Skywritings - film reviews

Verba Volent

(Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:52:22 +0100

The Words: Clichés about being and wanting to be a writer. Unsuccessful would-be writer publishes as his own a manuscript that he found. Original author, now an old man (Jeremy Irons, dreadful American accent attempt, but the wonderful voice and speech impediment is there) tracks him down to reproach him. All extremely superficial about what it is to write and how and why one writes. Movie is just right for the mediocre non-talents that write books and make movies today. No, writers don't re-type the manuscripts of others to feel what it's like to write well. No, it's not all about figuring out what's fiction and what's biography. No, real talent (or art) is not about being able to write a tear-jerker. Not the slightest sign in any of this that "writers" have minds (or ought to). The plot within a plot of having yet another writer tell the poacher's tale is pretty pointless, as is the aspiring, admiring grad student (a standard Woody-Allen prop) who alternately drools over and dominates this supernumerary writer (weak shades of "Misery" here), played by Dennis Quaid, a mediocre actor who can only play superficial, learing lechers -- but is, ironically, well cast for personifying this whole reduction of the art of writing (and movie-making) to whatever sells today.

The Met's Faust: If It Ain't Broke...

(Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:15:36 +0000

There seem to be three reasons why directors tamper with operas today: (1) To try to freshen them up and make them more "relevant". (2) To try to put more (paying) bums on today's (declining) seats. (3) To allow scope for the "creative" contribution of the director.

That's all fine, for minor works. But when it comes to the masterworks, let them speak and sing for themselves.

Gounod's Faust is not Goethe's masterpiece, but it's far from a minor work either. Gounod/Barbier/Carré reduce most of the depth and dimensionality of Goethe's Faust to just the seduction and redemption of Marguerite. Faust himself is downsized to a somewhat ambivalent libertine. No sign of the doctor fallen from the heights of scholarly inquiry with which he had become disillusioned to try his hand at the ordinary layman's love-making that he felt he may have missed. Not much trace of the bargain of pawning his soul for the second chance. And a lot more exalted Christian prudery sanctified as virtue in the devout Gounod's version than in the more worldly and universalist Goethe's.

Yet there is more than enough of the universal in Gounod's Faust to make it unnecessary to strain to make it more "relevant." Believers or non-believers, we can still understand that many once considered it a big deal to seduce, inseminate and abandon a naive girl. And even more immediate today is our horror at how cruelly she was treated for her "crime" by others, especially her beloved brother. We can even still understand -- though we cannot endorse or condone -- the brother's anguish at his sister's "fall." (And, no, we need not view this portrayed en travesti as islamic honor killings in order to get the point.)

Fortunately, most of this manages to get through in the Met's current Faust, directed by Des McAnuff. The way he chose to obtrude with a new "premise" (inspired by Dr. Jacob Bronowski's renunciation of physics upon seeing Nagasaki) was in recasting Doctor Faust's learned inquiries as 20th century atomic bomb-making rather than medieval alchemy and magic.

Well, yes, that certainly makes it more current and relevant, but does it make sense? The destruction wrought on Nagasaki was real enough, and horror at having contributed to it is certainly universally understandable. But what does it mean to renounce this destruction in favour of the goading of the gonads? Goethe's Faust abandons airy scholarship because it has not brought him the satisfaction he had sought; Gounod's Faust turns instead to seeking it in earthly seduction. But what, exactly, is the deal with McAnuff's Dr. Strangelove? Is he trying to make amends for Nagasaki, or to make matters worse?

We don't have to worry about these superadded fine points during most of the opera, however; they are obtruded only at the very beginning (where they puzzle, but otherwise do not matter, nor meddle) and at the very end -- but there they do pose a bit of a problem. For when Marguerite eludes the long haul in Club Mephistopheles, because she is forgiven by the Almighty both for her original "sin" and for the madness and infanticide to which she was driven by all her pious unforgiving friends and family (with the exception of the youth who loved and lost but never condemned her) -- the chorus of angels that cheer her up to the heavens is sung by legions of the lab-coated scientists that kept appearing here and there during the entire performance.

