts like an idiot. He shouldn't survive. I don't want him to. Worse than that, I don't believe in him. There are no point-of-view shots. There's no hint of a reality inside the character's head.

Rule #7. You can’t violate story logic or character logic. A French spy trained in Arabic wouldn’t beat up a muezzin who woke him up at the call to prayer in Cairo. Never happen. No !@#$ way. Yeah, it’s a dig at French colonialism – who cares? It’s contrived. It’s false. It just wouldn’t happen.

Rule #8. Your movie is a joke. The characters within your movie don’t know that. Your characters should take themselves and the reality of the movie absolutely seriously. You should too. Play it straight -- in all your acting, editing and music choices. Never elbow the audience in the ribs. Isn’t this funny? The second you ask, it ain't. This flick is constantly reminding me of how wacky it is.

Rule #9. Make one, big satiric point, then stop. Jimmy Durante’s nose is big. Ha-ha. If you try to make lots of little points, you weaken the comedy. Hey, our spy is an arrogant French colonialist. Oh, he’s also probably a closet homosexual. So, is this gay bashing, or spy bashing, or colonialist bashing, or what? It’s not funny anymore.

Rule #10. Never make us care about characters and then kill them for no good reason. Never ever have the hero do it, even if he is a shithead. Death can be hilarious – if you set it up right. But throwing characters away is ugly, vicious, heartless and the opposite of comedy. OSS #117 kills Princess Al Tarouk, if you want to know--pointlessly, right in the middle of a girlfight. I liked her character. I hated him. My dislike of the movie turned to hate at that moment.

The Brothers Karamazov

photo by Frank Atura

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Ignoring the glorious sun and sand, I spent one family vacation on Saint George Island cooped up inside a beach cottage reading big novels: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, etc. Out on the sunny beach, my sister caught a Whiting and hollered with delight; inside the gloomy house, I crammed my head with literature. As to Karamazov, I made it at least as far as the Grand Inquisitor passage, though I don’t remember what happened after that. Fortunately, Roland Reed adapted the novel as a play; FSU/Asolo Conservatory just put it on stage. Finally, I know how the book ends.

Director Andrei Malaev-Babel holds the reins. It's a wild ride -- a disorienting, hallucinatory assault. (I mean that in a good way.) It's also no mean feat. Dostoevsky crammed most of human life in the pages of his original novel. This production crams the bones of his novel in a three-hour performance. Not too shabby.

There are three messed-up brothers and one lousy father. In Russian tradition, they all have several names, depending on context, so you have to pay attention. But family dynamics ain't the point. It's all about ideas. Lots of them. The kind tormented 16-years-olds obsess about.

If you hate ideas, don't see this play. It's a philosophical novel; the play is faithful to it. (I have a few quibbles, but Reed did a damn good job.) In Cliff Notes terms, the story is a study of good and evil. Dostoevsky, it seems to me, draws from the same dark well as Nietzche. Ivan (Jesse Dornan), the disaffected, intellectual Karamazov brother, says something to the effect, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” The possibility terrifies him. So, leaving the question of truth on the table, religion is a great form of crowd control. Don’t kill children or practice cannibalism or you’ll burn in hell. Good to know. If not, why not? This slowly drives Ivan mad.

Minus the philosophy, the bare-bones story has a lurid, Jerry Springer quality. It's the study of dysfunctional family. Dirty dad fighting with one of his sons over the same woman.

Fyodor (Francisco Rodriguez) the father, in question, is a corrupt, lusty, son-of-a-bitch. He’s rotten. He’s a blowhard. Like Richard III and Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he’s the most interesting character in the story.

Dirty dad competes for the affections of Grushenka (Kelly Campbell) with his son Dmitri (Brendan Ragan), the ex-military brother. Alyosha, a repressed monk, tries to make peace in the family. But there is no peace.

There's more to it than that. There's a troika of minor characters; the subplots have subplots. I won't attempt a plot summary. It'd be like, well, summarizing a Russian novel. Let's not. I won't spoil the ending, but it all ends badly. Excellent performances. (More to come, as I have time.)