So it's not forgiveness (whether Christian or generic) that triumphs and redeeems, but what? And why? And how does Nagasaki and disenchantment with research fit in all this?

Go figure. As long as it has that note of "relevance," filled the seats, and brought due attention to the director, who cares?

Especially since (apart from the arbitrary atheistic irony of the ascent at the end) Gounod and the wonderful performers and conductor were nevertheless able to successfully reanimate this 19th century magic and alchemy yet again in the 21st.

The Best of the Worst

(Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:49:47 +0100

Yes, the commentator in the Khodorkhvsky movie who said "Kh was the best of the worst" (the worst being all the oligarchs, including Kh) seems to have captured the essence of the puzzle.

There is no question that Kh's enormous business success was due in part to the government selling him public assets at a low price (partly to keep them in Russian hands, partly because of insider wheeling and dealing and self-interest). There were no doubt dirty tricks and gangsterism on both sides (oligarchs and government) along with collusion. There is also little doubt who the worst of the worst was and is (VVP).

How did Kh become the best of the worst? It looks as if his motives for acquiring wealth never came from those lowest depths of sociopathic cupidity that drove so many others; his motives seem to have been more technical than materialistic: it was a skill he was obsessed with developing. There may even have been some self-serving belief in its "trickle-down" benefits for the rest of the world too. But he clearly had a first round of remorse and rethinking that led to his support of the political opposition to Putin (possibly because of conflicts and conflicts of interest with Putin), and this is what led to his arrest (by which time he had already developed a sense of fatalism, if not martyrdom; probably his wealth and influence also gave him some illusion of immunity, so far only partly confirmed).

But what about now? In prison, having lost (almost) all, he had a second round of second-thoughts about wealth acquisition, and he seems to think he is now fighting for a principle (though it is not at all evident what that principle is).

Probably Kh would have made (and might still make) a better president than Putin. But that just means the best of the worst would be better than the worst of the worst.

Human character is capable of remorse and reform, but I think Russia's chances would be better in the hands of Politkovskaya (compassionate, intelligent, funny, and equally obsessive and fatalistic -- surely closer to the best of the best) if the worst of the worst (or some of his competitors) had not already done their worst with her.

The King's English

(Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 13:37:05 +0000

Apart from not capturing the King's English -- either then or now -- The King's Speech does rather simplify and even trivialize speech defects, speech therapy, and, no doubt, George VI's struggle. But the two principal male (and female) roles are well (if inauthentically) played. (Colin Firth mastered the royal mispronunciation of "r," but not the Windsor accent.) Derek Jacobi, however, is simply dreadful as the A of C, and Timothy Spall's face and facial expressions were terrible as Churchill. The anachronisms -- e.g., I rather doubt that the royal family's locution "the firm" dated as early as the 1930's, but the urge to slip it in prevailed -- are sometimes intrusive, and I'd certainly hate to be one of the portrayed parties having to view this. Nevertheless, overall, the film works.

But two obvious strategies to make the task of public speaking (and especially public broadcasting) easier for the king were never tried. And leaving us to wonder why cannot but reduce the drama of the struggle:

(1) Why insist that broadcasts be done live, rather than recorded in advance (with multiple takes and edits)?

(2) If playing loud music in headphones while reading a speech inhibited the stammer, why not use that during the speech-making, rather than only as therapy?

Fractal Sociopathy

(Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:45:29 +0000

Inside Job is a documentary film written and directed by Charles H. Ferguson. It tries to illustrate through narration and interviews how the global financial crisis of 2008 was the result of deregulation of banking and the resulting unregulated growth of "derivatives" in which bad debts are packaged together and repeatedly resold in what amounts to a massive pyramid scheme, with investment banks hedging their bets by encouraging bad loans, receiving high fees, offloading them on other lenders, and then betting that they will default.

Complicit in this are banking executives, credit rating agencies, politicians (lobbied by the extremely wealthy financial industry), presidential appointees (often former and future banking executives), corporate lawyers, and economists (often likewise drawing large consultant fees from the financial industry), greatly weakened regulatory agencies and regulatory laws, and legions of greedy, risk-prone traders.

The 2008 financial crash in Iceland is presented as a harbinger and microcosm for the phenomenon.

Reminiscent of the film The Corporation, Inside Job's premise is that enormous incentives together with lack of controls and answerability create an industry that behaves like a sociopath, pursuing its interests relentlessly, at the expense of that vast majority of poor people who end up having paid for it.

The most worrisome conclusion is that even after the evidence of the global financial crash that such unregulated trading has induced, many of the very same people who brought it on are still in power and perpetuating the same system, despite minor cosmetic reforms, because of the undiminished resources and lobbying power of the financial industry.

The sociopathy seems to be scale-invariant: It is present at the level of the banking industry, which is not an individual sentient human being but a virtual entity created by human laws and individual human actions, at the level of individual corporations, likewise not sentient, but also at the level of sentient financial industry executives and the other individuals involved, and they appear to be genuine sociopaths, blinded by their greed and their addiction to the system that allows its uncontrolled indulgence, still perpetuating the same system without the slightest admission of guilt, remorse, or any genuine commitment to reform.

"The Concert" No "Ultimate Harmony," But Still Worth Seeing

(Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:20:27 +0100

How did Radu Mihaileanu's recent farce/tear-jerker, "The Concert," still manage to be a movie that one does not regret having gone to see? And why does it manage to elicit some sobs even from a seasoned cynic? It is not because of any great depth:

No, music is not about attaining that "ultimate harmony." No, violinists that are sent to their deaths in a Siberian penal colony do not keep playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto obsessively in their heads and fingers till the last. No, they do not establish posthumous psychic contact with their progeny that way either. The treatment of discrimination against Jews in Russia does sound a few true notes (even though it's mostly the historic doctor's plot conspiracy theory transformed into a (mostly) fictional musicians' plot) despite the slap-stick caricatures of both Jewish and Gypsy stereotypes. It's certainly not Aleksei Guskov's inept imitation of conducting, nor the almost as inauthentic mash-up of Mélanie Laurent's faux solo, edited into a composite duo with whoever was actually playing the fiddle.

But the Tchaikovsky really is beautiful, Mélanie really is pretty, and acts fairly well -- if not always like a real musician. And the longing for lost loved ones resonates despite the superficiality and artificiality of the particulars.

And one of the only two bits of subtlety in this crowd-pleaser (the other being a moment of Mahler), is the Gypsy subtheme (subliminal for most, who will not know when it is Romanian Gypsy music that the Romanian director of this Russian/French farce, Radu Mihaileanu, uses to herald and accompany the action), both as a metaphor for it all, and as a light counterpoint to the Tchaikovsky theme.

There is even the (no doubt unintended) irony of the fact that Tchaikovsky's music was for a time perversely undervalued -- by snobs and pedants, mostly in the West, perhaps not in Russia -- as being too sentimental, something of a tear-jerker, playing for popularity rather than for "ultimate harmony."

Justice has long since been done, fortunately, for this genius of the first rank (P.I.Tch.).

The M.O.

(Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:54:49 +0100

Eszter Hagyatéka. A good portrait of a psychopath (con-man) and how their manipulative charm does not wear off even when their falseness and emptiness is transparent. The only thing that is not perfectly repulsive about them (for those who, unlike Eszter, are not otherwise in their thrall) is their almost touchingly naive conviction that everyone else is a psychopath too, "righteousness" being just another con. In this film, Lajos even effects to want to co-opt Eszter's haplessly unvindictive righteousness to complement his own "insufficiently talented" M.O.

Eszter's Lajos is unlike Mann's Felix Krull, whose manipulative skills are grounded in a capacity for empathic mind-reading that is then used for exploitation. But there is still the same sense of an inescapable superficiality always yearning (but only, of course, superficially) for depth, while addicted only to the allures of the surface. Perhaps it's a mistake to say that psychopaths have no feelings: They do, but they are faint and fleeting. They need to use method acting to simulate a soul -- a soul that they know so well to be false, that they cannot conceive it to be otherwise in anyone else.