Malaev-Babel's direction is original and gutsy. He feints and throws you off balance like a good prize fighter. Characters bump into furniture and push it back into place -- or wander off the stage entirely. The staging implies the characters aren't at home in this world, don't quite fit in our reality. Beyond that, Malaev-Babel turns the collective consciousness of the village into a Greek chorus, offering commentary and judgement on the main action. Nice touch. There's also a weird, prophetic echo of the Soviet Union in the costume choices. This pays off when Dimitri shares his vision of a line of starving women and a dying child, begging for bread outside their burned-out homes in the snow. It could be a scene from the Nazi invasion of Russia or one of Stalin's purges. In a final vision, Dmitri strives for the light, despite the darkness. (There were tears in my eyes; and in the eyes of the actors at the curtain call.)

Dostoevsky saw the darkness coming. He saw Hitler, Stalin and Charlie Manson coming. But he decided to keep going.

The hint of light beyond the darkness was enough.

The Brothers Karamazov
Through Nov. 20
An FSU / Asolo Conservatory production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
941-351-8000


Quibbles below jump ...

2BRN02B

Uh ... line?

Submitted, for your consideration, a production of Hamlet by the Wooster Group—a group famed for experimental theater. This production at the Ringling International Arts Festival was experimental indeed.

Imagine—in some scenario out of Rossum’s Universal Robots or Blade Runner, that scientists succeed in engineering synthetic people—androids, for want of a better term—and that, as predicted in a thousand SF books and movies, these synthetic servants erupt in a revolution and kill all the humans. Hundreds of years later, the androids look back on the creators they murdered with regret. They feel incomplete, you see. They want to be like us, but they’re not quite like us; their emotions don’t have the full range. So, the androids desperately read our literature and watch our movies and try to figure out what it means to be human. In one android project, they stumble on the record of John Gielgud’s 1964 production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton. They analyze the movie frame by frame. They chart its motions on a Cartesian axis. Then they imitate it. Religiously. Trying—through brute force analysis—to make some emotional connection to the world Shakespeare created. A connection to emotions they just don’t feel.

The Wooster Group's production of Hamlet is like that.

Very much like that.

A performance of Hamlet by androids, directed by Max Headroom.

MAX: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trip -- trippingly--
t-t-t-trippingly on the tongue!

Android Shakespeare. That may sound glib, kids. I don't mean to be be glib. That's how it struck me at the time. I honestly felt like I was hundreds of years in the future watching synthetic humans performing Shakespeare.

Hey, that's entertainment, right?

Explaining the logic behind this production in merely human terms ain't easy, but I'll try. As far as I understand it, somebody filmed the original 1964 performance of Hamlet. This film (much like heavyweight boxing championships and opera today) was subsequently screened at theaters around the country. They called it "Theatrofilm" or sumpin. The Wooster Group took the original "Theatrofilm" record of this performance and reverse-engineered it. (This concept was director Elizabeth LeCompte's brainchild.) Somebody in the editing room chopped up the raw original film in Final Cut Pro; if he thought there was a leaden pause, out it went. Then (with Shepherd in Burton's role) the modern-day Wooster Group actors slavishly recreated the 1964 performance. More accurately: they slavishly recreated Shepherd's edited version of the performance. So, if there's a jump in the dialog or the actors fast-forward and backtrack, the real-life actors do exactly that. And that's what you see on stage.

You see the original film, in a big screen behind the performance. The Wooster Group actors perform, with a minimal set on wheels that stagehands roll around to mimic the set in the original film. On top of that, there are two widescreen computer displays revealing either live actors or dead ones. Occasionally, the big screen behind it all turns into a big Cartesian grid. Or a blue screen labelled with the phrase, "Not rendered."

Hamlet said "I know not seems," but this is all about seeming. The film behind the production has been doctored. The characters you see drop out of their scenes like ghosts. The final sword fight shows merely two disembodied swords--and two rectangles in place of the empty actors.

The real life actors on stage heroically imitate the doctored film. It's the dead opposite of method acting. It's acting nailed down to externals. There's not a drop of spontaneity. The real actors are slaves of the body position, timing and intonation of the actors in the doctored film.

This may seem like a gimmick. Nay, it is. It's a gimmick.

The gimmick slaps you in the face and makes you think about things you usually don't think about. The production is a box within a box within a box: The Wooster Group's recreation of Gielgud and Burton's interpretation of Shakespeare's original text of Hamlet. The Wooster Group rubs your face in the artificiality or it all. It literally shows you the Cartesian grid that Shakespeare's words have been graphed on.

The effect this had on me? I can't speak for the rest of the audience, but all this post-modern artificiality made my brain want to grab onto the PLAY. Throughout all the graphs and hip-hop stuttering, I clung to the rock of who the characters were, what happened and why it mattered. Bits of business aside, I came out of this experience with a deeper understanding of Hamlet.

Humans and androids alike will enjoy this play.

Tree of Life

Wow. Amazing film. I'll get back to that. But, first, here's a chunk of film philosophy ...

Film is a visual art, like painting. Film is a narrative art, like novels and short stories. Filmmakers are torn between these impulses. Either paint with light, or tell stories with moving pictures, that is the question.

99.99% of all filmmakers tell stories. That's true, because 99.99% of all moviegoers are bored to tears by collages of imagery with no storyline. Me too. So, Kubrick, in his heart of hearts, wants to do an imagist collage in the tradition of Cocteau. He does "Eyes Wide Shut." I understand the impulse. But I wind up kicking the back of the seat in front of me and, like Ralph Kramden before me, growling WOULD YOU GET ON WITH IT? Call me a plebe, but I love storytelling. And I have a short attention span.

But I surrendered to this movie. And I'm glad for it.

Terrence Malick is one of the .01% of the filmmakers who want to paint with light. The Tree of Life is defiantly non-linear, fiercely imagistic. On one basic level, it functions as a series of wicked cool images on the screen. He's showing you stuff that looks good. He's painting with light.

That said, there really is a story behind it. Telling the story is not his main concern. But it's there.

Basically, a family grows up in Texas. Dad (Brad Pitt) is a frustrated artist (a masterful organist/pianist) who's sick of taking shit from the bastards he works for. He does his best, but he boils with frustration. He pressures his sons -- especially his oldest son, Jack -- to "be your own boss." He teaches Jack to fight, demands a fierce respect. Jack wrestles with hatred towards his father and Oedipal impulses towards his mother (Jessica Chastain). The middle child (and DAMN if I can find the name online) is sensitive and artistic; his father's musical DNA has passed to him. Jack grows into adolescence -- and takes a turn to the dark side, with acts of vandalism, break-ins and animal cruelty. He gets over it, but a certain joy is lost. Dad loses his job and has to move, and there's a long, painful look back at the family home. Years later -- when the sensitive, middle child is 19 -- he puts a shotgun to his head and kills himself. Jack wrestles with survivor's guilt for the rest of his life. Then, amidst the cold, modernist architecture of Dallas, he has an epiphany -- not necessarily standard-issue religious -- but a revelation, nonetheless. A glimpse of the communion of the saints, perhaps. Jack finds acceptance.

A bright first-year film student could cut out all Malick's mystical imagery, put the story in linear order, add a To Kill a Mockingbird first-person voiceover, and make a very conventional story out of it.

But Malick didn't want to do that. He wanted to say, "This is life! Look at it! Look how beautiful it is!"

Malick opens the doors of perception. He fragments the narrative with trippy images -- the scenes that fascinate a child's mind and bore an adult's; the scenes an adult mind edits out, because they're insignificant. Mommy's ankle against a sprinkler; the dance of wind chimes ...

Malick takes this fragmented, trippy collage, and throws it up against the background of a long 2001-style creation narrative. (And hired some top-flight CGI people to do it, I assume.) Basically, he takes you from the beginning of creation, to the origin of life, to the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, to the death of life on earth. No lie. The impulse is part artistic, part scientific. He loves life -- but life specifically -- with the eye of a botanist or paleontologist.

On top of THAT, Malick punctuates his interpenetrating collage of evolution and a suffering Texas family with enigmatic images of a light sculpture.

So what's it about?

It's about grace, God and glory. And sunflowers. Malick is shouting, "Wake up. We already live in a world of grace and beauty! See it, or you're going to lose it! You're squandering it!" It's a tone poem and an opera. It has movements and elaborate motifs like a visual symphony. It's seductive and hypnotic. And, as a bonus, if you grew up in the 1950s or 60s, it's an addictive shot of nostalgia. There's a quiet beauty and sorrow to this film. And a deeper joy. (Thanx to my friend Su Byron for various stolen insights.)

Don't believe what people tell you.

See this film. It's a long journey. But it's worth it.