Stigmata: Real and Virtual

(Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:58:20 +0100

A late-comer's appreciation of John Huston's 1952 Moulin Rouge, based on Pierre La Mure's novel about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:

Although the French wikipedia states that HT-L's contemporaries said he was not bitter or inhibited because of his hereditary deformity (dwarfism and disfigurement, exacerbated by a childhood accident; his parents were first cousins), but rather an ebullient bon vivant, and even something of an exhibitionist, the novel and movie portray him as deeply wounded and stigmatized by his condition, hypersensitive about it, yet prone to make cruelly ironic, self-deprecating allusions to it in his communication and interactions with others.

The idea is that HT-L, who would naturally have been a horseman, athlete, dancer and lady's man, instead withdraws into painting and a perceptive but passive observation of life, certain that he is repulsive, especially to women, as a man (and the film has ample actual confirmations of this conviction, with people finding him repulsive and saying so).

HT-L falls in love with a prostitute who had sought his help, and he dares to get into a physical relationship with her only because he perceives that in her profession there is indifference to his condition. But she is indeed a prostitute, and it is never quite clear whether she is really just as repulsed by him as anyone else, or perhaps less so because she too feels a stigma. At any rate, she, ex officio, "betrays" him and his only carnal relationship (according to the movie -- in real life HT-L had many prostitutes and mistresses too) ends, leaving him overwhelmed by despair and drink. But again his art, and his sardonic view of life draw him back from despair, if not from drink. He continues to frequent the Paris demi-monde and to paint it affectionately, unjudgmentally. He interacts with its denizens the same way -- sympathetic, but unengaged. The implication is that the conviction has now been definitively confirmed that he cannot be loved physically, and that he will never again expose himself to the added torment of inspiring disgust by seeking love.

His sense of being repulsive overflows only occasionally to his work or his words. It is mostly his body's inability to inspire anything other than disgust that prevents him from daring to hope or to respond when another woman, far better born than the prostitute, and deeply responsive to both his art and his character, may or may not have fallen in love with him. She may love him, or she may just identify with him in a deeper way than the prostitute did; but she seeks a sign whether he will ever be able to allow himself to reciprocate or even acknowledge her feelings, and he is unable to allow himself to dare to show her -- and perhaps even himself -- that he loves her (although he does, having secretly followed her, jealously, exactly as he had the prostitute). So she -- not a prostitute, but, like a prostitute, needing a provider -- accepts to marry someone she does not love. As with the prostitute, his last-minute impulse to call her back comes too late.

What is most universal about this film is that the sense of stigma that generates such a sense of being incapable of being loved, especially carnally, is not reserved for the physically disfigured. Or perhaps "appearance" is subtler than just bodily form.

Note added Jan 24 2010: Since seeing Offenbach's Comptes de Hoffmann, both Hoffmann and Kleinzach, come to mind -- but perhaps these were all late 19th-century bohemian/Parisian clichés...

A Temetetlen Halott

(Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 15:22:11 +0100

The irony of "A Temetetlen Halott" ("Unburied Remains" or "The Uninterred Corpse," woodenly translated "The Unburied Man") is buried in its one good metaphor: that what tormented Imre Nagy (the abettor of the ill-fated and short-lived Hungarian uprising of 1956) the most at the end was that his (inevitable) posthumous rehabilitation would be at the hands of his own assassins (rehabilitating themselves).

The film ends on the note that Imre Nagy's exhumation and reburial with honours was not done until 1989, after the remains of the post-1956 regime had faded out (and on the very day his successor/executioner János Kádár died). But it seems to be lost on the film-makers and the nation that the internecine squabbles among the true-believers (few) and the opportunists (many) about whether 1956 was a revolution or a counter-revolution had itself been just another incarnation of Hungary's unburied cycle of red/white -- previously black-yellow/red-white-green) oscillation and carnage. The same archetypes keep re-emerging, out of the self-same mother-soil and blood-types that the film is here whitewashing (in accordance with the current cycle), if not beatifying.

But Hungary is perhaps no worse than the rest of the planet in this regard, and certainly not the worst.

The film itself, apart from a few moments of good character acting, is dead dialogue and dreary docudrama throughout.

(full disclosure)